As a brash young kid, Sridhar Nallani thought he could conquer the world all on his own. With his energies focused on personal goals, abilities, dreams and performances, he was a victim of the pandemic culture of unilateral stardom. Its tough imagining then that the same man today manages three separate groups at The Washington Mutual Bank (WAMU), one of U.S.’s largest banks, and has two vice presidents reporting to him.

As the First Vice President of WAMU, Nallani’s present job entails overseeing all Systems and Development efforts in building CHAMP (Customer Household Account Marketing Profitability)—a data warehouse that measures over 40 terabytes. Roughly translated, the CHAMP database can hold data equivalent to twice the entire content in the Library of Congress.

Building the 40-terabyte data warehouse at WAMU has ensured some level of paranoia for Nallani, and that is the very ingredient that has kept him on his toes. The magnitude of the task has also meant managing a fairly large team, and changing a few people not suited to the desired role if such an occasion is unavoidable. Yet he did not hurry into the process of a makeover. “When I first joined WAMU, I had numerous one-on-ones, asking people the top five things they wanted to change there, and things they wanted to hang on to.” It was only after about 3 months that he had the answers as to who the right people were and where he needed to make adjustments.

Sector swapping through role-play
Nallani’s career graph would well shoot off at a tangent to how digging in several places never fetches you the water beneath. Straight out of college, Nallani chose a job in New York State (NYS) Health as a senior architect over an offer from Caterpillar Inc., as the former offered him a challenge of working towards his goals within bureaucratic wrangles. At that point, he was still the star in his own right; a quintessential individual contributor.

It was the resignation of one of his leads at NYS Health that helped Nallani graduate to the forefront and take up a lead position. He emerged successful, having led the effort to migrate information in the NYS Health registry from the legacy system to a state-of-the-art Oracle data warehouse. The incident, an inflection point in his career, also helped Nallani make the transition from a unilateral star to a team player and understand the mantra of leadership: Once a leader, it all becomes about others, it’s no longer about one’s own self; it’s about making teammates feel good about themselves, and building on their strengths. Having learnt the ropes of captaining a team and completed the job he had begun, he started looking for better opportunities.