You Can Socialize While Gardening

If you quit your job at Bank X to move to Bank Y, you will probably have to spend some period of time on gardening leave, during which Bank X will pay you your salary and in exchange you won’t do any work for either bank. (This is to reduce the chances that you bring useful inside information from Bank X to Bank Y, and also to make it less attractive generally for Bank Y to hire you.) It is arguably a little unclear, though, what “work” means. Like you probably shouldn’t be lead adviser on a merger while you’re on gardening leave, or put on a suit and show up at Bank Y’s offices every day.

But a lot of the real work of an investment banker consists of having dinner with old friends who happen to be chief executive officers of public companies. It is a relationship job, and if you are good at it it hardly feels like work, and it probably wouldn’t look much like work to a court either. So I am sure that lots of very senior bankers keep in touch with their old clients during their gardening leaves, not to pitch deals or sell the capacities of their new employers or anything as mercenary as that, but just because they have spent their professional lives developing a social group that happens to include a lot of clients. Staying in touch with those friend-clients seems perfectly natural, and is also good for business.