Letter to My Younger Self: Sara Naison-Tarajano, Asset & Wealth Management

Dear Sara,

As you read this letter, you are graduating from Yale University, and eager to start your job in Investment Banking at Goldman Sachs.

While you don’t yet know where your career will take you, you feel sure that joining Goldman Sachs is the right first step.

Sure enough, after a few years in Investment Banking, you move to a role in Equity Derivatives and subsequently to Emerging Markets, where you become entrenched in the markets and learn to leverage your technical expertise to provide innovative products and services for clients. Through this work, you ultimately find a passion for interacting with clients, which then drives you to Private Wealth Management.

In Wealth, you have the opportunity to create an entirely new business for the firm, which you even get to help name: Goldman Sachs Apex, which is the dedicated family office coverage team that partners with private wealth advisors to deliver a broad suite of investment opportunities and services to family office clients of PWM.

While you knew Goldman Sachs was the right home for you in 1999, you couldn’t have predicted that you would work in three different businesses, raise transformative ideas – and gain the trust to run with them – and be here 23 years later.

As you embark on this journey – which, believe it or not, also includes having three wonderful daughters – I am sharing five pieces of advice to help you along the way:

Bring an agenda to every meeting.  You received this advice early in your career, and have stuck to it religiously ever since. Bringing a bulleted list of items to a meeting shows that you value people’s time and are making the most out of the forum. It sounds simple, but the respect it demonstrates goes a long way. 

How you treat people matters. When you learn to bring your authentic self to work, you form connections that go beyond projects and to-do lists. Approach every interaction looking for the best in people, and show people that you care. Remember that you never know where your paths might cross in the future.

Keep things in perspective. For the first part of your career, you put your head down and do what’s asked, and then some. The spare time you have you spend with your family. Over the years, though, you feel like you can do more for your community. This leads you to become very involved with the Innocence Project, a nonprofit that is committed to exonerating individuals who have been wrongly convicted through the use of DNA testing, as well as serve on the board of the UJA-Federation. This work is incredibly energizing and empowering, and a good reminder to look up and think about your job in the context of the broader environment.

Apply the 7:1 rule. As you grow in your career and bring people along on that journey with you, there are times when in order to bring out the best in your team, you do need to deliver feedback on what can be improved. As you approach these sometimes challenging conversations, apply the 7:1 rule – share seven pieces of feedback on what that person is doing well, and one piece of feedback on what they need to improve. By leading with the positive, your team member knows you see them, value their input and contributions, and care, and are sharing the area of improvement from a good place. Ultimately, you unlock the best in people when they know you are rooting for them.  

Have fun. The secret to success and longevity is finding the joy in what you do, and with the people you work alongside.