Turning Human Potential Into Business Strategy

Jon Clifton:
[0:07] Well, Ellyn, thank you for coming to spend a little bit of time with us today and talking about your strengths. But first, can you just tell us a little bit about the story of strengths at Accenture?

Ellyn Shook:
[0:18] So it was 2015, a decade, almost a decade ago. And we were pivoting our business strategy. And our CEO at the time Pierre said you know we need to totally change our talent model. And people don't want to be measured and monitored and you know, managed. They want to come in every single day and feel great about what they're doing. So you know you need to figure out how to get how to change performance management at Accenture, and I said okay and we happen to be in Washington.

Jon Clifton:
[1:09] And how many employees at that time?

Ellyn Shook:
[1:10] Three hundred and four thousand about. Okay so big. We were we were big at the time. We were in Washington at a meeting and all this, this is a true story, it was my birthday July 21st. You know how this is seared in my memory with so much detail. All of a sudden I get a text from Mariana, what is happening at Accenture? Why is Accenture trending above Nicki Minaj on Facebook. Okay, I'm like, what is going on? So I get on, and Pierre had just done a Wash Po Live. They used to have little videos. And he announced that Accenture was getting rid of their performance management. Now, we had no plan.

Jon Clifton:
[2:15] And you didn't know the announcement took place.

Ellyn Shook:
[2:17] I didn't. He didn't tell me he was going to say it. I don't think he really planned to say it either. I think the reporter just like asked him some question and he knew we were thinking about it. And so actually someone who you just saw speak, Rahul Varma, was on my team at the time. And you know how inspirational Rahul is if you saw him speak today. But we're like, we better go figure this out. And so we did like a six-week sprint on what makes great performance. And it was simple. We got like a simple answer. Do you know what the answer is? What makes great performance?

Jon Clifton:
[3:02] Yeah, I should probably know that answer. But why don't you go ahead and say it?

Ellyn Shook:
[3:06] I'll tell you the answer. The answer is simple, it's when people work at the intersection of what they are great at and what they love to do. That's when the magic happens.

Jon Clifton:
[3:17] That's what I was going to say.

Ellyn Shook:
[3:21] Okay, so we knew that, now we knew that, now what do we do? How do we like get something ready? Because our fiscal year starts September 1st and it was now like, you know, August. And I happened to meet your dad.

Ellyn Shook:
[3:41] I'm going to cry. I wish he was here, you know, with us, but I'll try to see him in a few weeks. But he's extraordinary. If you all haven't met him, I hope one day you get to hear him speak. And he just sat down with me and talked to me about strengths and how they could be helpful to Accenture. And that was the click because what we really wanted to shift from is this you know monitoring, measuring and managing performance to what our people wanted, which was to show up every single day and do a great job. Our Accenture people are you know they're smart and they're ambitious and they want to do good work. And so what the strengths allowed us to do is really rethink how performance happens. And you know the team our collective team really made it happen by and we did a major investment in 80,000 people that like teach them how to coach for performance rather than kind of we called it feed forward not feedback and strengths was and still is at the heart of that. Imagine today, 740 plus thousand people know themselves in a way that they never would if we weren't a strengths company.

Jon Clifton:
[5:16] It's amazing. It's amazing. You know, so when you get that notification from Arianna that things have changed rapidly, you sit down with Jim Clifton. The two of you both have Activator and Futuristic. Is that what made things click and how you figured out things so quickly?

Ellyn Shook:
[5:39] Yeah, I also have Ideation. So I like to, I am future, I identify most with that strength, even though it's not my first strength. I identify most with Futuristic, but I could see what he was talking about, yes. I could quickly, you know, get in a room, not just with my team, but our people, and start figuring it out, and that's where my strengths end. I don't have any Discipline, I have no Focus, I have no Context.

Jon Clifton:
[6:25] But you do have Input.

Ellyn Shook:
[6:27] Yeah. And that really drives my team crazy.

Jon Clifton:
[6:30] And why is that?

Ellyn Shook:
[6:31] Because it's like the never-ending quest. I have the never-ending quest for knowledge and like ideas and facts. And I, you know, it drives them crazy.

Jon Clifton:
[6:49] In the back she has a thing of documents about this big. And she looked at me and she said, there's Input for you. Can you show them what you brought too?

Ellyn Shook:
[7:00] Yes. Can everyone see these? This is my team, the HR leadership team at Accenture. Notice, executing is the number one so Achiever is the number one team rank strength. I don't have it. It's like in my bottom. I do have Activator. And then this one is our global management committee so Julie Sweet, our CEO's leadership team.

