PEOPLE &PLACES
BY JENNIFER MILLMAN / © 2007 DiversityInc
Rosie Saez
Senior Vice President, Director, Leadership Practices Group, Wachovia
As a Fortune 100 executive
charged with integrating diversity
within corporate-wide business
strategy, Rosie Saez thought she
had reached the apex of her career.
She was wrong.
Wachovia, No. 21 in The 2006
DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for
Diversity®, invited all senior managers to compete last year for a
position as director of its Leadership
Practices Group, which drives the
strategic direction of the company.
Saez, diversity integration director
within the bank’s community-development group at the time,
applied. She was one of five finalists
interviewed by a panel of five senior
leaders—and they picked her.
“It’s almost like a fire hose got
turned on me,” says Saez, who was
promoted in December. Now she
and her 58-member team are
entrusted with cultivating the next
generation of Wachovia leadership.
“For me it is an honor to be asked
to lead this work for the company. I
Rosie Saez
Company: Wachovia
Top 50 rank: 21
to our development work, we
ensure that we are being good stewards around our talent,” says Saez.
“I do believe the work we do at
Wachovia truly is making a difference and is creating tremendous
“Believe in yourself and the goodness of the world
and you can accomplish anything you set out to do.”
think of us as the architecture—our
group is architecting the future of
leadership at Wachovia.”
Saez and her team develop leadership solutions around talent identification, performance management, executive coaching, employee
engagement, enterprise-wide change
management and organizational
development, which encompasses
diversity-integration practices.
“It is about defining all of the
development opportunities for leaders in the company, what kinds,
which ones need to be targeted to
specific groups, and how in addition
opportunities for others.”
A social worker by profession,
Saez knows sustainability depends on
building—and branding—
relationships. As a first-generation Puerto
Rican who grew up in a Philadelphia
barrio, she learned early the importance of “fairness and equity—and
how important it is to always know
where I come from.”
This premise has defined Saez’s
personal and professional experience. As a high-school senior, she
organized a sit-in so girls could wear
pants to school, which they were
not allowed to do at the time. “It
was the era of the late ’60s, early
’70s, and women were fighting
for their rights. I believed I could
make a difference.”
A longtime board member
and former chair of the New
Jersey–based New Brunswick for
Tomorrow—a nonprofit that
addresses the human aspect of
city revitalization—Saez continues to be a catalyst for change.
“Get up early; play hard—take
time to stop and relax. That’s
what you do,” says Saez, who is a
member of the National Society
of Hispanic MBAs Corporate
Advisory Board and the National
Big Brothers/Big Sisters Hispanic
Advisory Council.
As a woman of color in a traditionally white-male society,
she has experienced her share of
discriminatory experiences—from
pay to promotions to perceptions
that she doesn't belong on an executive floor—all of which have been
powerful teaching points. “I always
believed, because this was the way
my father raised us, that if I was
doing a good job, my boss would
recognize it, compensate me and
help me on my way,” says Saez,
who realized that to ascend the
corporate ladder, she had to give
herself credit where deserved.
“Own your power as a woman
and be clear that doesn’t take anything away,” she now advises young
women of color.
And what drives Saez? “At the
end of the day it’s family, it’s the
community, it’s the people who I
work with. There’s such great
opportunity if guided and directed
in the right way,” she says. “Believe
in yourself and the goodness of the
world and you can accomplish anything you set out to do.” DI
