Sheree Atcheson -Leading Global Initiatives Using a Data-Informed Approach
I previously interviewed Sheree Atcheson, Group Vice President of Diversity and Inclusion at Valtech about her book, Demanding More for LeadDev’s Bookmarked series. I was delighted she agreed to talk with me about her experience leading global teams. We talked about our shared belief about why the discovery process is so critical for new leaders in a business. We also talked about the importance of bringing others along, especially when in an organizational leadership role. That alignment is so critical. Finally, we talked about the need to have embedded ways to listen. This is so important for all leaders.
For those who don't know you, can you introduce yourself?
Yeah, sure. I'm Sheree Atcheson. I'm a multi-award-winning diversity and inclusion executive. I've been doing this work for 13 years. I help companies utilize data in creating equitable and fair environments. I started my career as a software engineer many years ago and use the same principles that I used when I was developing software. I write for Forbes regularly on diversity and inclusion, and leadership principles. I'm the published author of Demanding More, Why Diversity and Inclusion Doesn't Happen and What You Can Do About It and a contributing author to Certain Uncertainty: Leading with Agility and Resilience in an Unpredictable World, which is a collaboration of a lot of great people sharing their ideas on how to prepare for certain uncertainty, funnily enough.
I encourage people to pick up Demanding More. It's a stellar book. How did you get into diversity and inclusion?
When I was at university, I studied computer science. There was not much diversity there, as you can imagine. I went to university in Belfast, which is the capital city in the north of Ireland, close to where I am from. I spent time with my university helping them to get more women into engineering, choosing computer science degrees, and so on. When I graduated, I worked at a local software house in Belfast. I spent some time trying to make things better but not really knowing why the problem was so ingrained at that stage. Keep in mind, I was a fresh-faced 20-something-year-old graduate figuring everything out. I started out trying to see what I could do to make things better. I don’t like reinventing the wheel so I spent a lot of time researching what existed out there. I found Women Who Code.
And at that stage, Women Who Code was a relatively small nonprofit based in San Francisco and also in India, which worked to create communities of women in technology. They provided free monthly meetups in all their locations that helped women get the skills they needed and the money they deserved to be paid. There were around 3,000 members globally at the time but no branches in the UK and no real presence in EMEA. So I spent a lot of time speaking with the CEO asking if I could branch this to Belfast. There wasn’t a community there for women that spanned across industries within the technology sphere that’s free. I wanted to see what I could do.
I'm very uncomfortable with creating communities that charge people to go because then we create exclusion. We prevent people from potentially poorer backgrounds from having access to that same knowledge. The real driving point with Women Who Code for me was the fact that they had a model that prioritized it being free. So I branched it to Belfast, creating a great community of women technologists there. I partnered with the main company, then a branch in London, Bristol, Edinburgh, Dublin, all across Europe, and so on. Now I sit as a board member with Women Who Code. Through that work, I created a lot of remote teams. Keep in mind, I was doing this all when I was like 21 or something like that. So I was thrown into the leadership building remote teams and partnering with huge organizations, scaleups, and everything in between.
While I was doing that, I was spending a lot of time with those companies, helping them use Women Who Code as an avenue in their diversity and inclusion, and helping them to start taking a data-driven approach, which wasn't really being done. A lot of diversity and inclusion work wasn't considered “measurable” apparently. I pivoted the work to a data approach so it got to a point where I was both an engineer and doing this diversity and inclusion work. So I had two jobs. I was really tired and arguably I was much better at one of those jobs than the other and that was the D&I leadership.
So I moved to Deloitte and after a year or so made it my full-time role. Since then I've been doing this full-time – helping companies of all shapes, sizes, and industries, take a different approach, take a more technology-centric approach. The problem I have with a lot of D&I strategies is that they're in technology companies, but they don't use the principles that the technologists use every day. So people find it harder to connect with, as well as understand how you measure it. So that's how I made that pivot quite a while ago now.
Being a board member level role and being a relatively junior tier engineer are two very different roles and two very different skill sets. It was a lot of context-switching. So it was interesting.
You were young when you got into leadership. It sounds like it wasn’t necessarily planned.
No, it definitely wasn't. I mean, I'm 32 now, which is still pretty young. But yeah, it (being in leadership) wasn't planned. I wanted to make a difference when I branched with Women Who Code. But did I expect that I would end up leading six or seven remote teams in my early 20s? I was still very much a junior developer at that stage and then sort of a mid-level developer after that.
My seniority outside of the company was very senior and my seniority inside the company was not. There was a conflict there regularly because I would be treated differently by people outside of the company I worked versus how I was treated inside.
There's a difference in how people treat people they deem worthy of listening to. I was acutely aware of that. When people deemed me worthy of listening to, they didn't speak over me, they sat back and paid attention to what I was saying because of all of the credentials I had. I started to write for the Huffington Post when I was doing this work and had won so many different awards that give me all of this credibility. Flip that to being a relatively fresh-based engineer, people didn't care what I was saying then. So I had a lot of conflicting experiences in my early leadership journey. It paid off, but it certainly wasn't planned.
