Jennifer Wells, a former Senior Director with A&M’s Corporate Performance Improvement practice from 2013-2015, is currently Chief of Staff, Office of the President at City University of Seattle. 

In the Q&A below, Ms. Wells shares her career trajectory, her view of the "get it done" A&M culture, and her passion for expanding access to education.

You’ve had an amazing career trajectory. Where do you attribute your success?

As my career evolved, I realized that I was very motivated by serving clients and helping groups of people tackle problems they couldn’t tackle on their own. I also enjoy putting the customer at the center of the dilemma and helping clients shift what they are doing to be better for their customers. I’m motivated by tricky problems and by scenarios when I’m in over my head.  I’d credit my interest in making things easier for people and asking questions to get to the root of the challenge as something that has consistently helped in each role I’ve had.

The story of how you landed at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is an interesting one. Tell us about it.

When I was at A&M, the team I’m now part of was my client. I was working with a Senior Program Officer to shape an investment in research that focused on alternative credentials.  She needed a landscape assessment about credentials that are earned outside of colleges and universities (like certificates, licenses or proof of training) to shape investment ideas.  Before commissioning original research, I recommended checking to see if her research questions had already been answered by existing reports or analysis.  It turns out that most of them already had answers, but those answers were distributed across very varied sources.

Instead of going outside to a third party, she asked me to aggregate and shape those insights into a single reference and help her identify the investment opportunities.  While I codified all of those insights and worked with her, we joked that I’d earned a master’s degree during that project.   

The project was very motivating, they liked the work and asked me to apply for an open role on the team. I had a conversation with one of my mentors and current A&M alumnus, John Rossman, and he told me that he and A&M would support me and that I should do the right thing for my family.

How do you differentiate yourself from other leaders?

I don’t know if this is different or not, but I try very hard to operate and communicate as consistently as I can with all levels of an organization from front lines, to senior executives. That is just a personal preference and a style choice that I have consciously made. I believe that teams are more productive when everyone feels recognized and heard, enabling more voices to contribute and participate. I’m also very candid about what I am working on and my expectations- I follow that ‘show your work’ mantra from math class. I’m fair but I’m demanding – again, not sure if that’s a differentiator or not!

Prior to joining A&M, you were with Arthur Andersen. What was your experience like at what was then a “Big 5” firm?

I was fortunate to be asked to join the Arthur Andersen Seattle practice right out of business school. It was a very good fit for me. The culture of the practice and the nature of the work was very hands on and we delivered our work onsite for mostly for-profit businesses in Seattle and across the northwest.

I really enjoyed and benefited from the combination of serving my local community and being a part of this global entity. We had our local norms, but I was able to travel internationally and walk into an Arthur Andersen office in Germany and have it work the same as it did in Seattle. I loved the training, the clients and the culture. It was an incredible learning opportunity in retrospect and a seminal part of my professional career.

What ultimately brought you to A&M?

Simply put, because of the people. I ran into John Rossman, Erin Kenny, and Kathleen Bennett and we spoke about the opportunity. The more I talked about the idea, the more compelling and interesting it became. Steve Maupin, who was also at A&M, was my deciding interview for Arthur Andersen in 1997. He helped clinch my decision to join the firm.

The experience level of the A&M talent pool is unbelievable. There are so many former C-suite employees and that is something unique to A&M’s culture. I knew at that point in my career that I just wanted to learn from people with a lot more experience than I had. 

Who do you consider to be your closest mentors during your time at A&M?

Every project I worked on led me to great connections and the opportunity to work with talented colleagues. John Rossman served as a great sounding board with his “get in there and go figure it out” mentality. I benefited from talking to Erin Kenny and learning from her. I also had the chance to participate in an extremely motivating and special training with Joe Berardino and Tom Elsenbrook. I’d known Joe Berardino from afar; he was the voice that called us twice a day (remember Octel?) during the Enron crisis at Andersen. Otherwise known to us as “the voice over the phone” that calmed our nerves and kept us in the loop during every step of that chapter. It was remarkable for me to have him as a teacher for a training session.