Goldman Sachs
- Bracha Cohen, a partner at Goldman Sachs, says delegating is key to balancing work and a big family.
- Cohen, an engineer, said that she's learned which commitments are truly non-negotiable.
- She said that obligations that may seem to clash with her job have actually fueled her success.
Bracha Cohen knows that she actually cannot do it all, or at least not all at once.
A partner within asset and wealth management engineering at Goldman Sachs, Cohen said that knowing how to delegate responsibility is crucial to excelling in her job while raising seven children.
"Does this need to be me directly, or is this the kind of thing that a delegate could do just as well, and it won't compromise the outcome?" Cohen, who has been at Goldman for more than three decades and climbed to its upper echelons as a partner, said.
Around one in four employees at Goldman are engineers, and Cohen held various engineering leadership roles before becoming a partner in 2024. Her current team now automates the asset management business' operations to help it scale. Goldman's asset and wealth management division holds a record $3.6 trillion in assets and has grown under CEO David Solomon's leadership.
Cohen's approach to delegation plays out both at work and at home.
Some responsibilities, Cohen said, are "truly non-discretionary," but others can be passed on either to colleagues at work or family members at home.
For Cohen, a religious Jewish woman, celebrating Shabbat each week between sundown on Friday and sundown on Saturday is a non-negotiable. Her close colleagues know that they'll periodically need to take a task over the finish line on Friday evenings, after she's logged off.
The priorities that on their face might seem to clash with Cohen's job, like raising many children and observing Shabbat, have actually taught her skills crucial to her success: time management and long-term planning, to name a couple.
"I have to develop those skills at double or triple the pace," she said.
Many American adults have to juggle the day-to-day of their careers against the demands of parenting: both parents work in more than 66% of families with children under 18, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
"Allocate your time and energy intentionally. That's the key," she advised about managing as a working parent. On the weekends, for example, Cohen is more proactive in dealing with personal responsibilities before shifting her proactive focus to work on Sunday evenings.
Even so, Cohen said that the occasional conflict is inevitable. When two high-priority responsibilities bump up against each other, it's about judging the trade-offs and knowing that any fallout will likely be recoverable, especially since she's consistent as a colleague and parent. There are also ways to compensate afterwards, like calling the people who attended the meeting you had to miss, she said.
"If you're very dependable and reliable and always take the responsibility seriously, if some emergency comes up, be it another work commitment or be it a personal commitment, then it'll be excusable," Cohen said.