In January 1996 I had no job, and I didn't want a job. I had no real idea what I was going to do next, but I didn't plan to return to full-time work in the City. I vaguely thought about looking for part-time local work using my financial skills, but I wasn't in rush to look for it. I planned to spend some time just being with my son and then look for a job when I felt ready.
One morning, I woke up to realise that my husband was still there beside me. Normally he would have got up and gone to work by then, so thinking he had overslept I woke him up. "You're late for work!" I said.
He rolled over and looked at me. "There's something I haven't told you," he said. "I'm not going to work".
Working at a junior level in a female-dominated environment, he had for months been experiencing what amounted to bullying and sexual harassment, which had gradually destroyed his confidence, wrecked his productivity and driven him into the same black hole as I had been in. He had also been affected by my depression. He finally went to the doctor with physical symptoms of stress, and the doctor signed him off sick. He never returned to that job. Later that year he took medical retirement on grounds of stress. He was then unemployed for the next three and a half years.
My world collapsed. My dream of being able to stop for a while and spend time with my son while he was young abruptly ended. I knew I had to find another job, and it needed to be secure: I could not risk the insecurity of contract work any more, because our finances would depend on my income.
The anger I felt towards my husband for abandoning his job stayed with me for the rest of our time together. Eventually it destroyed our marriage: we separated in 2001 and divorced in 2004. I could not forgive him for forcing me to support the family when I had barely recovered from severe depression myself. I could not forget that although I had had bouts of severe stress throughout my working life, I had never given up work: I had always made myself carry on. Maybe it was selfish of me, but I couldn't see why he couldn't pick himself up off the floor as I had always done: if he didn't want to return to that job, that was fine, but he should just look for another one. After all, that is what I would now have to do.
And I did. I put my CV together, sent it out into the marketplace and soon secured a job as a senior project manager in Operations at SBC Warburg. I started the new job in April 1996. I didn't like SBC Warburg's office - the dark slate atrium of the building oppressed me, reminding me far too much of the black hole of depression, and the working environment itself was cramped and drab. But I thought I had secured a job that would meet my needs. I had specified when I took the job that I would not be able to do long hours or overseas travel, and I believed they had agreed. How wrong I was.
What they meant by "long hours" wasn't what I meant. "Long hours" to them meant 10 hours or more a day, whereas I meant over 7 hours a day. Everyone was routinely doing 8-9 hours a day: "long hours", by my standards, was normal hours to them. And the ban on overseas travel they took to mean months away, whereas I meant anything longer than a few days. We were at cross purposes from the start.
Included in my "previous experience", on my CV, was the work I had done in my brief stint at Credit Lyonnais - moving a trading book from one country to another. This was exactly what SBC Warburg wanted for their latest project. To minimise the political risk arising from the imminent return of Hong Kong to China, SBC Warburg decided to move their main Far Eastern trading books from Hong Kong to London. Henceforth, although they would have offices in Hong Kong and Singapore, all trades would be booked through London.
The problem was that the Hong Kong and Singapore offices had been outposts of S.G. Warburg, taken over by SBC not long before. They were still using S.G. Warburg systems and procedures. In contrast, the London trading and settlement systems were SBC systems. The two architectures were fundamentally different and in many ways incompatible. Moving the book was going to involve huge systems changes. The SBC Board - made up largely of people with trading and banking backgrounds, with little understanding of settlement processes and a jaundiced view of compliance and audit - could not believe the project would take 9 months to complete. Three weeks was more what they had in mind, and they simply would not accept the timescale suggested by project management from both IT and Operations. They eventually agreed to 6 months.
By the time I arrived the project had been named and had a high-level scope and plan. The project was originally named Icarus, until someone pointed out that Icarus had actually failed because he over-extended himself (he flew too close to the sun, his wings melted and he drowned in the Hellespont) - not a good omen. The project was hastily renamed Daedalus. But with hindsight, Icarus was a better name. 6 months was nowhere near enough, even with project staff working silly hours. Three days after I arrived, I attended a meeting at which the IT project manager presented his plan. I still remember his opening remarks:
"To achieve the deadline set by the board", he said, "we have removed the luxury of user testing".
