Boyden: A Discussion With Visa's Bill Ingham

Boyden’s Leadership Series presents discussions with business and thought leaders from organizations across the globe. The series focuses on topical issues that offer executives, political leaders and the media insight into current trends in business and talent management in the global marketplace.

This issue features Bill Ingham, Vice President, Global Human Resources of Visa. In the interview with Boyden, he discusses Visa as both a financial services and a technology company, global competition and the battle against cash, memorable M&A experiences, how he hires, and the challenge of becoming an authentic leader.

In his current role, Ingham sets the people and talent strategy to drive business for a number of Visa’s strategic functions for employees worldwide. He sits on the executive leadership teams and partners in the management of the Visa brand, communication and sponsorship assets, global strategy and government relations, and legal and compliance functions.

Boyden: You’ve served at a number of very interesting, successful companies, in industries including financial services, tech, retail and consumer. Is that typical for an HR professional and how would you describe that journey?

Ingham: I feel like I’ve been fortunate. Looking at retail, when I worked at Gap, they had 130,000 employees and an extended global workforce of over one million. If you think about that compared to being in a technology company – I was with Oracle and PeopleSoft and now Visa – all the employee bases for those three companies were around the same, about 10,000 to 12,000 employees when I was working there.

The work that you do from an HR perspective is very different. In retail, for example, when you think about workforce planning, it’s very transactional work. If you’re gearing up for a holiday season, it’s about bringing in a massive amount of people. Whereas if you think about workforce planning in a technology company, it’s more around a capabilitiesbased workforce plan – what capabilities do you have, where do you have gaps, and how do you close them.

Boyden: Would you say you have to be more strategic at a financial services company?

Ingham: That’s certainly what I find. When you’re head of international HR for a retail company, you have your people that are focused on employee relations and transactional issues in the stores. Certainly, I didn’t deal with those a lot. But at a technology company or in a more professional work environment, you’re dealing with more diverse issues. You get involved in issues that revolve around organizational design and whether you have the capabilities you need to expand the business to other countries.

Boyden: You’ve previously discussed how executives must take care of themselves and become authentic people in order to be effective leaders. Can you elaborate on that and what it means?

Ingham: This is something I’m actually very passionate about. I discussed it in a promotional clip for a book called The Rise of HR. My chapter is about how you take care of yourself first so that you can take care of others. Really that’s the journey to authenticity. This idea stemmed out of a book by Bill George called True North, in which he talks about how we go through crucible experiences in life and how they’re often very painful experiences. It can be a death. It can be a divorce. It can be a personal tragedy of some other nature that causes people to take a step back and revisit what really are priorities in life.

A couple of years ago, I went through a personal crucible experience of my own. Going through that I discovered how critical it is to take care of myself physically, emotionally, relationally, financially and spiritually, and how critical it is to do that first so that I can help others be successful. My personal life mission is being a king/ queen maker. That’s the way I describe it. I’m wired to help others be successful.

To read the full interview, click here.