Adrianne Court Petruska leverages more than 20 years of human resources and business leadership to head the human resources team at Caliber Home Loans.
Caliber experienced exponential growth in the last few years, now employing nearly 7,000 people. Caliber’s leadership team wanted to ensure that the unique spirit of the company — which includes exceptional customer service — would be celebrated, not diluted. To that end, they looked to Petruska to identify and embed this spirit throughout the company.
Petruska distilled Caliber’s culture into its Ways of Work model, which, rather than a values statement, articulates the ways employees desired to work together to reinforce company culture.
Using feedback from its annual employee engagement survey and working sessions with many teams within the organization, Caliber’s leadership team formally memorialized what employees instinctually knew about how they wanted to work together. These became known as the Caliber WOWs, and the catalyst for a company-wide integration. They are: collaborating contagiously, caring fiercely, leading thoughtfully and doing the right thing.
To support its WOWs, Caliber launched a recognition program and instilled the concept in the context of talent selection and recruiting. In addition, leadership scorecards tie annual incentive achievement to include a WOWs modifier and the company is measuring the effectiveness of the program through soliciting feedback and then developing actionable results.
“Adrianne has led us with passion and commitment to ensure not only that we embrace these WOWs, but that they are woven within the fabric of who we are,” her nominator wrote.