IT had indeed produced a project plan that filled up the entire 6 months with development and system testing. They really thought that we would go live with major systems changes that had not been subjected to rigorous user testing, and they resented me for objecting to their plan on the grounds that it was unrealistic. I don't recall saying "that will never work" when I looked at their plan, but I was so horrified by it that it is entirely possible that I did say that. Anyway, rumour spread that I had been very critical of the IT project management. By the end of the week I was persona non grata in the IT department, and the IT project manager had set out on a personal mission to undermine me. His method was not to confront me directly, or speak to my line management. No, his approach was more subtle. He complained to his management that I was "disrupting the project". His complaint went all the way up to senior management and back down the cascade to my line manager. To his credit, David blocked the complaint at that point and it never reached me: I did not find out about this until after I left SBC Warburg. But the message got around nevertheless. Frances was "difficult to work with".
Nor was that the IT project manager the only person producing unrealistic plans. I was the London Operations project manager, and I had a counterpart in Hong Kong. The Hong Kong Operations project manager was not a professional project manager and did not really know how to plan a project. His plans excluded all sorts of things that he hadn't thought of yet and were constantly changing as more things hit his head. He took no notice of resource constraints or critical dependencies, and had utterly unrealistic views of how long it would take staff in other departments to do their tasks. I tried to improve the standard of his plans, but my attempts were poorly received: he did not appreciate my "meddling".
Shortly after the start of the project, I was sent to the Far East for three weeks. I was to spend two weeks in Hong Kong and one week in Tokyo. This was despite the fact that I had joined the company with an explicit agreement that long overseas trips were out of the question. To SBC Warburg, three weeks wasn't "long". But to my 16-month old son, and to me, it was unbearably long. I did not want to go.
But I went, of course. And to start with it seemed to go well, apart from being left kicking my heels outside the door while senior Operations staff from London and Hong Kong had their own project meeting. I thought this was odd and was quite cross at being treated in what I thought was a rather inconsiderate manner. But apart from that, I was upbeat and cheerful: I was still worried about the very tight project deadlines and the poor state of the project plans, but I thought that as the plans were tightened up the unrealistic nature of the project schedule would become apparent and we would have the ammunition to bid for an extension.
That evening, the Head of London Operations took me aside. And what he said was like a knife to the heart. In the meeting to which I had not been invited, the Hong Kong project manager had complained about me, not on a professional but on a personal level. He didn't like me, found me "abrasive" and was refusing to work with me. London Operations were not taking this entirely seriously - the Hong Kong project manager had a history of volatility - but the manager warned me that I needed to be far more careful about how I spoke to him and what I said. It was just like GALM all over again, or even my childhood.....I had upset someone, apparently, but I had no idea what I had done. I asked for specific examples of occasions when I had spoken too abruptly or abrasively, but he was unable to give them. So I could not fix the problem. I would have to walk on eggshells the whole time and hope I didn't inadvertently crush one without realising it.
After he left, I sat in the office for a long time looking out of the window, tears rolling down my face. It was sunset: against the red and gold sky I could see the silhouettes of planes taking off from the airport. I longed to be on one of them. Why I didn't call a cab, go to the airport and get on the next plane home I will never know. I suppose I thought I might be sacked if I did - and after all, my whole reason for doing this job was to support my family. I had to stay, for their sake.
And stay I did, the whole three weeks. I hated Hong Kong, but I liked Tokyo. The manners of our Japanese hosts reminded me of the manners drummed into me as a child. I understood them, perhaps better than some other members of the team. I had studied Japanese business as part of my MBA: perhaps that helped. Anyway, I got on far better with my Japanese colleagues than I did with the Hong Kong people.
