Cheryl Grise
Americas Solutions Leader, EY
Cheryl is the Americas Solutions Leader at EY and serves as the North America Executive Sponsor of EY Entrepreneurial Winning Women program. She is an energetic and forward-thinking transformational leader who is passionate about helping clients navigate significant changes and grow their business in a connected, fast-paced and complex world.
At EY, Cheryl developed a new methodology and toolset to help activate the firm’s Vision 2020 implementation. She also led the Global Advisory Strategy practice, where she launched the Purpose-Led Transformation team and capability in the marketplace for clients.
Cheryl was the co-founder of the Beacon Institute, which she helped launch at the World Economic Forum in Davos. To drive Purpose Led Transformation, she worked closely with an author and thought leader to help companies “discover and activate their why.” She introduced new research in collaboration with the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School and HBR Analytic Services on the topic of using purpose to transform and drive new levels of growth and innovation.
Cheryl has spent the last 25 years of her career in consulting with EY, IBM, and PwC where she held various senior leadership roles. Throughout her career she has served as the Lead Transformation Partner on strategic enterprise programs to optimize clients' business models, processes, and providing support to business systems to deliver significant and measurable returns. In 2006, Cheryl was a contributing author to the book Can Two Rights Make a Wrong? Insights from IBM's Tangible Culture. She was also an adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University, where she taught a graduate course on Transformational Leadership. In her many years of experience one key theme emerges - Cheryl helps clients transform.
Was there always a master plan or were you figuring it out as you went along?
Straight out of grad school I said, ‘I’m going to plan my career.’ I even built a framework to help me and I use it every year. I really think about what I want to be known for. The roles I have and why.
What is your why?
I’ve had the privilege of working with Simon Sinek. We learned that your why is something that comes from your early life. And for me it came from 2nd grade. My father was in the navy; we moved from Connecticut to Hawaii and I was the pale-skinned curly-haired girl who was so different from everyone. Our teacher asked us to tell us about our parents. I proceeded to tell everyone that my father was a professional embezzler. Embezzlers move a lot so I thought that's what we did. Everyone laughed. That teacher, she said, ‘my goodness you’re different. How wonderful.’ And in a single moment, she changed my whole ability to make friends. I seek out those who are different so they can be heard, and that’s my purpose.
What do you think is the value of purpose-led transformation?
For years I studied with John Kotter, an amazing thought leader who led with a sense of urgency. You need a crisis to galvanise people around a problem. Then I moved into EY and I was selected as programme leader for ‘Vision 2020’. My job was to make purpose come to life. We had no real crisis and I learned it’s much easier to galvanise through inspiration. Crisis-mode is not sustainable over time. It’s less about urgency and more about inspiration and how you connect yourself as a human to the company to drive transformation that’s sustainable.
How do you ensure, on a tactical level, that the job gets done?
There’s all sorts of techniques. We bring in programme management, identify deliverables, etc. The trick to staying on board is keeping people connected to the vision. You can get through a programme and not change anyone's life. So every day it’s connecting people to that vision.
What are the key leadership values that are important to you?
The things that have set me back in my career are usually because of a leader I have worked for. What has propelled me are the leaders I’ve surrounded myself with. I expect what people say and what they do to match. I expect them to help me with the vision I'm responsible for. Candor is critical to me. You can't think you're on track, you need to know you're on track and you need people who are willing to give you feedback.
Passion and being decisive - I’m proud of those things, but I work at those things. I’ve learned early in my career that the best leaders can gather information quickly and make a decision. I’m a sailor; what makes me crazy is a skipper who makes decisions by consensus. You can’t do that - when the winds are howling, you need to decide and get your team to come along with you.
This whole job of being a connector. Having a really diverse network is critical to solving some of the problems coming at us today. You as a leader and connecting your people to others is a critical aspect of leadership.
Before you became a leader yourself, did you hear myths about what leadership should look like?
Leadership isn’t about having all the answers. That is a myth. My dad used to say that ‘no’ was a perfectly acceptable answer. It is about being confident in the decisions you make and being able to communicate why we make those decisions clearly. But it’s also about knowing when to accept you've made a mistake and own it. You, as a leader, are accountable for the decisions made by your team.
What advice would you give to ‘early-career Cheryl’?
I would be more planful about the time I was spending on myself. You own your balance and not everything matters. Work was the only thing that mattered early on and I would go back and do things a little differently. I needed to take care of myself better. More recently, I'd say go with your gut a bit more. I’ve been in business now over 30 years and you shape your acumen on knowing signals and how to read signals. I am good at going with my gut.
How has your journey differed from your male peers?
I really resonate with Sheryl Sandberg - success and likeability are negatively correlated for women and positively correlated for men. We work hard to be likeable so our success can be recognised better. I try to make it easy for the women on my team to toot their own horn, and if they don't, I will do it for them. It’s hard for a woman to stand up and say, “look what I did, look how great I am.”
More women have taken roles of leadership, what can we do to accelerate this even further?
EY has a focus on advancing women. The Fast Forward initiative advances women entrepreneurs. We like to see parity in leadership roles around the world. It’s important to our male leaders and female leaders; we're taking it very seriously. You need a deliverable focus on how you build a diverse team that is beneficial to the whole team.
What is the purpose of the Fast Forward initiative and what does it aim to achieve?
To mentor women through the evolution of their growth stages and help them reach their full potential. Whether access to private equity, experience on how to go public, or how to scale. Our goal is to ensure they are successful in their mission to grow their companies and fulfill their purpose.
Research shows women don't self promote as much. What are your views on self promotion?
Someone sent me a note saying thank you for what you did yesterday. I wanted my boss to know that someone appreciated what I did. He sent me a note saying he appreciated knowing that. Here i am 30 years into my career and here i am saying, ‘hey, look how good i am.’ You need to feel safe. It is your job as a leader to amplify the voices of others. Our voices don't always get heard. We need to amplify female voices.
Other leadership rules are.
Never rule yourself out. It is a female trait of ours.
Always lead with a POV. I see too many people come into conversations where they lost the ability to lead because they had no POV.
The last one I'd leave you with is that your family and your health always come first. Leaders are humans. They will always understand your need to put family and health first, otherwise you’re in the wrong place.