“What Have You Learned in the Last Six Months?”: The Head of Accenture - To Applicants
After a successful 10-year career as a lawyer, Julie Sweet has moved on to another field: she now leads the consulting company Accenture. Why she decided to change, how her first year as CEO goes, and which decision she considers the best - in a selection of her quotes
About dangerous complacency
Julie Sweet spent ten years at the large law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore and rose to the position of partner when a recruiter friend called her and offered her a “great opportunity” to move to the consulting company Accenture. “I often think: why did I answer the phone then? Why did you agree to the meeting? I had two small children. I have been very successful. The future was set,” she recalls.
According to Sweet, she stayed in the same company for so long that she had a feeling of complacency. “But the thing is, I don’t want to stop there, I want to keep testing myself and learning,” she says. “I have a poster at home that says, “If your dreams don’t scare you, then they aren’t big enough.”
Sweet accepted Accenture’s offer, five years later became CEO of the company’s North American division, and four years later she headed the entire firm. She believes that in the first year as CEO, it is especially important to communicate with employees and customers as much as possible. Sweet tried to answer all questions and listen to suggestions in order to better understand her subordinates. “When employees feel that they are respected, and the leader makes decisions not just like that, but based on the information received, it is easier for the leader to take the business to a new level,” Sweet is sure.
About the subtleties of time management
The second important aspect of successful leadership, according to the head of Accenture, is prioritization. Sweet prioritized customer and employee relationships, then identified six tactical priorities and decided to conduct a comprehensive strategic assessment of the business.
Learning to prioritize can help you avoid feeling overwhelmed by tasks and deal with cognitive and emotional challenges at work, Sweet says.
Every day she makes a list of priority tasks in the calendar. Sweet notes that this is important not only for work: thanks to competent time management, she always has time that she can devote to family and friends.
About the best solution
Sweet says it’s important for a new leader to get the communication right. So subordinates will be able to understand what kind of person came. This is a really difficult task for a large organization. “Like any big company, we talk about a million different things at the same time, and that’s why when I came in, I forbade employees to correspond with each other by mail,” she says. Instead, she decided to use video to communicate within the company. Sweet considers this one of the best management decisions she has ever made. In her assessment, replacing corporate email with live broadcasts or pre-recorded video messages has improved team communication. She points out that the live broadcast format allows for questions to be asked and also better communicates the emotional state of employees.
The Accenture CEO believes that people underestimate the importance of developing communication skills, forget that they help move up the career ladder. “Companies generally value employees who can clearly sum up a meeting, write a presentation, or write letters that get the point across,” Sweet says. “Conversely, the prospects for employees who can’t do this dim.”
Julie Sweet is CEO of consulting firm Accenture.
Born in 1967. She received her BA from Claremont College in California and her Juris Doctor from Columbia University. From 2000 to 2010, she was a partner in the law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore. In 2010, Julie Sweet joined Accenture as Head of the Legal Department. On July 11, 2019, Julie Sweet (51) was named the new CEO of Accenture, becoming the first woman to hold the position. The New York Times named Sweet one of the most powerful women in corporate America in 2019. Fortune has included her in a similar ranking for five years in a row - from 2016 to 2021, while in 2020 she was in first place.
About interview questions
At the same time, Sweet believes that it is necessary to improve not only communication skills, but also professional qualifications, which is why Accenture invests in employee training. “Everyone at Accenture, regardless of department, must take ten technology courses. We call it technical ratio improvement because having this kind of knowledge is fundamental to serving our customers,” says the executive.
Sweet says that he pays a lot of attention to the development of leadership skills in subordinates. “That’s why our people are our greatest strength, we help them become leaders in all areas,” Sweet says. She herself tries to constantly learn and recalls that when she came to Accenture, she literally knew nothing about the IT field and took lessons on this topic from one of the leaders for about a year and a half.
Since Sweet considers the ability and desire to learn to be one of the key skills, she asks applicants one simple question during the interview: “What have you learned in the last six months?” The answer can be anything, for example: “I learned how to cook” or “I learned how to change a wheel.” It is important that the applicant can answer this question. “This is a really simple, but very effective way to understand if the person in front of you likes to learn,” Sweet notes.
Sources: Insider (formerly Business Insider), The New York Times, Forbes, TechRepublic, CNBC, Harvard Business Review.