Jon Clifton:
[7:33] Can you talk more about the relationship that you and Julie have in her top five and how both of your top fives work together?

Ellyn Shook:
[7:40] Sure. Julie and I have an amazing relationship and have had one since even before she was hired. She's one of the only people that was hired into Accenture's Global Management Committee. She came in as our general counsel. Our CEO at the time, Bill Green, hired her because she was very different than any of us. She was a deal maker and one of the top lawyers at a big law firm called Cravath. And she came in to teach us how to do deal making and things. And she was a business person first, but I got to know her because she, I helped hire her and I helped bring her in. So we have a really good relationship, and before she became my boss, when I would take my Q12 and the question would be, do you have a best friend at work? Like Julie's face would be in my mind when I answered that question.

Jon Clifton:
[8:51] How does that happen?

Ellyn Shook:
[8:54] Well, I think, I think there's something at the core about trust, you know, like any relationship. I felt very accountable for her success since I helped bring her in. And she made a big, I mean, she was a rock star at her law firm. Like always on the cover of Dealmaker magazine. You know, she was a rock star and she chose us. And I felt very accountable for helping her be successful. In fact, my purpose that I discovered in the last decade is lift as I rise. And I feel like, you know, that was the connection with Julie.

And she's super smart and I'm, you know, I have like connection with super smart people, fast learners, you know. And that's how that happened, but we have a great relationship now our strengths are very different. Are mine up there? Okay you can see mine. Hers are her top five: Achiever, Learner, Competition, Intellection, and Activator, or is it, yeah, Activator. So we have very different strengths, which I think is where our magic lies. And because we had this like super trusting relationship before she became my boss, I think we have the ability to really work very well together. I mean, think about, she became our CEO September 1st of 2019, announced the biggest growth model change in our organization's history in January of 2020, went live March 1st of 2020. And then yeah so you know we worked through a lot of like super, super hard things together and I think you know the best friend at work having that trust and me being able to tell her the truth in all circumstances at all times because we have that trust, and you know her being able to be very transparent with me, I think is what what's at the core of that.

Jon Clifton:
[11:28] She has Competition number three. What advice would you have for people that work with a CEO that has Competition in their top five?

Ellyn Shook:
[11:36] I'm gonna ask a dumb question because all of Accenture CEOs, I think, have had Competition. Is that, that has got to be. For high, high performance businesses, I would imagine Competition has to be, no?

Jon Clifton:
[11:55] We did a study in 2017 and we asked Americans what they want in a president or in a CEO and one of the 12 attributes that they said that they wanted the least is competition.

Ellyn Shook:
[12:08] All right, well, maybe I don't understand Competition, but don't people with Competition, like, in their top five ... I know this whole audience is, like, cringing that I don't know the answer to this, but I'm just, I'm just Ellyn, so. But aren't people with Competition in their top five want to win?

Jon Clifton:
[12:27] Sure.

Ellyn Shook:
[12:28] Like, who doesn't want to work for a CEO that wants to win?

Jon Clifton:
[12:32] Thank you.

Ellyn Shook:
[12:36] I mean, I want to work for a winning company, a winning CEO.

Jon Clifton:
[12:41] Actually, most of our calls go this way, where it's just, I need so much therapy, she helps me get through these therapy sessions, so thank you again.

Ellyn Shook:
[12:54] Oh, I get it. I knew Command was, we always talk about Command, but I didn't realize Competition was one.

Jon Clifton:
[13:08] She is Command nine, so our calls start very fast, and they go very fast.

Ellyn Shook:
[13:14] We get a lot done.

Jon Clifton:
[13:16] Can you talk about your Self-Assurance? How does that manifest itself in your leadership?

Ellyn Shook:
[13:25] I guess like people that work for Accenture might have their own view about that, but I feel it's helped me enormously in my role because you know I work in, my job requires me to work in high ambiguity and lots of risk, right, because we don't have ... you know we were talking about Stryker and their amazing products and everything today. We don't we don't have that. We have our amazing human beings at Accenture, and so you know the decisions that I have to make and the direction that I have to give comes with a lot of risk, and I think my Self-Assurance helps me bring it to that.

Jon Clifton:
[14:19] But you're attracted to risk.

Ellyn Shook:
[14:20] I am attracted to risk. You can't do this. You cannot do my job if you're not attracted to risk because you have to be comfortable taking risk.

