Lessons That Linger: Leadership Reflections From the CFO Seat | Karen Williams, CFO, American Express Global Business Travel

As we re-release this conversation with CFO Karen Williams during the holiday week, we’re opening the episode with a short preface drawn from something she shared recently on LinkedIn. In a post about books that shaped her as a leader, Williams reflected on culture, bias, and the importance of staying open to different perspectives—ideas that echo throughout this episode and frame how she’s built her career.

Those themes weren’t always obvious early on.

Williams traces a formative lesson back to her move from a 20-person startup into Mars, where she says she “bombed at networking.” Accustomed to a small, family-style environment, she kept what she describes as a “head down, get on with it” mentality. She didn’t yet understand the importance of relationships and networks, she tells us, and after a couple of years, she left.

That experience reshaped how she approached her next chapter at American Express. The culture there was “very people focused, very relationship driven,” Williams tells us, but progress still came slowly at first. It took time to move from analyst to manager as she built credibility and learned how influence actually works inside large organizations. Once she reached that level, things accelerated quickly.

A structural gap gave her direct exposure to a divisional CFO, who became her sponsor and helped unlock three to four subsequent roles, Williams tells us. Over fifteen years, she held roughly nine roles at American Express—calling the experience her “Harvard School of training years.”

In the episode, listeners will also hear how Williams continued to stretch herself by moving out of finance into business leadership, leading strategy through disruption, and later stepping into CFO roles where unexpected challenges—like cleaning up a balance sheet—tested her early credibility.

It’s a conversation about learning, reflection, and how experience—especially the uncomfortable kind—shapes leadership over time.