That must have been so discombobulating. What dissonance to experience.
Yeah, I mean, it certainly was that. A lot of times it was very disheartening because I was like I’m worthy of being listened to because of my experience but then I go to another meeting with a different group of people where I’m not. It got to a point where it didn't matter anymore because I had the credentials to prove I know what I’m talking about. I know I’m good at what I do.
Being a board member level role and being a relatively junior tier engineer are two very different roles and two very different skill sets. It was a lot of context-switching. So it was interesting.
Can you share a bit more about your role as Group Vice President of Diversity Inclusion at Valtech? I’d love to know more about the scope of your role.
Valtech is a digital transformation agency. We create different solutions for people trying to do things in either a better way or a new way. We are, at the moment, in 20+ countries around the world and have over 50 offices around the world. So a fairly decent size footprint in the world. There are around 6,000 people within the company. I sit at a group level across all of that. Ultimately I provide clear guidance and leadership on our group D&I strategy, which is our five-pillar strategy across accountability, hiring, inclusivity, community, and education.
More important is taking that strategy and providing the expertise in how to take a global strategy and tailor it to all of those 20-plus places and in those 50-plus offices because even between some offices in certain countries there are lots of nuances and differences. All of that responsibility sits with me. I set clear goals that we want to achieve at a group level and also help our local entities do the same in the same way.
The best way to describe my role at Valtech is that I help us globally collaborate but regionally and locally implement. So we don't lose the nuance of the fact that we are in so many different places with so many different meanings of what embracing diversity and what fostering inclusion means. We do so in a way that we can still collaborate across borders and can learn lessons from each other.
I joined Valtech about two and a bit years ago. When I joined they didn’t have this role. All of the roles I’ve held have been the first for those companies. It meant they had so many different D&I strategies. Now we have a consistent strategy across everything. We all rely on the same maturity index. So even though we work on regional and local nuances, we can still measure how people are doing against our group-level strategy.
I'm here to put in consistency, collaboration, and best practices globally from the beginning, as opposed to places doing similar approaches but making the same mistakes because they don’t actually talk to each other. What a waste of time and money. This takes that out of the equation.
Who do you report to?
I did report to our Chief Delivery Officer who leads all of the delivery across the Valtech business. We just brought in a Chief Collaboration Officer to ensure we’re collaborating across all entities and delivering on business goals. So now I report to her. My roles always report to the exec. I never do anything that doesn't report to the exec because I think this role is arguably pointless without that.
Yep. I figured you reported somewhere at the C-suite level otherwise you can't really be effective.
First-of-its-kind roles are always interesting. How did you come into your role? Was it already identified or something you sold yourself into?
Before Valtech I worked at a company called Peakon. That role was made for me. Before that, I was at Monzo and Peakon reached out to me about this role focused on measuring this work through data analytics. When Peakon was acquired by Workday I decided to find something else.
I’d been doing a lot of work with clients and customers, helping them utilize the tool to measure their diversity and inclusion. I’d been talking to so many different companies. I thought they could do something really good. They’re not quite doing their potential yet but I could help them do that. I reached out to four or five companies. Valtech was one of them. I told them I was going to be on the market, did they want to hire me? The answer was yes. So I created and shaped the role. I did that at Deloitte too. It’s always a privilege to get to shape the things that are important to you. I guess I was ballsy and emailed them to ask if they wanted to hire me.
Oh my gosh, that is so badass.
Yeah, I mean the worst they can say is no.
And even though they didn’t have the role, there was already a recognized need.
Yeah, exactly. And as part of my role at Peakon, I chaired the advisory board for the Include product. At the time Valtech had asked me to be on their advisory board. I said no because I didn’t have time to do it. So I knew they were interested in me. I knew they respected my credentials. So I just took a punt. I would always do that. I think it comes from having a level of confidence to say, do you want to hire me? If the answer is no, that’s okay. It doesn’t hurt my feelings. If you say yes, let’s have a chat. If I ever wanted to move on, I would do that again because why not?
I have tears in my eyes, I know others are going to find these gems of wisdom so helpful.
It pays off for everyone. I think it's always worth taking a chance. I got to this level of my career where I’m confident in what I’m good at and what I need to be better at. So people saying no to me or pushing back doesn’t phase me now which I know is a privilege. But what I would also say to those that aren't at that stage yet is that people tend to fill roles based on network. People tend to hire people they've already worked with or they know. If the majority of our folks in those roles are for example heterosexual or if they're white or they're men or they're various parts of majority groups, it's a lot easier for those folks to simply put their hands. That’s why I do it now because I know somebody else is doing it. If I don't do it, someone else will. I think that's the main takeaway. If I self-select myself out, why bother because someone else will self-select me out anyway at some stage, but it might as well not be me. And that's why I think big moves are always worth taking a punt on..
That just hit me right in the heart. So good.
Good.
I'm here to put in consistency, collaboration, and best practices globally from the beginning, as opposed to places doing similar approaches but making the same mistakes because they don’t actually talk to each other. What a waste of time and money. This takes that out of the equation.
