Accenture gets Engaged!

When George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police officers in 2020, it triggered difficult conversations about racism, inclusion and bias in a lot of board rooms. These include Accenture, the global professional services firm with nearly 700,000 employees worldwide.

“We already had a lot of diversity and inclusion programs in place for women, LGBTQ+ communities and ethnically diverse talent,” says Amanda McCalla-Leacy, global managing director of inclusion and diversity at Accenture in the U.K. “But when George Floyd was killed, it spurred new discussions.” 

Most of the existing programs focused on big picture issues, like pay equity, diversity in hiring and retention among key demographics. “We were good at staying strong in these areas, but we needed to work on the more nuanced issues,” McCalla-Leacy says.

Her team started talking about systemic racism and how it can inhibit career progress among Black talent, even in the most forward-thinking organizations. This would be a critical issue to address for the company to meet its public goal of increasing the percentage of Black people at all levels of the business by 2025.

So they began brainstorming ways to address these barriers. It was the natural next step for Accenture, which is often lauded for its diversity and inclusion efforts. The company has been listed among the Top 50 Companies for Diversity 16 years in a row by Diversity Inc., which vets companies based on their human capital diversity metrics, leadership accountability and other notable diversity measures.

The U.K. leadership team began exploring the day-to-day decisions that can embed unconscious bias in the workplace, like how teams get selected, who receives coaching and how individuals receive attribution for a successful project or share of sales. “A lot of women and minority ethnic groups are at a disadvantage in these situations, but no one talks about it,” McCalla-Leacy says.

When these events go unaddressed, it can thwart D&I efforts by creating a culture where cis-gendered white males get all the support and opportunities required to fast-track them into leadership roles.

In 2021,  Accenture U.K.’s leadership team set out to fix this problem through Engage! The Engage! program brings together Accenture U.K.’s high-potential Black managers and supervisors, alongside their line managers, sponsors and Black leaders they work with, into a single leadership development program. 

Culture change in ecosystem

Engage! Is not meant to be an employee resource group or a training program about unconscious bias. Its goal is to promote inclusive behavior and to support rising Black leaders through mentoring, career planning and training to help them achieve their goals. 

The structure of Engage! is in response to research that demonstrated how appropriate career advice and sponsorship make a significant difference in outcomes. 

“It is a 360-degree leadership journey — meaning we are focused on producing culture change by targeting the employee ecosystem,” McCalla-Leacy says. “The goal of the program is to drive cultural change and foster an environment in which all our leaders can thrive.”

The pilot program was launched in December 2021. It included approximately 25 Black managers and senior managers, 25 people leads and 25 sponsors from across the U.K. organization. Richard McGowan, senior manager of the Google Cloud Practice, was one of the high performers invited to participate.

He admits to being a little skeptical at first: “We have talked about the need to do something about these issues for a long time, but I had never seen it go anywhere.” 

However, when he heard about the goals of Engage! and the senior leaders who had agreed to be sponsors, he decided to participate. “Everyone involved was energized to do the right thing,” he says. 

Planning your journey

The program lasts nine months and involves a regular cadence of monthly meetings using material pulled from books and research, along with internal company metrics and external trend data. These include: 

• A monthly all-group meeting where participants discuss broad topics about corporate politics and issues around microaggressions, workplace bias and representation. 
• A monthly meeting with journey teams made up of smaller cohorts of participants who share their stories and support each other’s journey planning activities.
• A monthly one-on-one between participants and their sponsors to talk about personal needs and set goals.
• A monthly one-on-one between participants and their team leads to share what’s happening in the program and how it ties to their day-to-day performance and long-term career goals.

McGowan found the journey team meetings to be the most impactful part of the program. All of his journey team members had very different experiences in life and work and were at different points in their careers. 

“I was able to talk to people about what they had achieved and what they did to get there,” he says. 

It was a supportive experience that helped him start to think differently about his own goals and personal journey. 

“At the start, for me it was about money,” McGowan says. “But as we challenged ourselves to think about the impact we make, it became about becoming a role model for the next generation of people of Black heritage. It took a lot of introspection to get there.”

Eye opening

Neil Wetherell also found the experience to be enlightening. Wetherell is a managing director for Accenture Technology and McGowan’s sponsor for the program. He and McCalla-Leacy were among the senior leaders selected to sponsor Engage! participants. Wetherell knew McGowan already, and was already an active coach and mentor at Accenture.

Like McGowan, he wasn’t sure at first what the intent of the program was, but after looking at statistics showing the impact of unconscious bias on high-performing people of Black heritage, he knew it was something he wanted to be a part of. “We’ve spent a number of years trying to make sure Accenture is an inclusive place to work for everyone,” he says. “To do that, we have to make it a place where everyone can thrive.”

He liked that the Engage! program was proactive in helping individuals achieve their career goals and how it shifted the conversation away from what Black leaders should do to overcome bias and focused instead on what sponsors can do better. 

“It is changing the narrative about what people of Black heritage hear,” McGowan notes. “It’s not about what we need to do to fix ourselves. It is what can the organization do as a collective to solve these problems.”

Difficult conversations

Before the program began, sponsors were given training on what topics to cover, how to have conversations with sponsees about their experiences, how to provide feedback and how to foster those relationships. 

“You can’t give constructive feedback without building a close relationship,” McCalla-Leacy says. “When you build trust first, the experience of giving and receiving feedback is vastly enhanced.” 

At first, Wetherell admits that he was a little nervous to hear from McGowan and other participants about their experiences with racism in the workplace. But the experience was enlightening. 

“It opened my eyes and caused me to work on my own unconscious bias,” he says.

These conversations also helped Wetherell better understand what McGowan needed from him and how he could help him create his journey plan and find opportunities to advance. 

He wasn’t alone. “All of the sponsors came in wanting to learn, and they left feeling like the experience was transformational,” McCalla-Leacy says. “We gained a lot of understanding.”

The program appears to have had the desired impact. While it is still only the first cohort, McCalla-Leacy reports that many participants have received promotions to senior manager roles, and one moved into a managing director role. The company’s employee survey also shows  an increase in satisfaction among employees of Black heritage. “We are raising awareness around the topic,” she says.

Engage! was considered such a success that Accenture is now looking at ways to expand it to leaders in the U.S. and to mid-level Black employees who are still early in their career journeys. 

“When you do a pilot like this, you have to ask, ‘how can we expand it to others?’” Wetherell says. 

How to get Engaged!

For companies interested in launching their own version of Engage!, McGowan suggests starting small with a pilot program before launching it company-wide. That way leaders can see what the program requires and what impact it can have. They can use that data to help secure funding and convince more sponsors to get involved.

Leadership support is also key. “When people see that the head of our U.K. business is a sponsor and attends all the sessions, that has a huge impact on everyone,” McCalla-Leacy says. 

It’s a small time commitment that can generate desired results and help companies tackle some of the hidden bias that otherwise deters great employees from doing their best work, she says. It’s one more way that Accenture’s leadership is demonstrating a commitment to diversity and inclusion in a way that drives real results.