vishnu-era-14

A QUARTERLY NEWS PUBLICATION FROM SRI VISHNU EDUCATIONAL SOCIETY
LEADER SPEAK
4
Mr Sumeet Rajpal is specialist in the area of Global Markets Technology with a
strong delivery experience in Operations Technology (Back office & Middle
Office) and FICC Technology. He has proven experience in scaling strong Agile
teams and managing delivery for Strategic Initiative programs, Regulatory
Initiatives and BAU (Business as usual). He is the India Lead (Sr. Vice President)
for Global Markets Operations Technology (Back office and Middle Office) at
Bank of America Merrill Lynch since March 2011. He completed his Bachelor of
Technology from Birla Institute of Technology and MBA from Narsee Monjee
Institute of Management Studies in Marketing. His interests include
Management Training, New developments in Global markets especially
Derivatives, Leadership Skill development, Strategic Planning among others.
Mr Sumeet Rajpal
Sr. Vice President,
Bank of America Merrill Lynch
Mr. A.L.Kishore, Chief Editor, Dr Mrunalini
Sasanka, Guest Editor & Student lead Mr. N
Rakesh Kumar (ECE) had the wonderful
opportunity to interact with Mr Sumeet Rajpal.
Excerpts of the 'FACE to FACE” is given below
Could you please tell us your journey from a Graduate
student @ BIT to Sr. Vice President at Bank of America
Merrill Lynch?
Everybody starts their career more or less as an individual
contributor. Slowly he evolves into a leader. The difference
between an individual contributor and leader is that as an
individual contributor you are responsible for the work you do
whereas as a lead you have to provide leadership for a team.
That becomes the next stage of your evolution. Third stage is
where you become a manager who has to manage and take
responsibility for being efficient in completing the task with the
resources in hand. The fourth stage is where you become
'manager of manager' and then 'manager of manager of
manager' and so on. The most important aspect is that you have
to understand the role you are playing. Then you have to figure
out how to become perfect in the role you are assigned. It's very
important that, as you are into those four different stages, you
define for yourself a core set of values and as you move from one
role to another those core set of values keep accumulating. For
example, take the case of Nelson Mandela, the value system he
followed was that there shall be no discrimination based on
color, creed, race, etc. Same is the case with Mahatma Gandhi
or Narendra Modi, they have their own core values like integrity,
honesty, etc which they always believed in. The core values at
times tend to cause uneasiness to lot of people around you. In
my own case, one of the core values is about people that you
work with. They are extremely important at times even more so
than yourself. Secondly, you can chase money but at the end of
the day money should be seen more as an outcome than a goal.
Another aspect is the ability to take risk at the right time. Taking
risks has a finite probability of failure. But one should not be
scared of failures. Because most of the times failures are
nothing but the lessons for future.
The other important aspect is the personal change
management. Any change should be well-planned and thought
of. The perfect example for the change is that what we witness
during different stages of human life cycle. Most of time people
know what's going to change. But they never plan and think
about its execution. All great people / organizations (be it
Microsoft, Apple, etc) realize this aspect of life. Just like them
we also need to anticipate the change and improve the skill set
which defines our worth. Just like Microsoft has a battery of
engineers taking the product (like Windows OS) from one level
to another, we have to use all the resources around us so that we
are better equipped to face the future. This should be
supplemented with pursuing higher education to gain enough
knowledge.
In the first few years of my professional life as an individual
contributor, I was extremely focused on what I have to achieve.
Time was no bar for me. I used to work for 16 hours a day. That
initial hard work helped me to do well for the rest of my life.
Also at this juncture, I didn't have any coach to guide me on what
should I be doing. I did what my peers were doing, by observing
them e.g. pursuing MBA and then specializing in Marketing. At
that point of time, the decisions were not consciously taken but
more or less led by what my friends were doing.
The present generation has a lot of resources like Internet,
Social media and forums from which they can take conscious
decisions. But I really doubt this generation is using it
effectively.
In general students coming from the engineering college have
three options – Career in Education (Teaching), working for an
Organization or becoming an entrepreneur. To be an
entrepreneur, one should have a bright business idea, know
how to create a business and have the ability to take risk.
Once you become a manager we really need an external help
from the ecosystem you work in, mentor or a coach, even from
parents, etc. When we don't get that help, we start working on
our task by trial and error. Trying and failing will ultimately
result in quality learning. Most of the times, as a manager, I
learnt everything from failures in a number of things that I tried.
. Post 5 years of working as a Manager, I realized that delegating
and balancing the work properly between you and your team is
important for efficient task execution. This stage of my
professional life made me realize how important it is for a
manager to have a coach or mentor who helps to learn things
quickly. Till this point of time, I was more of a manager than a
leader.
But later on as 'manager of manager', you are expected to be a
leader. The difference between manager and a leader is the
manager would be purpose-led and the leader would be
people-led. In this role I started focusing on coaching, guiding,
making sure the people under me didn't commit the same
mistakes which I had committed as a manager, etc. Also as a
leader, I began to do things beyond the scope of my job by taking
up several new initiatives that would positively affect more
people in addition to my immediate teams .
As far as the roles I was in, I was a management consultant with
KPMG for some years, then I decided to move into IT for couple
of years and then jumped into to become an entrepreneur (year
2000) where me and my boss worked on an idea (similar to
PayTM model). But we backed off because we realized that our
idea was way ahead of its time. After that I went to IT and started
working on my specializations viz. payments and cryptography
and then I decided to step into Global Markets which was in
2004. I have been in this field for more than 12 years now and
have developed a reasonable level of expertise in the subject .
The areas of your expertise deal with a lot of people.
How challenging is that, considering the diverse nature
of the people you deal with?
It's challenging. That's the need of the hour. It's like a symphony
where we have hundred people playing different instruments.
Even though we are extremely good players, we have to play in
synchronization with the team, otherwise, we may be checked
out of the symphony. Being a team player, we have to adjust and
play along with the team, living up to the core values.
What according to you is essential in ready to be
employees? Where do you think they are lagging?
For entry level employees, it is important to have thirst for
knowledge and passion for the work. One should invest time and
effort in learning and building specialization by working across
depth and breadth of the subject (T model). In addition to that,
asking questions and coming up with innovative solutions is