It was after I came back that the real problems started. The project was, quite simply, impossible. We all knew that. But none of us had the courage to go back to the Board and tell them that the project simply was not deliverable in the time frame. To be fair, we all thought the Board would not listen anyway. But collectively we all - including me - suffered from a massive lack of gumption. We worked longer and longer hours just to get the work done. I produced a one-page Testing Strategy that outlined the approach to user testing: backing it up would be test plans and scripts for each application to be tested. These had to be created. We also started to design new business processes for the functions affected by the changes, a work stream that I added to the programme at the Operations users' request. But it quickly became apparent that we did not have either the resources or the time to complete the extensive process redesigns needed. Meanwhile IT provided a delivery schedule for systems to user testing, which turned out to be unworkable: delays built on delays, while the project deadline grew ever closer. By mid-July I was doing 12-hour days.
One evening, my boss caught me staring at yet another screen of horrible test results. "Is it really that bad?" he said. I didn't need to answer - I just looked at him. He knew.
"I'll do what I can", he promised. And he did. He persuaded senior management that the project was in trouble. Next thing I knew, there was a full-blown project review. I welcomed this as an initiative - but what I hadn't realised was that it meant even more work for me. I was expected to keep the user testing going - on which I was already doing silly hours, coordinating testing activities around the world. And I was now also expected to participate in the review, providing data and doing analyses to support the argument that the project needed to be restructured.
In addition to the morning testing review meetings, I now had 8am project review meetings as well. I used to get home at 11 pm or later after working all day and all evening without a break, eat something and fall asleep, then be up in time to catch an early train to London so that I was back in the office by 7.30 am, in time to produce the updates from overnight test runs before the 8am meeting because I wouldn't have time after the meeting. I never saw my little boy, because I left the house before he woke up and didn't get in until after he was asleep. And he didn't know where I was: Mummy had simply disappeared.
One night in August, he woke up at 2 am because he was teething. I went in to comfort him. It was like a light bulb going on. Mummy was there.... After that he woke up at that time every night and refused to go back to sleep. The middle of the night had become playtime.
I lasted three weeks on hardly any sleep. Eventually the inevitable happened: I blew my top in a project review meeting. I had had an hour and a half's sleep that night, my temper was on a knife edge, and in that meeting I had one demand too many made of me. I lost my temper. I am not proud of this, but in the circumstances it is perhaps surprising that I hadn't blown up before. But it didn't do my reputation any good. Once again, the message went round: Frances was difficult to work with.
Eventually the project was restructured and re-staffed, and a new deadline was set which, I noted with some amusement, was the same as it would have been if the original project management estimate had been accepted. The project did indeed need 9 months, not 6 months, and even that would be tight - people would have to work very hard. A new overall project manager was put in place and the London and Hong Kong project teams were dismantled, being replaced with a new task-based structure. I lost my job, of course. They suggested that I could join the team preparing new business processes. I thought about it, and decided that was not really what I wanted to do. I wanted to complete what I had started. I wanted to run the user testing. There was a Test Manager job in the new structure, so I said I wanted to do that.
It wasn't as simple as that. There was another candidate. My well-meaning boss had assigned some more of his staff to the new project, including one senior project manager. The staff had not been assigned roles, because my boss viewed it as the overall project manager's responsibility to assign them. However, I know that my boss had intended the senior project manager to go to Hong Kong for five months to run the Daedalus project office there - clearly not a job I could or would do. Unfortunately, the senior project manager had other ideas. He had just started a new relationship, and feared that spending a long time abroad would disrupt it. So he looked for a senior role on the project that would keep him in the UK. And there was an obvious one - the Test Manager role. Suddenly I was in a competition. I had to prove I was the right person to keep on doing the job I had been doing now for two months.
The new overall project manager, concerned about the hours I had been working, put me on strict work-to-rule (9 to 5) and excused me from breakfast meetings. I was so tired by then that it was a relief. I didn't have to work late, I didn't have to come in early, I could see my little boy. But it left me in a very vulnerable position. I was not present at important project meetings. I was "off the radar".
