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Insight

Published October 2007

American Express: Charged with Leadership-Driven Talent

Ben Warden

Proving the impact (financial or otherwise) of a successful talent management program can be an elusive goal. It is one Paul Leone, Ph.D., attacks head-on for American Express as manager of assessment and evaluation. With a doctorate in industrial/organizational psychology, Leone's job description is simple: measure the results of the impact of the programs at American Express. By using studies, data and sometimes clever oratory skills, Leone proves the worth of all programs that deal with aspects of talent management, such as recruitment, retention and assessment, as well as maintaining a culture of productivity.

TM: Describe your company's approach to talent management.

Leone: The way we want to attract talent is to be an employer of choice. Especially through programs like The First 90 Days and our leadership program, we're really looking to make American Express attractive because of its concentration on employee development. We're concentrating on employee development, and we're concentrating a lot of our talent strategy on leadership and driving certain leadership competencies within the organization. Those leadership competencies are what we base promotion on, compensation on, etc. What we're really doing is grooming employees to be leaders at American Express, creating career paths to move through the organization. We have specific groups like top talent, executive talent groups that focus on talent at every level so that we can navigate them through the organization quickly.

We assess people on four dimensions: the ability to create our future, to inspire our people, to excite our customers and to deliver on the promise. As subcategories of these, we have things such as "develops winning strategies," "drives innovation and change," "builds and leverages relationships," "communicates effectively," "builds diverse talent," "customer-oriented" and "personal excellence." As much as the card tries to push our business model, which is based on reaching that kind of upper crust in terms of customers and clients, and having those people as our customers and clients, we also drive the same strategy for our talent.

TM: What processes or programs have you established to improve the performance of the entire workforce?

Leone: Our specific group puts out a leadership curriculum, so we have specific courses directed at every level of the organization, and we have programs for new people leaders, existing people leaders. We also have customizable curricula for each of the lines of business, so no matter where you are in the company, you can access a curriculum that will work for you and build leadership confidence. For instance, if you need development in one of the competencies, you can go to a leadership curriculum and pull exactly what you need.

Probably the most unique thing about that curriculum is, unlike other organizations, we don't just provide a curriculum and say, "Here, good luck and have a good time with it." Rather, we provide rigorous evaluation around how much impact each of those courses is having. We have a mix of instructor-led and Web-based classes and a blended approach. We've also studied the impact across all of these delivery modes for some of our major leadership programs. I've been here for three and a half years, and since I've been here, we've pushed some more courses into the mandated space. We have one program that we're pushing out to everyone we did last year for all people leaders at the higher bands, which was inspiring employee engagement, and this year, it's authentic leadership, which is a follow-up for the lower band, they are all people leaders.