I've been at the bank long enough, and in enough different roles, to finally understand how the place actually rewards performance.
The reward for hard work isn't recognition. It isn't career growth. It isn't additional compensation. It's more work.
Not just any work, either. You get handed the complex, politically sensitive, high-risk initiatives that everyone else has quietly managed to avoid. The kind of work where failure has consequences, success is expected, and if you somehow pull it off, leadership thanks you by immediately assigning you the next impossible project.
Competence isn't rewarded here, it's exploited.
The irony is that the less capable you appear to be, the less you're expected to do. People who consistently fail to deliver, miss deadlines, or spend more time trying to hand off work than actually completing it somehow develop an impressive track record of failing upward. They become experts at managing perception instead of outcomes, while the people actually producing results are too busy carrying the organization to spend time marketing themselves.
Then there are the teams that seem to have won the organizational lottery. Small teams. Clearly defined responsibilities. Minimal scope creep. Leadership that actually protects their capacity instead of treating it like a public utility. Flexible delivery timelines. Dedicated administrative support. They get measured on exactly what they signed up to do.
The rest of us? Apparently our job description is simply "everything else." Need another critical program? Give it to the team that's already drowning. Another governance function? They'll figure it out. Production support? Add it. Executive requests? Sure. Regulatory deadlines? Why not? Twenty-four-hour operational oversight? Of course. After all, they've always found a way before.
Then leadership has the audacity to act surprised when capacity becomes an issue. The best part is pretending this is all accidental. It isn't.
Leadership has the reporting. They have the staffing numbers. They have the capacity plans. They sit through prioritization meetings. They review resource models. They approve organizational structures. They know exactly which teams have half the support and two or three times the responsibility. They know which groups are expected to supervise critical operations 24 hours a day, 365 days a year while simultaneously delivering strategic initiatives.
They're not uninformed. They're informed enough to know exactly what's happening and comfortable enough to let it continue. When you escalate the issue, you get the standard corporate script.
"Prioritize better."
"Focus on the highest-value work."
"Be more strategic."
"Challenge your assumptions."
As if no one has ever considered making a priority list.
You can spend weeks documenting workload, mapping every deliverable, demonstrating capacity with actual data, and proving mathematically that there aren't enough hours or people to accomplish everything being demanded. The response?
"We understand."
Translation: We have no intention of changing anything, but we'd appreciate it if you'd continue accomplishing the impossible so we don't have to explain the problem to someone above us.
The most frustrating part is that leadership often mistakes resilience for excess capacity. Every time a team sacrifices nights, weekends, vacations, morale, or retention to somehow meet another impossible deadline, leadership congratulates themselves on successful planning instead of recognizing they've just normalized another unsustainable expectation.
And so the cycle continues.
The competent become the organizational pack mules, carrying increasingly impossible loads because they've demonstrated they can survive them. The underperformers continue to enjoy manageable expectations because no one expects much from them anyway. Meanwhile, leadership points to another successful delivery as proof that the current operating model works, blissfully ignoring that it only works because a handful of people refuse to let the wheels come off.
At some point, you realize the system isn't broken.
It's functioning exactly as leadership designed it.
The people doing the work absorb the cost.
Leadership gets the credit.
And every year, everyone wonders why the people capable of carrying the organization eventually stop volunteering to do it.