When Goldman Sachs MDs unfairly downrank Goldman Sachs VPs

When you work for Goldman Sachs, appraisals are a big deal. It is the appraisal that will determine your bonus. It is the appraisal that will determine your eligibility for promotion. It is also the appraisal that will determine whether you get fired or not in the year to come.  

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As the cornerstone of Goldman's meritocratic edifice, Goldman's appraisals are supposed to be objective measures of employees' performance. The recent case of Jon Reeves, a former senior VP in compliance, at Goldman Sachs who just won £1.45m after a decision was made to fire him while he was on paternity leave, suggests this may not always be so.

Under Goldman's appraisal system, Reeves - who was once the highest paid person in Goldman's London control room and was on track to make managing director (MD), was regularly rated by his colleagues. 

Reeves joined the firm as an intern in 2007. Between 2012 and 2019 he was regularly rated as performing in the top quartile of Goldman's people. In 2019, 87% of the feedback he received was "outstanding" and 13% was "good."

But then things changed. In 2020, Goldman started measuring employees in terms of meeting expectations, or not. That year, 50% of the colleagues who appraised Reeves gave him an "exceeds expectations score" and almost all the remaining 50% (but for one person) gave him a "fully meets expectations." Nonetheless, his bosses assigned him a rating of merely "meets expectations." In private, they discussed how Reeves - who became a father in 2019 - was not "driving things forward" or providing "transparency ahead of time about his travel plans." When Reeves drove to Cornwall on the August Bank Holiday with his young baby and didn't pull over and instantly respond to the email from his boss saying "need to talk," they complained that it constituted a "really negative soundbite," that lingered.  

The year end review of 2021 was also problematic. This time, Reeves received 16 "outperforming," 10 "performing" and zero "underperforming" appraisals from his colleagues. But his bosses assigned him a rating of "performing."

There was no 2022 appraisal because Reeves - a hitherto high performing Goldman Sachs employee of 15 years - had been fired. Despite Reeves' strong appraisals, his bosses - many of whom still work for the firm in both London and New York - insisted that he was "kind of lazy" and an underperformer. 

The judgement in Reeves' employment tribunal case highlights how the MDs he worked with undermined him.

In 2020, for example, Reeves gave a presentation to Goldman's chief legal officer (the now controversial figure of Kathyrn Ruemmler).  To his face, his bosses told him it was "great." In private though, they were emailing each other saying things like, "he described things in ways that didn’t make strategic sense… I stepped in a lot because I felt like I needed to … I don’t think she would have otherwise known what we were talking about."

In 2021, one of Reeves' bosses informed him he was underperforming a few weeks after the appraisal, even though he'd just been ranked performing in key categories and none of his colleagues had given him an underperforming rating. 

In July 2021, Goldman Sachs' own compensation algorithm recommended that Reeves' should receive an increase in his total compensation, but Reeves' boss overruled this and said his pay should stay flat. 

In September 2022, Reeves was fired. He was told that he was the only person to be let go on his team "in the context of what is a very strong peer group." 

That strong peer group at Goldman included a woman who was a favourite of the MDs lambasting Reeves. She was described as, "crushing it. Stepped up. Star performer. Doing a much better job than what Jon was doing." But the tribunal described these as "cliched generalisations" and said Goldman didn't provide any evidence that she merited these descriptors. That woman was since promoted to MD and is now running the team.  

In a comment on the tribunal case and Reeves' £1.5m in compensation for discrimination and being dismissed unfairly, a spokesperson for Goldman Sachs said: "Goldman Sachs is a market leader in paid parental leave and encourages all working parents regardless of gender to take the full 26 weeks paid leave offered to them. We strongly disagree with this decision.”

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