The Exchanges

Q How'd you find your way to Wall Street?

A Summer after my sophomore year, there was this program called SEO, and they had just started this career program the summer of 1981, which was the summer after my freshman year. And a bunch of my friends applied. They got in. They came back, and they were raving about it, and I said, I'm going to do that, because these are people that were my classmates, peers, looked like me. I respected them. They were super smart, and I thought, I want to do that. After my freshman year, I went home. I went back to Jacksonville, and I worked in the law firm, which was amazing, because I had never worked in a law firm, and at that point, I thought I wanted to be a lawyer. It was called Patrick, Patrick, Dale, and Ball, and they gave me a shot, That was a great summer, but when my colleagues came back and they were raving about it, I said, I want to do that. So I applied to SEO, and Ted, this was the funniest thing. I had never been in New York City. I had never had a stress interview, so I didn't know that three-on-one, three people interviewing you at the same time was supposed to be stressful. I had no idea. God takes care of fools and babies, and I was both. I sat there. The interview was supposedly tough, but I was just Carla, and I answered the questions as they came. By that point, they had realized that they wanted only juniors, but I was a sophomore at the time, and I got it, and that…

AI assessment note: “So I applied to SEO... all of a sudden, here I am on Wall Street”

Q When you were first at Morgan Stanley, you mentioned understanding what those adjectives are for the organization you're joining. How did you go about learning what those important ones are?

A Observation. I always tell people to study your environment, but here's what I tell most people. Ask those questions when you're interviewing. That's when you're going to really get down to the truth. And most of the time, you have six to eight to 12 interviews before you actually get the job. Every single interview, you should say to someone, describe a superstar to me in this environment. So when you say so-and-so is a superstar of Morgan Stanley or in your organization, what's that look like? Give me three words, and they're going to tell you. Now you're gonna know what they value. And here's the second most important question you should ask when you're interviewing. Give me the profile of the last person you fired. When somebody doesn't make it here, why don't they make it? Now you will know what they don't value. And the reason why that's important is if they describe what they don't value, and that happens to be your strength, don't take that job. That's your first indicator that there's a mismatch. So at Morgan Stanley, because I didn't know those questions to ask, I observed. I started listening.

AI assessment note: “So at Morgan Stanley, because I didn't know those questions to ask, I observed.”

Q So when you were in the seat as vice chair, how did you see all the parts of the bank interconnecting as it faced clients?

A I had seen that a long time before, actually, because when John Mack came back to the firm in 2005, he had a mantra of one firm firm, and he kept saying that we were working in silos, and I realized he was correct. The investment bankers worked with the investment bankers, and we didn't really have a lot of connectivity with the wealth managers at all, because remember, we didn't actually have expansion in wealth management until 1997 when the Dean Witter merger happened, and then again in 2010 with the Smith Barney acquisition. As a banker, I rarely worked with people who were in private wealth management. We always had a wealth management piece with private wealth management, but that was the ultra, ultra wealthy. But I'd gone a long time in my career without having a lot of interaction. As a capital markets banker, we always did allocate stock to private wealth management, but there wasn't this sort of strategic, let's think about who in private wealth management is sitting at the top of the house that could direct investment banking business that way. Let's think about the companies that we take public. How can we engage at the private wealth management level? We started to do some of that when the tech market was really hot, but there wasn't a long-term history of thinking about all the ways to bring that in. He's reintroduced that thinking in 2005. So I'd been thinking ab…

AI assessment note: “I was much more attuned when I got that role to thinking about cross-fertilization”

Q How about creating leaders? How do you prescribe that people create leaders within their organizations?

A You have to intentionally give people things that you used to cut your leadership teeth. You have to intentionally delegate those things to other people and be thoughtful about it, because again, it won't just happen. So you say to somebody, Ted, I'm going to put you in this meeting, and I want you to present. Here are the five points that you need to present. Here are some questions that might come up. If this comes up and you're not able to do it, throw me the ball. I have you. Those are the kinds of things that you have to be intentional about. And tell people, I'm doing this So that you'll be able to handle this on your own. I'm doing this so that these three people in the room get to see you as a leader, as a thought leader, because we're going to need to vote when it's time for you to be promoted. But that's being intentional and making sure the person knows what you're doing. You and I grew up in a clandestine world where people would put us out there, but they wouldn't tell us necessarily that we were being tested. And I'm not so sure that that was the right way to do it because millennials and Zers value highly when they believe somebody is investing in them. So you have to be intentional about articulating that that's what you're doing.

AI assessment note: “You have to intentionally give people things that you used to cut your leadership teeth.”

Q How did you think about your education and your career from there?

