Wall Street’s Regular Employees

Although Wall Street’s CEOs and other top executives have been getting all the attention recently, there are lessons to be learned from the more regular employees. After all, not everyone is a millionaire, since like every other industry, financial institutions need a lot of people doing a lot of different things to run their businesses. These folks don’t have golden parachutes, and about 120,000 of them have already lost their jobs. While the shameless big dogs continue to fight to protect their annual eight-figure comp packages, the regular folks are coming to grips with reality.

Many regular employees are angry just like the rest of us. They talk of betrayal, the invention of products for the sole purpose of making a few people rich, giving the best years of their lives to underlying greed, and having lost almost everything, as even regular employees received part of their pay in now worthless stock.

But not all is lost. Dealing with reality when the bottom falls out has a way of causing all of us to “open up our vistas,” as one regular Wall Street employee put it. The grueling world of investment banking held every employee hostage because of the money being made. There were spillover benefits even for regular employees.  Many did what they didn’t even enjoy because they couldn’t give up the money — until forced to.

Some employees are staying in the financial industry, desiring to use their skills but in more meaningful, less stressful jobs. Some have left the business altogether to run children’s baking classes or take a job in the public school system. Some have found religion, even to the point of dropping out of work to go back to school to study religion. Some believe they have been able to turn a disorienting mess into a discernible blessing. “Coming out of every situation, you need to focus on what you have, not what you lost.” “They can never take away your talent.”

Disaster has a way of producing wisdom. It also has a way of setting people free from what they’ve disliked doing and giving them the wherewithal to pursue something not measured by money but by the joy of pursuing a long-held (perhaps secret) ambition or purpose. We can all learn something from these regular Wall Street employees. They’re a lot smarter than the big dogs.