Diana Starcher is all for maintaining balance in life, but she says complete immersion in work can be satisfying sometimes.
As group executive vice president of Wells Fargo & Co.'s customer service division, Starcher is tackling a massive job. She is overseeing the integration of dozens of call centers after one of the largest bank mergers ever, Wells' 2008 purchase of Wachovia Corp. She is also centralizing the call centers for all of Wells' business lines.
That means coordinating procedures and standardizing work stations for 13,000 employees at 31 contact centers in 29 cities, including two offshore sites.
"There are always seasons in your life, and I can relate it to our recent merger activities," Starcher says. "For a short period of time, there's a lot of heavy lifting, but this is the period that can make your career, and provide you with opportunities for new learning to take it into the future. In time, things will slow down significantly. You can't run a marathon forever. But you can pace yourself and find ways to keep balanced."
Starcher tries to balance her hectic schedule these days by alternating between tasks-such as pouring over analyses of how the integration is going and mentoring her staff.
"With the work going on right now in our business, I balance my days with different types of meetings and needs-intense reviews of project deliverables and analytics, balanced with meetings on the human level that touch and support the people of our business," she says.