One day there was a breakfast meeting at which the final staffing of the project was determined. I did not attend this meeting, obviously.....but the senior project manager who was bidding for the Test Manager job did. At that meeting he presented a one-page Test Strategy as a blueprint for how to conduct testing. And on the basis of that presentation, he was given the job.
Later that day, the overall project manager jokingly asked me if I fancied five months in Hong Kong. Then I knew.There was no role for me on the project. Just as I had been after GALM 1, I was employed .....but unemployed. The project to which I had given so much had rejected me. I no longer had a job.
I only found out several months later that the Test Strategy that the senior project manager had presented at that meeting was the Test Strategy that I had written some months before, and that we had actually been using in the user testing that we had already done. He was so worried about losing his girlfriend if he ended up in Hong Kong that he resorted to fraud to get what he wanted. He stole my work and presented it as his own at a meeting where he knew I would not be present. He knew I had been doing that job: he knew I wanted to continue doing it. He knew that my circumstances made it impossible for me to spend five months in Hong Kong, which was the only alternative. But he didn't care.
I reacted to this much the same way I had to GALM 1. I had nothing to do, but I still had to come in to the office, and this time I didn't have the relief of MBA studies. I was bored out of my mind and dreadfully unhappy. It soon became evident that the new Test Manager was way out of his depth: the test team used to come to me for advice and information. I was no longer even a member of the project team, but they couldn't do without my knowledge. This went on for several weeks.
Eventually my boss found me another job - a small project to develop a time reporting system, coupled with running the Operations project office. It soon became apparent that there were so many big, business-critical and high risk projects going on at the time - plus the takeover of Dillon Read, of course - that no-one was remotely interested in a time reporting system. I could not get any senior management buy-in for this project and I admit that I was not really interested in it myself. It soon died, leaving me with only one job - the project office. As with the GALM "personal assistant" job, this was widely viewed as a demotion. But more importantly, I hated it. I knew that I was temperamentally unsuited to that kind of administrative role: but there was nothing else do do. I was bored out of my mind, miserable and stressed. I guess it showed in my behaviour: I was irritable, intolerant of minor annoyances and totally lacking any sense of humour. Not surprisingly, I became unpopular.
Underlying the problems at SBC Warburg was of course the tension at home. My husband was still unemployed, but was unwilling to be a house husband: he was spending lots of time doing voluntary work in order to gain experience with a view to becoming a charities fundraiser. Our son was in nursery, we had a cleaner and a gardener, all of it paid for by me. I felt that I was sacrificing everything I had ever wanted so that my husband could pursue his dreams at my expense. Something had to give, so I took us to Relate. We worked with a counsellor for several months, but the eventual (unsatisfactory) outcome was that I had to either accept the situation or leave. I agreed to continue to support the family if I got the second baby I wanted. It was an unholy deal that resolved none of the real problems and only delayed the inevitable. However, I did get the baby. In November 1996 I found I was pregnant. It was a high-risk pregnancy: I spent a lot of time visiting doctors and midwives, and as time went on I spent increasing amounts of time in hospital. There is little doubt that my mental state contributed to the risk: I was stressed and unhappy all the time, and this communicated itself to the baby.
Not long after this, my boss was moved sideways. He was replaced with someone who already had a vast team - we were simply additions. And he wasn't having any of the "flat management structure" that his predecessor liked. He chose the people he wanted as direct reports and assumed that everyone on the projects where they worked reported to them. But that left me out. I wasn't on any project.....but that didn't mean he wanted to be my manager. He simply ignored me completely. I was on my own.
I had to negotiate the terms of my maternity leave directly with Human Resources. The baby was due on August 12th, so I agreed that I would leave at the end of June. In practice I left earlier. I spent the last two weeks before going on maternity leave in hospital.....except for one visit to London. That visit was for my annual appraisal.
