Kathryn Hayley is helping companies become better places. But she's done a pretty good job of making her own firm a special place as well. As the CEO of Aon Consulting, she has boosted the firm's pre-tax income from 9.5 percent in 2005 to 14.8 in 2007. In addition, Business Insurance magazine named Aon Consulting the "Best Employee Benefit Consulting Firm" in 2006 and 2007. Hayley was recruited away from a consulting firm she worked at for 21 years. In 2006, she finally gave into Aon Consulting, who had been courting her for a while, because she liked the new leadership team in place and says she felt Aon Consulting was "a very strong organization with a lot of assets that had a huge amount of potential."
With that potential in action, she says her goal is clear: "Our mission is to have an organization that is this premier organization that is shaping the workplace of the future," Hayley says.
Becoming that organization, she says, is a two-front war. "On one end there's a lot of work on the strategy and thinking through how organizations need to wrestle with these key issues and be competitive, and at the same time, we're dealing with things in our own organization—improving our performance and growing the organization." Clients' key issues range from compensation and pension planning to broader human capital strategies, such as succession planning, she says.
Hayley says she's truly seen the consulting industry evolve during her career—but it's definitely for the better. "[Consulting] work [in the past] was probably not as significant as the work that we do now. The world's more complex, so [companies] can't have generalists in their own organizations who have that level of expertise, so I think it's become a much more common way to do business, to bring in people who can either bring a lot of change management or can bring deep technical expertise or other things in specific areas, so I think it's become much more accepted—and the demands are higher because of it."
And that may be why firms are more likely to reach out to a company like Aon Consulting before a crisis point. Most companies are struggling with a number of key areas, including healthcare costs, work/life balance issues and the changing demographic of the workforce—and while none of these topics is new, they are all areas Aon Consulting has deep expertise in. "We're in the thick of every one of them," Hayley says.
The Chicago-based executive dedicates her energies in two areas: her work and her family. "Those are my two priorities: I work and I spend time with my children, my husband and my extended family. That's it. That's what it's all about," she says.
And while she may have her priorities identified, the future could play out in a number of ways—and Hayley jokes that she has stopped believing work is going to get easier. "I remember thinking in seventh grade, 'I can't wait until I get to high school because it will be so much easier, and I won't have to work so hard.' So I've always had this perpetual 'two years from now I won't be working as hard' [mindset], and I've deluded myself with that for decade after decade."
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