LUKE VISCONTI Lucia, you’re a senior
executive woman in a very powerful business role. What has made
you successful?
VISCONTI What career advice can you
share with women who desire a
senior position?
GIBBONS I’ve been guilty of that so I
completely agree.
LUCIA DINAPOLI GIBBONS The core of
it is building great relationships
with people … I don’t think you
can accomplish anything
without connecting to
people and understanding them and building
relationships. That’s
something I’ve been
good at from the very
beginning of my career as a
relationship manager—building
relationships with businesses. I’ve
carried that through every aspect of
my career.
GIBBONS Sometimes, as females, we
can get very focused on the task at
hand, and that’s great because that
helps you drive performance.
You’ve got to demonstrate
performance in order
to move ahead, but we
cannot lose sight of
networking—network-
ing with each other,
networking with people
throughout our organiza-
tion. We have to take care of
ourselves in that way.
So if you have an eye on moving
forward and moving up, you not only
need to be focused on performance,
you need to be focused on networking and building those connections
through the organization—managing
your brand, essentially, very proactively managing your brand.
NO.
40
IN THE DIVERSITYINC
TOP 50 COMPANIES
FOR DIVERSITY
WELLS
FARGO
Reaching
Multicultural
Customers
VISCONTI You operate 157 retail
stores in [northern New Jersey],
which covers an amazing breadth
of diversity, and you described how
you adapt your store management
and how customers are handled
based on the diversity that you have
in those retail areas. Can you tell us
a little bit about that?
VISCONTI Less than 3 percent of
Fortune 500 CEOs are women, yet
if you look at the same age cohort,
more than half the people who have
four-year degrees are women. What
do you attribute the gap to?
GIBBONS In part, Luke, it’s time,
and I think with a little bit more
time—and I even see this in my
own company—the ranks of middle
to senior management are starting to swell. I’m really confident
that over the next five years, we’ll
see some pretty significant change
at the senior-most positions in
organizations.
VISCONTI That’s a great point. I’ve
heard it described this way: If a
man and a woman are sitting in two
different offices and they’re both
equally busy, and the senior vice
president comes down the hall and
says “Hey, would you like to go to
lunch?” the woman will say “No,
I’ve got to get this done,” and the
man will drop what he’s doing and
go to lunch.
Lucia DiNapoli
Gibbons
GIBBONS We operate in one of the
most diverse communities in the
United States. So we’re pretty
deliberate about looking store by
store, understanding the diversity
around that store, and then making
sure that we hire people who represent that community.
We started, with a lot of gusto,
our Hispanic strategy last year. It
is not simply understanding the
communities that have Hispanic
populations; it’s about understanding the breakdown of that Hispanic
population. Are they Puerto Rican?
Are they Portuguese? Are they
Colombian? There are certain
customs within various heritages
that only the people that are part
of that heritage understand. If you
can connect on that level and build
a relationship because you have an
appreciation for who those customers are, that’s going to help us build
trust, and that’s going to help us
build business.
BIRTHPLACE Jersey City, N.J.
TITLE Executive Vice President and the Northern New Jersey
Regional President, Wells Fargo
EDUCATION Bachelor’s degree from Rutgers University and
MBA from the Leonard Stern School of Business at New
York University
AFFILIATIONS Serves on the boards of the New Jersey Network
Foundation, New Jersey Performing Arts Center, the
Commerce and Industry Association of New Jersey, and the
Wachovia Regional Foundation. Chair of the Corporate Advisory
Board for the Boys and Girls Clubs of New Jersey
VISCONTI Can you tell us about
a store where you applied that
strategy?
GIBBONS Yes. We have a store on
Linden Wood Avenue [in Linden,
N.J.], and it’s a Hispanic community [and] it’s a Polish community.
So we have Spanish-speaking store
members and we have Polish-speaking store members. Now if
we weren’t deliberate about “OK,
it’s a white population; what’s the
