Executive Roundtable: Straight Talk

With the goals of networking and learning, minority women came together at the Women of Color in Management Consulting Preconference Forum in Atlanta in July. As part of that event, a small group of attendees participated in a roundtable conducted by Jacqueline Durett, managing editor of Consulting magazine. During this candid forum, these consulting professionals from Deloitte, one of the sponsors of the conference, Booz Allen Hamilton, IBM Global Services, Capgemini, Xerox and The Sandra Finley Company opened up about their challenges and successes.

Consulting magazine: With women making up such a small percentage of consultants, and then with women of color making up a fraction of that, do you feel there is more pressure on you to be a role model for others?

McLemore: I don't know that I feel that my firm necessarily is putting that on me, but there is a lot of that pressure I think [I put on] myself that I want the community I come from to be proud of me and say I succeeded. That propels a lot of that, I think.

Hilton: The pressure is to really make sure that the few senior women of color in the firm—any firm—are focused on substantive talent-management activities. Not broad programs. But things that are going to substantively help the leadership develop talent. And [all the better] if you can help leadership develop those types of activities—sometimes we call that "each one teach one." Sometimes it's really trying to help the leadership determine the best way to direct resources. Sometimes it's helping them determine where the pockets of high potential talents are. That to me is where the pressure is. To make sure that you really direct your efforts in a way that's going to have some substantive outcomes for growth.

CM: What are the benefits of being outside the traditional hierarchy?

Hilton: The meeting after the meeting! (Laughter)

Leatherberry: We, as women of color, traditionally have had to be individuals who can read an audience. We sit outside the norm and have to figure out ways to fit into the norm. We've got an awesome power in the ability that we can read dynamics better than I think anybody else can read dynamics. If we take that and use it to our advantage, then we're going to be successful. But to Tanya's point, a lot of times it's the meeting after the meeting. We'll have that discussion among ourselves.

Finley: One of the benefits is that we are really the only keepers of the key to link our firms, link our companies, our resources to the communities that support us and we are from. We are the exclusive bridge over all troubled water.

Ryan-Jones: I think we're in a position to lead by example. That's something I think is a good thing, but it's also a challenge. I'm in a position to make hiring decisions, bring some very senior women into our division, which in the past was considered "a white island"—I mean that's what people always called it. The pressure is once you create a diverse organization, you have to perform. You want to bring the right people in; it's finding the right talent to bring into the organization and then creating that culture in them to make sure that they can help the firm success.

Harris: I think for me it's the ability to raise eyebrows. When people hear your title, they look at you and they think, "Oh, she must be someone who can get things done," and what happens is that I am able to get things done. I'm able to step into roles of mentorship for other young black women, and I'm able to participate in the black executive exchange program; I'm able to get on those nonprofit boards. Things that perhaps weren't open to me before. This is new for me. This is an early phase in my career. I haven't been in consulting for twenty years, but things that I always wanted to do in terms of community engagement, taking some of my other gifts that perhaps are not what I do in my professional every day, but they're the things that made me successful as a professional and then apply them to create a pipeline of leadership for African-Americans.

CM: What role has mentorship played throughout your career?

Riggins: It's everything. As an African-American woman, you need a sponsor. If you are going to get on the prime projects that will showcase your skills to be able to move up in consulting, you need that sponsor who can say, 'Listen, why don't you put her in this position, challenge her to see what she can do?' You need that kind of sponsor to help you and to also help you navigate the firm.

Mathews: I don't have a mentor, but what I found when I've been in consulting as well as when I've been in industry, is that I've always found advocates. People will see my talent and they notice me at a meeting or they notice something I've done or a passion I've had around a certain subject matter and because of that, my name has gotten passed around.

Cobos: I would say that I have recently gotten heavily involved in a lot of our firm's diversity initiatives, and some of them have been heavily focused toward Hispanics and trying to bring more Hispanics to our firm. One of the things that I find very fulfilling and I believe my other Hispanic colleagues do as well is that that unity and that bond and that understanding of each other's culture and feeling that we can come to a career and bring a contribution and have the culture be a part of that and it be accepted. I feel lucky because I think that [Deloitte is] understanding and realizing that we have potential in the firm as well, and I think that they are even focusing on our diverse population to help us through the process…I think that opportunities have been given to me because I am Hispanic and from a diverse group.

CM: How would you describe your firm's diversity initiatives?

Finley: From our [League of Black Women] research, one of the things we know is that because these women will be alone for a long time in their careers [as minorities], it's essential that the firms bring early leadership maturation to the forefront. Because part of what decimates the numbers of how many people survive are that [they are] facing all sorts of invisible challenges that no one can pinpoint and most others can't see. And so that really takes the numbers way down. You have one when you started out with the potential for so much more. So they have to reverse the strategy. I call it the "early introduction of Miracle-Gro."