Jon Clifton:
[14:31] What do you feel like the biggest risks are that you've taken as a leader?

Ellyn Shook:
[14:38] That's a hard question. The biggest risks I've taken, okay. Here's another true story. I don't know if Rahul's still out here, but he'll remember this if he is, and Deb might remember this too. When we wrote our first talent strategy under Pierre, we knew that who we were under our own old strategy, which was a world-class systems integrator, our differentiation was like standardization. Our clients could experience Accenture consistently anywhere in the world. We called it standard rules, tools, and schools and that's who we were. And then Pierre said uh the competition's coming for us, we got to pivot, and we were a fast follower, that was our positioning. We're going to be the leading provider of digital-related services, and we said at that time in 2014 that every business was going to be a digital business. And most of our clients laughed at us when we said that. Paul Doherty, he's definitely Futuristic.

And so we were talking about, well, how do you actually do that? And our talent ambition was to be the best place for the most highly specialized talent on the planet. And one of the ways we knew we had to change was to be more diverse. We needed more diverse skills, more diverse people. We needed to become innovative. We didn't have methodologies. You know, we had to dial up the diversity. And so we said as part of our ambition that we were going to be the most inclusive and diverse company on the planet. That was probably, and I remember saying to one of my team members at the time, Nate, I'm like, Nate, it was like audacious, like how can we say it? He's like, if we don't say it, it'll never happen. And I'm like, okay, fine, we're going to say it, and guess what? It happened. Refinitiv has said in the past six years, in the past six years on the Refinitiv Inclusion and Diversity Index, which for HR people in the room, you don't submit any, like you don't submit marketing material for that. It's quantitative, publicly available facts. We've been number one four times in the last six years and in the top three in the last six years.

Jon Clifton:
[17:32] You and I have talked about this, how your Futuristic got ahead of that, but your Input was also focused heavily on DEI. Can you talk a little bit about how you used your Input in order to get ahead of that and actually make those things happen?

Ellyn Shook:
[17:48] Sure. I mean, as part of that talent ambition, and I don't know how many ... I can't see out there, so I don't know how many of you were even, you know, doing what you do 10 years ago, but there wasn't a lot of like technology, and we certainly in Accenture had really bad HR technology at the time. We were like the shoemaker's children. That's not the case anymore. But Pierre challenged us to be insight driven, data driven, insight driven HR people. And so we started looking internally and externally at all the data and in fact, leading up to that, my team helped me put together this amazing analysis that said oh we hire a lot of women. We're you know, we hire 50% women, but there are only 10% women managing directors. So I brought the analysis. I did the analysis and brought the thing into Pierre with all the data because he was an analytic, a strategic analytic.

And I came to him and I said, boy Pierre we must be really crappy recruiters. And that hurt him because you know we like to think we can hire great people, and it's a core competency of ours. I said, look we must be really, because what do you mean Ellyn and I, he was French, I said look we hire 50% women but we only, they're not progressing. They must not be great talent. And then he knew we had a problem and that's when we really were able to lay the groundwork to bring us to where we are today.

Jon Clifton:
[19:44] What was the big change?

Ellyn Shook:
[19:47] The big change, honestly, was mindset shift, okay? I think the biggest change was mindset shift. That meant we have a lot of technology people, so we have a big workforce in India. Most of our people in India are engineers. The conventional wisdom was, well, we'll never be 50-50 by 2025 in India because, well, there aren't enough women technologists. We had an amazing person leading our technology business at the time in India, who's now our chief strategy officer, Bhaskar Ghosh. And he really helped people make the mindset shift that we're not going to limit ourselves. Yes, there are women engineers. We just don't go hire from those schools. And he put an amazing program in place and included all of the leaders of that business to actually, he has high Belief, he actually helped people see the future. And they got very excited to actually create the future together. And I will say we have increased our women in India by 375 percent in 10 years, so the workforce has grown and it's 2024 and we're at 49 percent women. It takes a lot of mindset shift to take away all the limiting factors, I think.

Jon Clifton:
[21:28] Can you also talk about the Truly Human initiative that you and the team brought into Accenture? What inspired it and what the rest of us could learn from it?

Ellyn Shook:
[21:41] Yes. Yes, what we learned when we started becoming more diverse is that the power of individuals and the power of human connection was what really was going to help us unlock people's full potential. And so we wanted to, we aspired to help our people be successful both professionally and personally, and that's how we kind of define truly human. It wasn't just about you're an employee of Accenture any longer. You are a human being who works for Accenture, and that was a real aha for us. And I don't think we would have seen it when we were less diverse, because I don't think people were bringing them, you know, bringing all of who they were to work. It started with that mindset shift.