A Again, this mentality of always reaching for the top meant whatever the top was, go get it. So that meant get A's. Then when it was time to go to college, it was interesting. I didn't have any aspirations to go to Ivy League schools at all. That was not something we talked about in my household, but my parents did expect that I would go to college because I was so good academically. So they just assumed I would get scholarships. And my biggest aspiration was Was to go to UCLA because my favorite aunt lived in LA. That was it. Full stop. However, by the time I was a junior and senior in high school, I was taking all honors classes, and the kids around me started talking to each other, not me, about, did you send in your application to Yale, or I just finished my Harvard application this weekend. I think I'm going to apply to Cornell or Princeton. And that's how these schools came on my radar, and then some of those schools were actually coming to the high schools to recruit. My very first one was Cornell. I went to the Cornell recruiter meeting, and then I would go to some of the others as they came, and I'll never forget the guy who was teaching my AP English class. I was like, if you sign up and miss my class one of these times, I'm going to fail you, Carla Harris, so that scared me. Now, I was too naive to know I had the right privilege to go to those things, but by then, Bec…

AI assessment note: “this mentality of always reaching for the top meant whatever the top was, go get it.”

Q lessons and navigating just by being yourself. There's two things I really want to hit on. One is a lot of these pearls of leadership in your new book. I also want to get through some of these stages in your career. Why don't we start there? So you've been a banker for a long time. What were some of those different roles and steps you played along the way?

A I started my career right out of Harvard Business School in mergers and acquisitions, and part of the reason was because, again, I'm negatively motivated. Everybody told me, don't do M&A. You won't have a life. They wear beepers, and so I said, okay, that's where I'm going. Loved M&A, but M&A was hot in the late eighties, and the last big year was 89, and in 1990, it was dead, and in 1991, as I like to say, it was dead squared. So I thought to myself at that point, if I'm going to be long-term in this business, I better make sure that I understand the bread and butter of investment banking, and that's capital raising. So that's when I made the decision to go to Capital Market. So that was an important decision because it also changed my career trajectory because it gave me a level of visibility with senior people in the firm that I would not have had if I had stayed in M&A. I went in as an operations officer, which was the person that assigned deals, helped the senior person to run the department, did all the administrative things. That made me connect with the head of equity, made me connect with the head of investment banking. So it gave me a level of visibility I don't think I would have had. And then I found something I loved. I did M&A because I kind of understood M&A. It was hot. It was supposed to be difficult, so that's why I went into it. Didn't know what a capital mar…

AI assessment note: “I started my career right out of Harvard Business School in mergers and acquisitions”

Q You mentioned in your book knowing your own blind spots. What's your biggest blind spot?

A That's easy. Giving people too many chances. Let me give you a quick and dirty around that. I realized that when it comes to taking someone off of a project or removing someone out of a spot, that's the one thing that I'm slow about. Everything else, I'm decisive, but I find myself wanting to give people chances. Over the COVID period, I asked myself, what is that all about? And I realized that it's cultural because growing up as a Black woman, people always said, you don't have as many chances as everybody else. You only get one shot because you look like you look. Black, you're a woman, you got one shot. Don't screw it up. I couldn't help but think that perhaps somehow that had curbed my risk appetite over the years. And I remember thinking as a young professional man, when I get in a position, I'm not going to just give people one shot. I'm going to give people a chance to recover. But in doing that, sometimes you're too slow. I heard a great leader, a subversive one time, that somebody told her that when you fail to remove a poor leader, You hold the rest of the organization hostage, and boy was she right. So because I recognize that, I'm much better about that. I'm quicker. I now look for that. I ask myself about that, knowing that it's a potential blind spot.

AI assessment note: “That's easy. Giving people too many chances.”

Q You mentioned earlier this important concept of authenticity. So there's one thing about realizing the skills that are required to be a capital markets banker. You talked earlier about quantitative and modeling, and now it's reading people and listening. Where did you find your own superpowers in this process to ascend the ladder as you did?

A That's a good word, superpower. The temptation for any of us, and it was certainly a temptation for me, Ted, is when you go into a large organization and you see that other people are being successful and You happen to be struggling or not being as successful in your own right at that moment. The temptation is to now do it the way Ted is doing, or say it the way Mary is saying it. And before you know it, you start losing your edge because all you're trying to do is walk and talk like Ted and eat and drink like Mary. You lose the thing that only you can bring. And the beauty of relationships is that you have an opportunity to own a relationship in a proprietary way if you just offer yourself. So it took me a few years to realize that there was one Carla Harris. Jacksonville, from the South, woman, Black, Harvard, all the things that made me mean. There's only one. So that was my competitive edge. So I could never be competitive trying to be like Alan, or trying to be like Ted, or trying to be like Mary, because I cannot out Alan Allen. When I finally realized that I should just bring Carla And that was going to be the thing that was going to make the difference in the relationships. That's when it clicked.

