Monster Inc

Disney made a movie called Monster Inc. It was about a world of stuffed Monsters who are working in a energy factory, and their way of sustain energy was based on tears and cries from the babies, until, they found a little girl who didn’t take the cry but with gave them laughs at monster’s grimace, and suddenly, the machine starts to bump boosts of energy back to the Monster world again, with more power than tears. It was a smart and funny and meaningful movie, and yet, who would have believed that making people laugh is more powerful as a motivator than making them cry, even in the real world?

Finance team in North America, known for it's solid establishment of internal controls and accuracy for financial reporting, didn’t have any numbers in the auditor's scorecard for 6 six years while I was there. At work, there was stressed managers and crying analysts, star or non star performers. I flew 11 hours to the Nordic world, just found out that high accuracy can also be effective with positive reinforcement, and that was the first 3 months of my experience, along with higher productivity with large scope and decision making.

Working in regulatory reporting had many tough moments, for work as well as people, due to the large responsibilities and ECB changes. In Nordic culture, team leads are there to support the stress management by taking out stress factors from teams to motivate people. Process owners were there to support me for work and people leaders followed us everyday to make sure we are calm and satisfied every day. I get unhappy at work very often, and fight with other analysts regularly, it’s democratic at work. There was one time I bullied an analyst for macro training since I was not good at it and gave a scary stare to one of the people lead because I didn’t get the work I wanted. Z and A, to solve the problem, gave me an analyst case, to understand the answer key I got but didn’t understand in the interview. After the meeting, an email flied in my inbox, sent by Z to the entire RPC team (A) asking one analyst to update a chart called “falling angels”. I took the email and answered ALL back, knowing the email was exactly for myself. They wanted to show me the merits from my own case in the interview to make me feel confident in the unit as a new joiner, who always doubted about my own ability and Basel knowledge. Jani, also offered to do it in the email chain, and of course, sending him for 4-eye was an obvious choice. Good collaboration, I understood that criticizing people at their weak moment was not nice, supporting his automated formatting using macro box was more mature gesture. Wonderful email chain fixed two conflicts, a whining and self-doubting employee. Every moment now and then, the happy bubbles and emoticons for problem solving would burst in the unit from time to time, as a drive for continuous support during one of the hardest changes in the bank. As years passed by, I became self motivating, and always confident to face any crisis, and challenge that comes at work. Reasoning was much easier to do, and I felt relaxed about everyone I worked with, and was able to focus on the work despite long hours and increased workload during the COVID-19 Pandemic.