Jon Clifton:
[22:49] You know, in the United States and there are a lot of countries like this too where the political dynamics are such that the divisiveness means that that also comes to work. How do you manage through that?

Ellyn Shook:
[23:03] Well for us it starts with our core values, and our one of our six core values is respect for the individual. And we celebrate all of our differences, and we believe as you can imagine with 742,000 people, that the views of Accenture's people reflect the views of the world. And we just assume that, and it is you know I've experienced it, so I think it's true. But at the very core is respect, and I wasn't sure if we're going to be able to talk about this, but I brought a different prop, which is actually a printout of something that was on our internal social media, Viva Engage, this week.

And it was written by a woman who's a mentor to me. Her name's Sumrine Ahmad. She's the lead of our interfaith ERG, and she wrote, "It's been a challenging year for so many on varying levels. And while there are many whose aim might be to use faith as a polarizing force, I am so grateful for all of those in our interfaith ERG community who strive every day to model, inspire, and support one another by honoring difference through the lens of respect, humility, and intellectual curiosity." That's how you do that.

Jon Clifton:
[24:50] You know, it is having an organization with 742,000 colleagues at a time where things are difficult. I mean, it wasn't long ago when Axios said, and this was well after the pandemic, that this is the hardest time to run a company. And when it's an organization of that many employees, how do you inspire hope?

Ellyn Shook:
[25:14] Well one thing I want to say because I was thinking about this even as I was listening to the introduction, it's interesting to me that we have 742,000 people. But I really don't care because I truly believe that every single voice has the power to change the world, and so I don't think about the mass of our workforce, I think about each person. But to inspire our people, I think, first you need to understand your people. And one of the most important ways that we understand our people is through the Gallup Q12. We do the Gallup Q12 very far down in the organization on a team basis, not on our company level or any big level. And we have, I think it's a fairly sophisticated listening framework that has the Gallup Q12. It has something called Conduct Counts, which measures how our people experience our culture every single day. So their daily experience. It has our transformation GPS so people feel like they're prepared for change. We're constantly reinventing ourselves. We need to make sure our people feel ready for change. Our ERGs are part of our listening framework, and it all starts with that, really. What can inspire people? And it's not a one-size-fits-most, but I can tell you that our strategy of creating 360-degree value, which is not only success for our shareholders, it's success for our people, our clients, our communities, and each other, is what really inspires our people.

Jon Clifton:
[27:25] When you're doing that listening, when you think about Gallup's Q12, expectations, materials and equipment, mission and purpose, recognition, best friend, is there something that Accenture you feel like does the best, and are there places where you said, we wish we were buttoned up more on that particular item?

Ellyn Shook:
[27:43] Yeah. So our top two questions are best friend at work. I love that. Who doesn't want a best friend at work? That was a funny story. We probably don't have time for that story today.

Jon Clifton:
[28:00] Can you tell it?

Ellyn Shook:
[28:01] Yeah, not every place in the world believes you should have your best friend at work.

Jon Clifton:
[28:08] I agree with you. Why is that?

Ellyn Shook:
[28:10] I don't know. Like, I know. We have like this brand love strategy and it kind of freaks some of our people out. That we talk about love at work too, but I don't know. But we got over that, and that's our top question. And I understand, I think, I don't know exactly the words, but it's like I understand what's expected of me, which is super important in this whole performance achievement thing. So I'm really proud of that. Sean just told me what our, like, not so good questions are, and I can't. Oh, recognition, what the heck? What the heck? Sean, we're going to fix that. I can see how to fix that.

Jon Clifton:
[29:03] Ellyn, you're Futuristic. How far do you think in the future, by the way, with your Futuristic?

Ellyn Shook:
[29:18] I think it's far, and here's why. And it's almost an obsession, so maybe it's not so good, but I do live my life every single day to make this world more equitable, just, and fair for our people, for society, for my family. And I think it's a ways off in the future, but that's when I see the future. I see a beautiful future of equality, and I will not stop until we get there.

Jon Clifton:
[30:07] We're gonna end on that. Ellyn, thank you for your leadership. We, everybody here, is focused on exactly what you just said, which is to make, to fix the world's broken workplace and to actually make it work for everyone. So thank you for leading the way and helping us all get there. Thank you.

Ellyn Shook:
[30:24] Thank you for having me.

Transcript autogenerated using AI.