“My childhood taught me to see the upside of any opportunity,” said Markell Byrd, senior vice president and head of affluent markets at Wells Fargo. “I had to think ahead.”
Optimism buoyed his unpredictable childhood, which involved rotations through several foster homes until he emancipated himself at age 17. “The challenges that I’ve had, I knew I’d change any industry I jumped into,” he said.
A career in retailing stalled and Byrd shifted to finance, spiraling up through several major banks and finding his way to wealth management business development. At each stop, he has done more than join employee networking groups. He has introduced fresh ideas that energize peer connections and that spark changes that convert organizational diversity goals to growth engines.
Ten years ago, at Bank of America, he co-chaired a Black employee network and grew its membership by 400% through strategic collaborations with parallel employee groups for other ethnic and under-represented people. Employees found that when they reached horizontally to focus on women in each community, they discovered underlying commonalities that fostered powerful relationships and opened career growth for all.
That kind of connection now informs Byrd’s approach to building communities of diverse clients at Wells Fargo. “My mission is to correlate DEI to tangible business results,” he said. His next project: Creating business growth guides based on the cultural nuances of clients who come from underrepresented communities.
— Joanne Cleaver