Ryan-Jones: They have lots of really good diverse programs at Xerox. We have the emerging leaders program where if you have less than five years in our business we will identify you along the way, and we do it through both formal [and informal] channels. The informal channels are the groups that we have like the Black Women's Leadership Council; we've [also] got a lot of Hispanic groups.

Leatherberry: I'll talk about how they're not working. I think [these programs] still sit off to the side as a special pet project, and I think where we have to go next is to integrate them into the overall talent management strategy of our firms because if you think about management consulting and professional services at large, that is our value stream. People are our value stream. We don't produce cars; we don't produce record players or CDs or DVD players or the like. That is our value stream. So to spend money on recruiting talent and spend money on developing talent and then to let that talent walk out the door because they don't see what their future opportunities are is a big, big risk to us as a profession. So the more that we can be advocates of how this initiative helps the overall business case of the firm, the better off we are. I think the next challenge is really figuring out how to integrate the back end.

Cunningham: That's true. And I think even though we have the diversity initiatives, we are still recruiting and developing people even when we have the diversity initiatives, in our white male role model's image. That is still our definition of success. It's still the way we measure performance, even though we have these diversity initiatives so we need to fundamentally change our value proposition and maybe have multiple value propositions so we can identify different talent….At the end of the day, you know, you're a successful black partner in a management consulting firm because you've succeeded at the white man's game. And I think you have to succeed on your own merits in your own way.

Headroe: In my company, we have put together some key initiatives, some women's council initiatives, regionally, within our own offices, across North America. We put in some recruiting initiatives, but I really think we're far off from where we need to be.

CM: Do these initiatives empower minorities, change mindsets in the traditional hierarchy or both?

Mathews: I think it depends on the initiative; I think it also depends on the person who is leading that initiative and how much passion they have behind what they're doing. I think that if you are someone who has a passion around wanting to make change and you have a vision for your group and know where you want to take them as an end result, then you're going to be successful.

Leatherberry: I think there is a key component, and that is you've got to be aligned with where the leadership is headed. This profession has to change its mindset, but it's not there yet. And you can have all the passion in the world, but it's highly unlikely that you'll be successful to make that change if you don't have the ear and the hearts and minds of the leadership, and at the end of the day, who is responsible for the bottom line? I still come back to the business proposition around this, and the more that we can change our language and our dialogue so that our traditional male counterparts can understand it and get why it should be important to them and their hearts and minds, we will be continuing to push uphill without that pull through.

Hilton:It's the O word and the A word. Ownership and accountability. And until those two words enter this dialogue in a way that comes from a standpoint of buy-in from the majority leadership, it really is [just] a dialogue. That's it.

Cunningham: Right from the get-go, we have no tolerance for variety. None. We recruit from certain schools; we recruit from certain GPAs and certain courses. That's only valid in white America in the 50s. And it's still the model we use….So on one hand we say we're committed to diversity and we get the business kings; on the other hand, everything we do shows that we have not yet gotten it, because if we did, we wouldn't be relying on the African-American women to drive the diversity initiative in our firms.

CM: How is the reality of being a minority woman in the consulting industry different from how you perceived it would be before you entered the profession?

McLemore: I knew 100 percent when I came in that I was only going to do this until I got married and had kids; I had no desire to be a partner. And I think I didn't see and appreciate some of the ways consulting can actually impact so many things. Like conversations and following a [client] CEO around and actually saying to someone something valuable that's going to change their business. I had no appreciation for that. And I think one of the interesting things as a minority in consulting is you don't have an appreciation for that. You didn't grow up sitting around a dinner table hearing anybody talk about consulting in that way. No one in my life said, 'I want to be a consultant when I grow up.' There's absolutely no connection to what I thought initially to what I think now about a career in consulting.

Riggins: It's not something that is in the forefront of your mind. I mean it's always there. I don't think about it that way at all. It's more on my merit, on my intellect, on what I do, can I advance? Not thinking of it in a race situation. Not that that can't occur; it's just that that's not in the forefront of my mind.

Ryan-Jones: I think you go into Corporate America into the firm [thinking] you were chosen. You feel you're on a high because you're the best of the best. So you slam into it. Often, you hit a wall one day and you know that something's happened. You don't know exactly what it is. And I think because I've seen and heard, as I think a lot of us have, that it has to do with our race and the fact that we're women of color. You control what you can control, right? And you make sure that the things that you're given to do you do well. And you begin to work the relationships that you do have.

The other point is, what is the definition of success? There has to be a common definition of success to a firm, and that is called profit, right? So, I think somehow, we have to show the link between women of color in powerful positions delivering the currency of the firm, and that to me is how we get from where we are now to the next level. I'm not sure exactly how we continue to do that because of course you have to have opportunities to be able to make that happen, but we have to tie everything we do at the end of the day to the currency of the firm.

ALM