A Seat at the Wells Fargo Table

Creating a corporate center does a couple of things: One, as I mentioned, the core and common and language, but two, it allows people to come together from different lines of businesses and really develop and learn from each other, which we haven’t done in the past because having a more fragmented approach, you did more intact team training.

How do you work directly with other line leaders?

I partner with a lot of the senior line leaders as well as team member network groups, leadership councils. We’re really understanding their business priorities, our corporation’s business priorities and how we’re tying both the development of our leaders to these priorities as well as tying them to the talent management process. It works both top-down and bottom-up. As you know, when you’re looking at development, we can deliver a lot of solutions and a lot of assessments and tools in coaching, but that’s only going to be 30 percent of it. Seventy percent of it is the experience and how we create those experiences; how do we identify stretch roles, how do we see where there’s good job swaps or talent rotation opportunities.

What do you contribute to conversations about the company’s business strategy?

We have a belief that when team members are leveraging their strengths and core competencies, they’re much more engaged, which creates more satisfied customers, which drives extraordinary business results. That has been a hallmark of our organization, but I do think that one of the things that differentiate us, as most companies, is your people. It’s a commoditized market, so the people that service those products, that help the customer, that think about the future, that innovate and have the strategy, it’s all about us investing developing the talent to deliver on that.