Sue Oliver

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Human Resource Leader and Business Consultant

As President and Founder of Katana Partners, Sue Oliver unlocks new levels of financial success for companies by systematically identifying the impact of employee behavior and attitudes on business costs and financial performance. She partners with company leadership to achieve measurable and significant employee ROI.

Sue’s expertise is in complex human resource initiatives, organizational transformations, crisis management, and labor. She has navigated companies through a myriad of employee issues affecting business performance during business turnarounds and in tough business environments. Sue is a lawyer who puts her legal background and leadership skills to work on building and driving innovative solutions to complex business issues.

Prior to launching Katana Partners in early 2009, Sue held key executive positions with retail and aviation industry leaders, including former Senior Vice President, People for Wal-Mart Stores, U.S. and CHRO for American Airlines, Inc. Katana Partners is a 100% woman-owned business. These positions were carried out during extraordinary times in American business:

• The American Airlines post 9/11 response and recovery and historic restructure of employee pay and benefits to avoid bankruptcy;
• Walmart Stores’ unprecedented expansion of human resources capacity in the aftermath of the largest class action gender discrimination suit in history and the corresponding build out of field human resources capability and business partnership.

Sue faced the enormous challenges of these two world industry leaders straight on. Recognized as an energetic, creative, and positive business leader, she is particularly accomplished in organizational transformations, labor relations, Human Resources integration into the business team, and creating step change in levels of employee engagement.

American Airlines, Inc., Fort Worth, Texas
Senior Vice President, Human Resources

Sue was a corporate officer, responsible for all Human Resources functions supporting American Airlines worldwide. American Airline’s Human Resources supported 82,000 active employees and an inactive retiree population of 58,000 employees.

• Transformed American Airline’s Human Resources organization from a traditional delivery model to a shared services structure with call centers, centers of excellence, strategic business partners and employee self-service, creating a 20% reduction in HR headcount while increasing speed and accuracy of employee support.


• In the aftermath of the 9-11 terrorist attacks, led American Airline’s HR organization in devising a broad range of survivor support, employee assistance, and voluntary exit programs, resulting in a positive public response and an economically sound reduction in employees needed to save the airline.


• Managed the largest concessionary bargaining process in American Airline’s history resulting in pay and benefit savings of $1.8 billion and avoidance of bankruptcy.


• Through initiating company-wide diversity and cultural awareness education, aggressive application of a zero-tolerance policy, and establishing a Board Diversity Committee, fewer workplace intolerance incidents and improved relationships with key internal and external stakeholders were realized.


• Introduced collaborative, interest-based approaches to grievance resolution and collective bargaining with American Airline’s flight attendant union, resulting in an unprecedented resolution of more than 100 outstanding grievances and a collective bargaining agreement reached in less than 5 months without public controversy.

Walmart, Inc., Bentonville, Arkansas
Senior Vice President, People and Labor Relations Walmart Stores, US

Responsible for all Human Resources functions, Sue supported the largest of Walmart, Inc’s business units, Walmart US Stores Operations, providing HR support to 1.2 million employees at 3,769 Wal-Mart Supercenters, Discount Stores and Neighborhood Markets throughout the US.

• As a corporate officer, integrated business strategy and new Human Resources capability to drive new levels of company performance, talent management and employee engagement.


• Transformed Walmart Stores Human Resources to an organization of highly capable HR professionals, resulting in a 10-fold increase in HR talent and an unprecedented level of professional HR services for 1.2 million employees.


• Transformed Walmart Stores’ traditional learning and development function to a progressive, innovative learning organization capable of delivering integrated talent management, succession planning, performance management and competency based development tools to meet Walmart Stores’ strategic growth needs.


• Achieved a step change in Walmart Stores’ employee engagement scores (19 % increase) through strategically targeted store interventions focused on leadership behaviors, communications, and associate segmentation.


• To address significant talent gaps, instituted aggressive, non-traditional talent initiatives, including hiring, on boarding, and retail training 100 military hires in 4 months, and launching accelerated development programs for high potential externals, internal cross functional talent, and store operations talent to condense the advancement timeline for key store operations roles.


• Created a breakthrough compensation, rewards, and leadership development model that incents the best talent to seek the most challenging store assignments and rewards all store manager talent for increasing their leadership effectiveness.


• Piloted an outsourced hiring solution for Walmart Stores which increased quality of hires by 21%, employee retention by 15%, and enabled a 10% reduction in store management headcount.

Sue also held strategic positions with the following organizations:

• City of Reno, Reno, Nevada
  Labor Relations Consultant and Advisor
• Wien Airlines, Anchorage, Alaska
  Assistant Counsel
• Kempell, Huffman and Ginder, Anchorage, Alaska
  Associate Attorney, Employment Law
• Stettner, Miller and Cohn, Denver, Colorado
  Law Clerk and Associate Attorney, Employment Law

She received her B.A. from George Washington University and her law degree from the University of Denver School of Law.