How PayPal’s chief people officer created leadership and career navigation frameworks to support the company’s turnaround

Talent is a critical, yet often overlooked, factor to successfully leading a transformation.

Isabel Cruz joined PayPal as its chief people officer in November 2023, when the financial tech giant was in the midst of a major transition. Its CEO, Alex Chriss, joined in September that year, leading a turnaround evolving the company from processing digital payments into a commerce platform with a focus on offering expanded paid services to merchants. (The company also laid off some 2,500 workers as part of its restructuring.) Cruz was part of a majority-new C-suite team that Chriss recruited.

For Cruz, who had worked at NBCUniversal during its transition into digital and most recently at Walmart during its push into ecommerce retailing, guiding a workforce through a major transformation wasn’t entirely foreign.

“When Alex Chriss called me and talked to me about the opportunity to really transform PayPal…I could not resist,” Cruz told HR Brew. “I felt like it was both in my wheelhouse and created some unique opportunities to drive impactful change.”

While PayPal was bringing in a lot of new talent and leadership into the company during this process, Cruz also wanted to embrace the institutional knowledge and culture that existed within its workforce. So her team focused on introducing frameworks that codified what effective leadership and high performance look like at PayPal during a time of large and swift change.

Leaning on leadership. In late 2023, PayPal introduced three leadership principles for employees across all ranks to follow: putting people first, problem solving with customers “at the center of everything,” and “winning together,” or encouraging collaboration.

“First and foremost, we wanted to create clarity for all employees around what it will take to lead through this transformation, whether you are an individual contributor or an executive,” Cruz said.

Soon after, PayPal also introduced a leadership development framework called BOLD, an acronym standing for building outstanding leadership development. The framework contextualized the three leadership principles described by encouraging traits including “leading with clear vision,” “creative and impactful problem solving,” and “investing in self and investing in others.”

“When we think about that framing all underpinned by our values, we think that’s the kind of secret sauce of creating coherence and alignment, but also predictability in the experience and also how we execute,” said Cruz.

PayPal’s culture already had a lot of the elements of those leadership principles in place, Cruz said. For example, 67% of employees participated in its community impact programs as of 2023 (which has grown to 80% since). But her team also focused on “amplifying those areas where we really need to lean in.” Her team is ensuring that these principles stick and permeate throughout the company by taking a top-down approach, starting with executives and moving through the managerial ranks.

And the leadership development framework isn’t focused solely on getting workers into management positions: “We’re starting with BOLD and working our way across, but there is existing programming that we’re going to build on, for individual contributors, emerging leaders, which really just speak to culture, speak to enhancing performance, and also speak to living our values,” Cruz said.

Clearing a path. More recently, Cruz’s team introduced a career navigation framework at PayPal, codifying the skills and proficiency levels expected within each role and at each career level within the company.

“What I aspire for PayPal is more seamlessness in career navigation and mobility, and every employee knowing how to mobilize their careers internally, because there’s that transparency and the tooling to support it,” she said.

So, if a people manager wanted to become a senior manager, they would understand what they’d need to excel at in their current role and what skills they’d need to develop to advance. Additionally, Cruz also envisions using AI with this framework to help employees pursue those aspirations, such as helping them get matched to opportunities.

The framework is intended to ensure all employees obtain the same knowledge and access to pursuing advancement opportunities, if they wish to do so.

“We believe in access, which is something that we’ve really been leaning into, so that it isn’t just predicated on whether or not I have a good manager that I know how to navigate the system,” Cruz said.

Correction 06/25/2025: This article has been updated to clarify the introduction of Paypal leadership principles in 2023.