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Profile

Published November 2007

UBS’ Michelle Blieberg: Promoting Peak Performance

  

  Brian Summerfield

Michelle Blieberg, global learning officer at UBS’ investment bank, loves a challenge. When she took her current position with the Swiss-based wealth management firm more than three years ago, the learning function was little more than a course catalog. In the course of her tenure, Blieberg has transformed learning into a highly strategic operation that’s recognized throughout the enterprise for its innovative and effective programs.

“I was brought in here for a restart,” she explained, adding that this suited her just fine. “I’m a start-up kind of person. My two specialties are mergers and acquisitions and starting corporate learning centers. I really love it when a company has a vision for something, either a new start or a restart. I’m very entrepreneurial — I grew up in a family that did that kind of stuff, and that’s what I like to do.”

Blieberg got her first inkling of what she wanted to do during her time as a student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she participated in both a human resource MBA program and graduate counseling in the School of Education while pursuing an undergraduate psychology degree. Incidentally, this also was when Blieberg began to develop her prodigious work habits.

“My workaholic tendencies showed up as an undergraduate,” she said.

Although Blieberg weighed going for a graduate degree, she opted not to after being offered an enticing rotational human resources assignment that provided her with access to various working environments. She was exposed to many different aspects of this then-emerging discipline with that organization and others, but she eventually realized she wanted to be involved in enterprise education specifically.

Before her current position, Blieberg worked for other financial firms (including JPMorgan, Shearson Lehman, Charles Schwab and Moody’s) and ran two corporate universities. Despite this wealth of experience, none of it really prepared her for working at an organization as international as UBS, she said.

“Now that I’m here, I almost forget what it’s like to not be in a global company,” Blieberg said. “Every Wall Street firm says they’re global, but they have a U.S. headquarters, do things on a U.S. time frame, design in the U.S. with U.S. vendors and then export products and services. That’s counter to how everything is done at UBS. For example, the UBS investment bank doesn’t have a headquarters — I could just as easily be operating out of Asia, Switzerland or London [as New York].”

The investment bank, which accounts for about a quarter of UBS’ workforce of 80,000, is the most global part of the enterprise. As such, its learning function is charged with delivering development programs to other lines of business in any location where it makes up the majority of personnel, which includes most places outside Switzerland.

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