SBC Warburg appraisal involved 360 degree feedback and self-assessment. While in hospital, I completed the self-assessment form, which had been sent to me in the post. I didn't think I was particularly kind to myself in the self-assessment: I was by no means proud of my performance and felt that I had in many ways behaved pretty badly, though I did think that there were substantial mitigating factors.
I left hospital on the day of the appraisal and took the train to London, taking the self-assessment with me. The appraisal was to be conducted by a former colleague of mine who had recently been promoted, and a lady I had never met who had flown in from Switzerland. Apparently these two between them were now my line managers.
That appraisal was the worst one I have ever had in my life. Their assessment of me was far worse than mine: they refused to take into account any of the mitigating factors I had identified - not even my fragile physical state and the worry caused by a high-risk pregnancy, nor the fact that my marriage was in serious trouble (which they knew). None of it mattered. All that mattered was what people thought of me, and that was generally negative. There was a positive report from my team members: unsurprisingly, there was a very negative view from the senior project manager who had stolen my work in order to get my job. I had been unable even to be polite to him once I found out what he had done.
They refused to change any of their findings in the light of my self-assessment. I might as well not have bothered to do it. At the end of the appraisal, they said "well, now we'd better get this signed". I didn't say it, but I'm sure they knew what I was thinking. No way was I signing my own death warrant.
I spent all of the return train journey in tears. And I kept saying to myself, "I'm not going back. I'm never going back there again". I went back into hospital in a very upset and stressed state - not good for woman in the late stages of a high-risk pregnancy.
I look back on this experience now with absolute horror. I have managed people, and I can say in all conscience that, whatever crimes a staff member may have committed, calling someone out of hospital to give them a strongly negative appraisal is simply appalling management. Even if the bad appraisal is justified, you just don't do that to someone who is in a fragile physical or mental state. But it was symptomatic of the generally awful management at SBC Warburg.
I returned from maternity leave in January 1998. I negotiated the terms of my return directly with HR, because Operations didn't know what to do with me. I wanted to come back on the basis of working at home a couple of days a week, but all the Operations business units would consider was full-time in the office. So I found myself once more in limbo, with no clear role. No-one would assign me to anything meaningful because of what they saw as my restricted availability.
It didn't last long. SBC Warburg took over its rival UBS: Operations was restructured and I had yet another change of line manager, this time someone I liked and respected. But I never had a chance to work for him. Not long after the takeover, I was made redundant.
The next bit I am going to write is possibly illegal. But it is now fifteen years since I left UBS. Does it really matter any more?
I was sent to see HR to sort out the terms of my redundancy. There was a queue for interviews with HR officials, so I was shown into a waiting room. The room was full of women.....pregnant women, women who (like me) were just back from maternity leave, women with small children. There were no men.
In the HR interview it became clear that the new UBS was using the merger to get rid of everyone - from both sides - who didn't fit their "work hard, play hard" ethos. That's why so many women with children were being made redundant. We weren't going to commit the time that they wanted.
We were offered an enhanced settlement package in return for relinquishing our right to claim for unfair dismissal and sex discrimination. UBS provided legal advice for us at a reduced price: but it is fair to say that the solicitors were looking after their own interests, not those of UBS. The solicitor I went to see suggested that I could go back and ask for more money.
I didn't. The awful appraisal was still in the back of my mind. And because of it, I considered that I deserved my redundancy. In fact the appraisal was bad enough for dismissal, really. I decided that I didn't have the moral right to ask for more money. I had not behaved well.
But HR had a slightly different take. They knew what had happened over my maternity leave, and they no doubt knew about the appalling appraisal done at a time when I was officially off sick - after all, no-one had ever insisted that I signed it, indeed it had never been mentioned again and I no longer reported to those individuals. They apologised to me for the awful management of the Operations department. I still remember the comment of the HR official who dealt with my redundancy:
"We do our best", she said. "But there are some management black holes".
Clearly I had been in one of them.
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