The 2023 Rising Stars of the Profession: Erika Morris

Erika Morris is a Senior Delivery Principal in the Data & Analytics practice at Slalom Northern California. Leveraging her prior advertising agency experience and her relentless focus on people, she has established herself as a critical solution architect and owner partnering with colleagues spanning multiple locations to help our clients build better tomorrows for all.

In commercial terms, she has delivered several million dollars in value supporting a multi-billion dollar business through parallel projects across several functions over the course of the past two years. She continues to win new work due to her successful solution delivery, often through internal client referrals to stakeholders that rely on her to help them solve their toughest and most challenging problems.

In her own fiercely human approach to work, she has championed the consultant engagement and experience focus areas across the hundred-plus Slalom teammates that serve her clients. This includes great data and visualizations, of course.

Prior to Slalom, Erika worked in the New York City and San Francisco Bay areas, building expertise in using data to guide business intelligence. Erika holds a bachelor's in economics from Carnegie Melon University's Tepper School of Business.

What would you say has been the biggest factor in your success so far?

A consistent focus on outcomes and operating in the best interest of the team I'm working with. I truly don't care who is or was supposed to do something; just that the objective is completed, especially if it's important to big-picture goals or accomplishments. I don't find it productive to dwell on what should have happened, but on what needs to happen going forward. As much as I love some aspects of work more than others, I'll gladly pick up a shovel to help the team in whatever capacity is necessary so that we can get to that next milestone. This is the standard I hold myself to and deeply appreciate in teammates.

What do you enjoy most about your career in the consulting industry?

I love the variety and "rhyme" of challenges we are privileged to address as consultants. Even within niches of expertise, seemingly similar projects vary across clients (or even departments of the same client) always have nuances that bring additional perspective and needs to the forefront of strategy, design and implementation. It's a constant learning journey that helps keep you humble and curious; I'm always excited to dream up new approaches to fulfilling a client's vision because each project has its specific, unique needs.

What is your proudest achievement to date?

It's always exciting when your stakeholders are thrilled with your delivery, and they begin to evangelize your solution; it's extremely special when adoption takes off and a framework is adopted cooperatively across multiple organizations and hundreds of users. One of my favorite projects started as an internal-facing request made by my partners managing the performance marketing for a client; they were spending a significant amount of their time manually generating the analytics tracking parameters necessary to track the ROI of the client's campaigns. Over a spare couple of hours, I created an automated solution that was adopted internally. The reduced QA overhead and ease of operations was immediately noticed by the client, so we helped update the framework to apply to the client's entire digital marketing portfolio. The solution was used across our internal teams, the client's teams, and additional consultancies working with the client stakeholders.

What's the best advice you've ever been given?

I was an extremely disciplined student, so I initially thought my university student president's advice to skip class was absolutely mad. After a few years of additional perspective, I finally understood what she was saying. Time is our most valuable, limited resource and should be cherished as such. Some responsibility or other always be knocking at your door, so it's essential to take moments to reflect on how your use of time aligns with your priorities. This could range from fostering personal connections with friends and family by making room for anniversaries to nightly bedtime stories. Or engaging with your community, causes or other activities of importance. For myself, it means making a concerted effort to balance my professional and family responsibilities, giving my family undivided attention especially when I've made commitments to be present.

What does this recognition mean to you?

It's humbling to know that my colleagues think I am worthy of being submitted for a nomination let alone actually being selected as an honoree. I'm extremely grateful to my team for the care and effort that they take each day to support individuals because these kinds of honors don't happen without additional effort or in a vacuum. Life and work are a team sport. It means the world to have validation that the work I am contributing to makes an impact and that it's making a measurable enough difference to warrant my peers taking timeout of their day to recognize it.