AI assessment note: “When I finally realized that I should just bring Carla And that was going to”

Q And what did that mean for you? What was being Carla?

A Being Carla was bringing my Southern self to the table, talking about my singing, being able to ask a question and be unafraid to ask that question and not be bothered by somebody's notoriety, because I believe that we're all equal. We're all people at the end of the day. For example, I don't want to name the person, however, It was a personality that we were doing a deal for. Very well-known personality. Everybody was afraid of this person because she had a reputation of eating up talent. Everybody was like, oh, she's in the building. Everybody was walking on eggshells, and everybody was afraid that I was going to screw it up because they knew by then I was just an authentic Carla. So they thought, oh my gosh, you've got to handle this person in such a way. But I was like, she's a woman just like me. My job is to give her excellence, and I'm going to give her the very best of what I'm supposed to do. But that means Carla, too. I remember going into the meeting, and I sat at the end of the table. It was a long table. All of my colleagues were sitting at the other end of the table. When I started going through the presentation and what was wrong with the presentation, I could see the look on my colleagues. Everybody was sort of looking and not breathing, and I was like, well, look, my job is to get it right before we go out there on the road. She was sitting at the other end of …

AI assessment note: “Being Carla was bringing my Southern self to the table, talking about my singing”

Q We're talking mid-eighties on Wall Street. You get started, what were some of those early lessons in how to navigate a career as an investment banker?

A I tell you, I call them my hard earned and hard learned pearls, because these are things that I didn't know. Every company said, we're a meritocracy. All you have to do is be smart, work hard, and you'll go straight to the top. I started to realize that there were other things that really informed your success equation. And how did I learn? By making the mistakes, falling in the hole, crawling out of the hole, and then being reflective on what I could have or should have done that might have avoided that hole. And then applying the lesson, because of course it's going to come again. So when it came around again, I had a lesson that I could apply and say, aha, that works. So the things that I didn't know are the things that I write about in my first book, Expect to Win. I certainly didn't know about the power of authenticity, but let me hold that one for a second. I didn't know that you have about 90 days to create an impression when you go into a new space or you're working with somebody for the first time, because it's just natural. To form an opinion that is pretty solid by then. I didn't know that you had the ability to train people to think about you in the way that you want them to think about you. Don't just leave it out there for chance and let them create their own narrative. You have to be mindful about that. I didn't know about asking questions at the time that somebo…

AI assessment note: “I didn't know that you have about 90 days to create an impression”

Q As you worked your way through your career, there's this combination of all these little great nuggets you've picked up on relationships, and then there's also the piece of how do you excel? I'd love to hear about that side of your trajectory.

A How do you excel is understanding what is expected. For example, when I was in the capital markets, being able to demonstrate that you had judgment around how to interpret feedback that you got from some of the accounts that the company that you were raising money for when they went out on a roadshow, how those accounts were viewing that company, how they valued the company, what they thought of the management team, what they thought of the opportunity. It's really a matter of discernment because people say one thing, but you need to be able to understand what they really mean away from the words that they articulate. And that actually came with experience and dealing with certain salespeople who covered Fidelity or Wellington or Capital or Janice. You get to know those people so you know what they really mean when they use this word or what they really mean, but they don't give you any feedback at all. Over time, I started realizing that being able to make the call on where to price the deal Making sure that you get it right. Even being able to telegraph what could happen was also important to your success. So over time, you start realizing the things that made you successful as a capital markets banker, and then deploying those things. But that's observation, that's being self-aware, that's being intentional, that's also being fearless to take some risks and ask questions. I …

AI assessment note: “How do you excel is understanding what is expected.”

Q Those prescriptions, I'd love to pull on a few of these. So trust, how do you go about creating trust?

A Yes, thank you for that question. The way you build trust is you deliver over and over and over. Think about people in your life that you trust right now, the people who are taking care of your kids, the people who are looking after your parents, the folks that you let cut your hair, the restaurant you go to every time it's important. Why do you trust them? They deliver consistently over and over. The second point, people will always tell you what they value. All you need to do is ask the question and create the space where they can define what they value. Then you can strategize on how you deliver that. That's how you build the trust. You know what they value? Deliver it over and over again. And they come to trust you. Transparency is key to building trust. Because if I even perceive that you're holding something back, or you're not telling me something, you impair the trust. Authenticity is critical to that. If you're not being who you really are, there's no way you're going to get the trust. Not a hundred percent. Trust is important in customer relationships, but it is critical in colleague relationships, because if the people that you are leading don't trust you, you will never get maximum performance and productivity from them.

AI assessment note: “The way you build trust is you deliver over and over and over.”