My first year at work: No job is too small

By Nikhil Barshikar

Details of your first job
My first job at Lehman Brothers was memorable for all the wrong reasons. I joined on 911. I was in World Trade Center tower three when the planes hit and my clearest memory is running away from the building and rising detritus, confused and shocked, wondering how anything could ever be okay after this. But it was okay, eventually. They moved us, rookies and directors, into a hotel, and I remember setting up everything from scratch. In many ways it felt like a startup. Nothing was working, but everyone was certain they would make it work. We were united by grief.

I was recruited straight out of college into their management trainee programme. But in the light of what had happened, the first 100 days involved getting the company back on its feet and helping affected employees. I remember setting up the trading desk from scratch, and doing everything from the most menial of jobs like getting cables to being part of strategic meetings with the most senior leadership at the firm. What I have held to steadfast since then is how no job was too small, no matter who you were in the organisation.

How I had fun at work
I was a massive prankster. A particular prank I enjoyed was reconnecting all the printer connections so that people's printouts came out on different floors.

The worst mistake I made
I mistook one of the managing directors to be someone else and asked him to get cof fee for all us because he was dressed in jeans.

That came back to bite me a couple of times.

The best leadership lesson I learnt
What i saw during those first couple of years was how leadership during a crisis is very different from leadership during a calm phase. The ability to instill the belief through action and communication that we were all in it together and we would come out stronger than before was one of my earliest leadership lessons.

How I managed my work-life balance
Working in an investment bank, especially in those days, was an easy 16-hour a day job. I left early and came home quite late, but I still found time to get in an hour at the gym and spent the weekend's partying it up. Working out continues to be imperative to ensuring a calm and relaxed mind.

My biggest innovation
Post the devastating event, all the derivative trading and systems halted and we were left with credit default swaps, which we couldn't unwind. My first innovation along with the technology team was to figure out an algorithm that helped us match up the millions of transactions. We were able to do what would have taken us 10-15 days manually, in a few hours. We saved about $10 million that week with this simple innovation.

(Nikhil Barshikar is Managing Director, Imarticus Learning)