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Since starting in her new role at the beginning of the year, Jimmie Paschall has brought a global mindset along with a nonprofit perspective — traits she said she acquired during her time in HR with Marriott International.
Paschall spoke with Diversity Executive about her experience, the nature of the diversity officer role and more.
What led you to this role at Wells Fargo?
Paschall: I started my career with Marriott as a college student in an hourly position and I ended up working for the company the first time around for 17 years, primarily in human resources roles and several business lines that were not lodging business lines. [Then] I had an opportunity to go serve [as] the HR officer for a start-up telecommunications company called XO Communications.
I went from a big, large, global company like Marriott to a small start-up where the decisions that you made on a daily basis actually made a difference in terms of whether or not your organization was successful. It built a whole different set of skills for me. I [then] ended up going inside of a large national nonprofit organization called Volunteers of America. I went in as their EVP of external affairs, leading fundraising, volunteer initiatives, internal and external communications, public policy — those types of things.
I went back to Marriott in 2008 and it was really at a very pivotal time for that organization because it was catalyzing its growth outside of the U.S., with most of its hotel growth happening in other parts of the world — India, China, Africa and the Middle East.
It was really focused on building cross-cultural competence, seeing that as a leadership competency that would be central for success both in the U.S. and in the global marketplace — really linking the strategy to our customers in the inbound traffic from other parts of the world and service expectations that that created on our U.S. properties.
So I think it was from the work that we were doing there that I was identified during the search for the enterprise diversity and inclusion role here at Wells Fargo.
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