The Challenge

The leadership team at Capital One wanted to build a foundation, or blueprint, that helped all employees throughout their home loans organization, to make customer-first decisions. A cross-functional team of 34 was chosen from within the org, to design and roll out a culture framework that would help us all operate in a human-centered way. I was selected to be on this team as an ambassador of the product org.

The Result

I led the crafting of the mission statement for Capital One’s home loans framework. Building upon customer empathy we had gathered, I led the team to write a statement that evolved into our final version.

I was also one of the 4 people selected to present the “story of the customer” at all of the all-hands meetings rolling out the new framework. This meant telling an empathy-building customer narrative to ~1000 of our employees. The story reportedly “gave people goosebumps,” and inspired them to adopt our customer-centric operating mindset into their daily work.

My Role & Impact

As my manager at the time, Lorie Robinson, summarized it: “Sarah is an outstanding public speaker. She was asked by our executive leadership team to participate in a key initiative that resulted in her selection as an internal Town Hall presenter. Despite the hours she spent preparing, once on stage Sarah made it all look effortless. She is a natural-born storyteller, capable of moving a crowded ballroom to tears.”

What I Learned

Our greatest challenge came after we rolled out the framework at all-hands meetings. Although employees were incredibly excited about the customer-centric initiative, our adoption mechanism wasn’t as well received. Our team decided to infuse this framework into everyone’s daily standups, and diffuse stories about how employees were putting this into practice. After the first few days of this, employees felt bored by revisiting the same framework at every morning meeting, and customer-first stories started to lose their novelty. Looking back, I wish I had interviewed some employees to learn how we might best implement the framework on my team, and perhaps taken back learnings to share with other teams. The delivery and adoption of the framework should have been much more deeply rooted in empathy for our audience (employees).