Aleksandar Savic
After World War II, Goldman Sachs ranked 10th among the top 30 U.S. investment banks. Twenty-seven of those once-mighty Wall Street rivals, including Salomon, Lehman, and First Boston, have been relegated to the annals of business history. Goldman, in contrast, is a global powerhouse, employing more than 46,000 people, operating in more than 40 countries, and supervising $3 trillion in total assets.
Goldman owes much of its survival and success not to financial acumen, which its rivals shared, but rather to organizational agility — sustained not for quarters or years but for decades. The firm has repeatedly evolved to thrive through market upheavals, geopolitical turbulence, technological revolutions, and unrelenting waves of product and service innovation.
CultureX recently analyzed feedback from more than 250,000 employees across 50 diversified financial services and asset management institutions. We benchmarked Goldman Sachs against its peers in terms of how frequently and positively the firm’s employees discussed more than 125 topics in their online job reviews. Goldman ranked first among its peers in terms of agility, scoring nearly two standard deviations above the industry average.
A critical engine of Goldman’s sustained agility is its ability to attract, develop, and retain ambitious and talented employees. In an industry that attracts high-caliber talent across the board, Goldman Sachs stands out. Employees speak about the firm’s talent density — colleagues who are impressive, intelligent, hardworking, and ambitious, with the latter trait being mentioned more than three standard deviations above the peer group average.
In a recent podcast, Jacqueline Arthur, global head of human capital management at Goldman Sachs, shared the approaches to hiring, internal mobility, performance management, and development that have helped the firm maintain its agility over decades.
1. To fight complacency, hire ambitious people.
Sustained success breeds complacency in most organizations. Goldman fights this by hiring ambitious people who constantly challenge the status quo. “Our people are ambitious, motivated, hardworking, and resilient, which means open to feedback and open to challenging discussions,” Arthur said. “When you have talent that’s looking to grow and an environment that champions that mindset, it becomes the bedrock of an organization that’s constantly challenging itself to do things better. It feels like it’s part of our DNA.”
That restless drive to improve extends well beyond financial products and services. “Cultivating a culture that encourages and supports innovation and experimentation — it’s not just about what new products can we offer,” Arthur said. “It’s also about thinking about every dimension of our business, the markets, and even how we do things internally. Are there better or smarter ways to evolve how we manage day-to-day tasks?”
2. Reduce bureaucratic obstacles to action.
Agility requires speed, and speed works best when employees aren’t slowed down by unnecessary red tape. “In our day-to-day businesses, we are really encouraging our employees to act like owners,” Arthur said. “And really, what does that mean? Intentionally reducing bureaucratic layers and empowering our teams with significant autonomy so that, ultimately, decision-making is swift [and] accountability is clear, even as we operate at a global scale and at a very fast pace.”
“We’re very data-oriented,” Arthur continued. “In our annual sentiment surveys, [we ask,] do our employees feel empowered to come up with new and better ways of doing things? And we score extraordinarily high on that question, really, across all levels of the organization.”
One risk: Ownership without context can lead to well-intentioned decisions that don’t align with the firm’s strategic direction. Goldman addresses this by providing employees at all levels with the strategic context they need to make good decisions. “A few years ago, our earnings town halls were open to our managing directors and partners,” Arthur said. “One of the things we did was open up these town halls to our broader employee base, because it’s imperative that they understand the firm strategy and [that] they feel aligned to it, even if they’re responsible for [only] a discrete piece of that in their day-to-day role.”
3. Encourage internal movement to retain ambitious employees.
The ambitious employees Goldman hires need room to grow — and will leave if they don’t find it. Internal mobility is Goldman’s answer to this challenge. “We focus on helping our managers understand having an employee-first focus on talent development,” Arthur said, “because sometimes that best opportunity for someone doesn’t necessarily exist in your team. It exists someplace else in the firm.
“A core part of our culture and value proposition has been this opportunity for mobility to facilitate a long-term career at Goldman Sachs,” Arthur explained. “When we actively encourage and facilitate this internal movement, essentially we’re rehiring our best talent and recontracting with them in terms of the value proposition of a career at Goldman Sachs, which keeps them inspired and motivated.” Arthur exemplifies this mobility: “I started in our revenue businesses; I was in the executive office; I’m now in human capital management. I’m a recovering lawyer. I did not start in human capital or in the HR department.”
Mobility enhances agility for the firm beyond retaining ambitious employees. “It creates incredibly well-rounded professionals who have a much broader exposure,” Arthur said. “Understanding how various parts of the firm connect, understanding our culture better from that perspective, provides significant advantages in terms of judgment and clarity, which are really critical for agile decision-making.”
Want to hear more advice from Arthur? Watch this conversation and the entire series on the CultureX YouTube channel, on Spotify, or on Apple Podcasts.