When Jill Smart was approached by George Shaheen, then CEO of Andersen Consulting—now Accenture—about her taking an HR role with the company in the early 2000s, she already had over 20 years of consulting experience with the firm under her belt. At the time, Andersen was outsourcing a lot of talent, and wanted to appoint a chief learning officer (CLO) to oversee training for consultants from different backgrounds who were joining the company.
Smart was hesitant to take on a new gig. She loved working with clients in financial services consulting, but a mentor who worked in the same department recommended that she pivot from consulting into HR.
“It was completely out of my comfort zone,” Smart told HR Brew. “It was a very strategic role, and I’m much more of an operator and an execution person.” Even so, she added, “It was the best thing I ever did.”
After spending two years as Accenture’s CLO, Smart was tapped for the CHRO position, which she held for a decade, from 2004 to 2014. After leaving Accenture, Smart served as president of the National Academy of Human Resources, a professional organization for senior HR leaders, for eight years. She currently serves on the board of directors for several companies, including EPAM Systems and AlixPartners.
While leading HR for Accenture was never part of Smart’s plan, she embraced the opportunity to be “at the epicenter of the business.” At Accenture, Smart stressed the importance of adaptability, as well as learning the ins and outs of clients’ businesses. She said she believes this prepared her employees to take on top HR roles elsewhere, as many went on to serve as CHRO or CPO at companies including Ubisoft, PepsiCo, and McKesson.
Being in the business. Many HR leaders consider proximity to the business to be a key differentiator for aspiring CHROs and CPOs, and Smart said that her years working on the business side of Accenture helped prepare her for a transition to HR.
“I really understood what we did and what we needed, and what client partners at the time needed from HR,” she said. Recognizing that “a CHRO needs to be a business person before they’re an HR person,” Smart stressed to her employees that they “needed to be in the business, partner with the business, live in the business.”
One way she did this was by asking every HR person at Accenture to listen to the company’s quarterly earnings calls. Smart would host a webinar with someone from the firm’s finance department afterward, and give members of her team the opportunity to ask questions about anything they didn’t understand.
“A lot of the questions from investors were about our people, because that’s effectively what we sell..the intellectual property of our people,” Smart said of the earnings calls. “And so they needed to understand what was talked about on those calls.” Sometimes this meant not being afraid to ask “stupid questions”—Smart said she had a go-to contact in Accenture’s finance department for these sorts of queries.
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Accenture employed thousands of HR professionals from a variety of different backgrounds when Smart was running the department. She said her team would recruit employees from the consulting or finance side of the business, and sometimes HR workers would move over to these sectors, as well.
Working for an “agile organization” helped prepare Smart’s employees to navigate the HR-related challenges that companies face today, whether they’re marked by the Covid-19 pandemic, civil unrest, or politics. “Being able to adapt and turn on a dime…while it’s really hard, they grew up in an environment that was very good at it.”
Building a CHRO pipeline. At Accenture, Smart helped build an incubator of sorts for HR talent. She identified some two-dozen former employees who went on to lead HR at other organizations, including Becky Schmitt, CPO at PepsiCo; Jacqui Canney, CPO at ServiceNow; and Anika Grant, formerly CPO at Ubisoft. Ellyn Shook, Smart’s successor, spent her career in HR at Accenture, and recently stepped down from the CHRO role.
“She keeps us all connected,” Canney said of Smart, who emails the cohort with updates when Accenture alumni are tapped for CHRO or CPO roles.
While it could be hard to see top talent leave Accenture for new jobs, Smart said she always encouraged her employees to take good opportunities elsewhere when they arose. When she spoke with HR Brew in February, she recalled having lunch two weeks prior with Gene Raffone, who still remembered being encouraged by Smart to take a position as chief human capital officer for consulting firm Navigant.
While Smart was encouraging, she remembers being disappointed about losing him, as well.
“He had a big job on my team, it was gonna kill me to lose him,” she said. “But anybody that would hold someone back…shouldn’t be a head of HR.”
Raffone, who is now CHRO for advisory firm Riveron, said he was very driven to become a CHRO, but cognizant of the fact that such opportunities don’t arise very often at a firm like Accenture, which employs more than 730,000 people. Given the considerable network of Accenture alumni who’ve gone on to become CHROs or CPOs, he compared Smart to “a head coach whose coordinators keep getting other head coaching jobs.”
“That head coach is doing something right if they keep developing coordinators who go on to be great head coaches themselves?” he said. “And that’s what she had…en masse at Accenture.”