A Seat at the Wells Fargo Table

At Wells Fargo, employees are seen as the competitive advantage to achieve business success for customers, shareholders and for the company to achieve its One Wells Fargo united mission. Because of this, the company’s CEO John Stumpf believes one contributor to business success is the development and utilization of the strengths of all team members, especially leaders. Stumpf brought Cara Peck, head of enterprise talent planning and development services at Wells Fargo, on late last year to communicate the company’s vision, mission, goals and implementation strategies to internal customers, provide resources to assist employee development planning and identify and communicate organizational opportunities. Peck tells Chief Learning Officer magazine how she does this.

How did you get here? Give us some background information.

I’ve been with Wells Fargo almost 13 years and this is a new role for me. Before this I was head of intermediary sales for Wells Fargo Funds Management.

After the merger between Wachovia and Wells Fargo, John Stumpf, our CEO, and his operating committee really wanted to focus on leadership and the next generation of One Wells Fargo leaders and how we would accomplish the goal of uniting and building our top performers.

Wells Fargo was more of a decentralized organization, whereas Wachovia was a centralized organization, and bringing the two together, we had a bit of a fragmentation on how we approach leadership development. It was decided to create a corporate center of excellence around leadership and professional development using core and common platforms on how we develop our leaders. This mandate came down from John Stumpf and the operating committee in the beginning of 2011. I was hired out of the sales business at Wells Fargo on July 1, 2011, and we just launched the corporate center on January 1, 2012.

In addition to monitoring that process, I also own the office of talent management. It’s a nice partnership between the two — learning and development and talent management — because it allows us to have a lot of conversation around how we are developing our leaders, in particular, the leaders identified as succession to the operating committee or more senior roles at the enterprise.