“If what you want as CEO is someone to help you figure out how to man the operation and get the right kind of leadership, she’s perfect,” Parsons said.
A few years on, Corbat put Wechter in charge of talent and diversity. In 2018, he named her global head of human resources and invited her to join the bank’s management committee, a coveted spot. Then 37, she was one of the youngest people ever to join such a panel at one of the largest US banks.
“She wasn’t trained like the classic HR person, who gets more focused, frankly, on process and procedure and specifics like that,” Parsons said. “Her orientation would be how do we get the right kind of leadership.”
Minding the Gap
Wall Street human resources departments are designed to head off drama. Wechter wasn’t afraid to stir some up.
Less than a year after she took over as head of HR, the bank announced goals for improving the abysmal representation of women and Black employees in Citigroup’s upper ranks. A few months later, it became the lone major bank to disclose gaps in wages for male and female employees, showing that women get 74 cents for every dollar a man makes at the bank.
“We sat and talked about it, we said ‘Let’s be upfront about this, let’s rip the Band-Aid off,’” Corbat said. “Sara gave us all confidence that we would find our way through it. These weren’t things that were unsolvable.”
Soon, the firm added diversity metrics to its scoring of managers’ performance, which is used to set their pay.
Laying out data and goals, and updating them periodically, is a strategy she picked up from her time working with Corbat. Instead of summarizing initiatives in a single email or memo, he would travel and repeat them at town halls at offices around the world.
“I would be like, ‘If I have to hear this one more time I am going to fall asleep,’” Wechter joked. “But then, it would finish and everyone would come up and would say ‘Oh my gosh that was so brilliant,’ or ‘Oh I learned this,’ or ‘Oh I learned that.’ And you realized how many times he had to say the same thing over and over and over again to get 230,000 people to catch on and understand and appreciate what he was saying.”
In February, the firm announced it exceeded targets for increasing the percentage of women and Black executives in its ranks. Months later, Wechter set higher goals for both categories and for improving the representation of Hispanic executives and hiring from lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer communities.
No Jab, No Job
Covid-19 vaccinations were just getting rolled out to the masses in early 2021 when the CEOs of JPMorgan and Goldman made it clear they wanted employees back in the office soon. Wechter saw an opportunity.
With many Wall Streeters eager to keep working remotely, she persuaded bosses at Citigroup to adopt a different stance. The firm continues to permit most staffers to work from home at least part of the time. She later pushed through the vaccine mandate.
The moves gave Citigroup a recruitment advantage with people who wanted flexibility or, when in the office, to play it safe. It also helped the bank comply with President Joe Biden’s push for companies to require vaccines. Though some workers openly groused about the mandate, about 99% of the bank’s workforce complied.
The result was that Wechter was no stranger to controversy by the time Republican lawmakers began calling for the government to cancel contracts with Citigroup over its support for abortion travel. Regardless, a flood other employers followed suit.
“She’s doing what she thinks is right, it’s not a surprise at all,” Parsons said. “She has an instinct for that, a disposition. She’s not a politician, she’d be a terrible politician. She’s a do-what’s-right person.”
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.