You’ve had a great deal of experience leading in global environments. What’s most challenging about leading global teams?
One of the biggest challenges or misconceptions when you move into a global role, especially in inclusion and diversity is that you can just lift and shift what you’ve done at a local or regional level and map it globally. We see quite a lot of folks typically in mainland Europe or North America taking an approach that is centered on those experiences. It doesn’t make sense. Valtech is a great example. We’re so many entities. There are so many different cultures in this one company. There is no way from a local perspective or a regional perspective that you could map everything across those 20-plus countries. That would be silly.
I think another challenge of doing global work is that you have to have a pace to it. You have to be realistic that when you create something new you cannot roll that out without having appropriately and rigorously tested it to understand if this will work across all of the entities instead of the ones you’re close to.
If you think about it from a company perspective, before we roll out any new software, you should have it rigorously tested. You have QA teams dedicated to that to make sure that it doesn't fall flat on its face when it goes out into the real world. But yet with D&I strategies, we don't tend to do that in the same way. My question to people is: why is that? Usually, it's because of inexperience, laziness, or pressure to get something done quickly. You can’t rush this. You have to set expectations.
What's hard about setting expectations globally?
There’s a view that this is really quick to do and therefore the expectations are that we should have ABCD done. This is a real problem. Okay yeah, in a year we can focus on the community element and make a big difference. But will we have changed our behavior and criteria around promotions? Will we have embedded rigor around our hiring matrixes? We won’t do that in a year.
This kind of work is business transformation, it’s organization transformation. It’s changing how people think, how they work, how they view each other, how they measure progress and measure failure. There’s a view that this is quick to do so the expectations are high about what we can accomplish in a year. It takes time to change behavior. So (the hard part) is the expectation of what we think the work is vs what it really is. It's very important that leadership recognize that this is very complicated and it won't go fast even if you want it to.
Yeah, people forget that business and org transformation is messy, it takes time to shift things because you’re dealing with a global entity. It sounds like you have to educate people about what the work really is and what it takes to get it done.
Yeah, absolutely. Education is such a big part of this, especially when you're doing group-level roles, because the expectation if let's say the majority of your leadership team is from, the United Kingdom, Switzerland or North America, there's a very different understanding of what diversity and inclusion work might be in those entities versus, countries that are less advanced in those spheres. To have a global D&I strategy, there has to be an understanding of the nuance. You know, diversity and inclusion work in Latin America is very different from North America and over to India, to the MENA region, and so on. It's all very, very different. Leadership has to recognize and understand that. But we have to educate them as well.
This kind of work is business transformation, it’s organization transformation. It’s changing how people think, how they work, how they view each other, how they measure progress and measure failure. There’s a view that this is quick to do so the expectations are high about what we can accomplish in a year. It takes time to change behavior. So (the hard part) is the expectation of what we think the work is vs what it really is. It's very important that leadership recognize that this is very complicated and it won't go fast even if you want it to.
It seems like aligning leaders and working at the leadership layer is a big part of your work.
In every company that I've joined and have helped with this work, one of the first things that I mandate is leadership training that focuses on privilege awareness and how to make balanced decisions. The reason I do that is because everybody has to be on the same page. Everyone has to understand why we’re doing this from a global context. We spend a lot of time going through different statistics and data points from around the world on exclusion.
We look at things like health care, mortgage access, housing, all of those things that are relevant for everybody, regardless of where you come from. After that, we talk about what we really mean by equity. I use several different diagrams so people can see we're talking about access to opportunity. We’re talking about that everyone can see an opportunity arguably, we all know it’s there but if we can’t access it, it might as well as not be there. There’s an exercise in Demanding More that’s a privilege walk. I talk to the leadership team where we start at ground zero, everyone’s at the same place on the line in the beginning. We ask 50 or 60 questions. Depending on your answer you move back or forth. There’s a scatter graph of people at the end.
The purpose of that exercise is for people to see that we’re in a room with our peers. There’s a commonality there. Some people are at the same “number” as me, some are so far forward or backward. We’ve had so many different experiences to bring them to this one point. When we have this awareness and give them time to self-reflect it can be very eye-opening for people.
Then we move into this is what you can do next. This is how you can make balanced decisions. This is what we want to do moving forward. So they leave with something. So you’re right, education with leadership and giving them the why is the first thing I do in any company. Without that, it’s like throwing a load of rocks into a stream without a current. If there’s no current, they’re not going to go anywhere. It’s really important you have that current first.
Right. Absolutely. Without alignment, these efforts get sidelined into a small area. I remember reading that exercise in the book. It’s so powerful.
Were there any early lessons or other things you found to be most successful in aligning across a global environment?
The thing that I learned very early on was that it's really important to spend time doing discovery before you create anything on a global scale. Let’s say I was creating something for Brazil or Pune but I live in the UK, it's important to do discovery sessions with the people that it affects, within reason. Without that we make assumptions. I did this early in my career where I made assumptions on what people want or need.
Assumptions are riddled with bias. They're riddled with the decision that I would make based on my echo chamber that I live in. That’s why I spend my first two or three months doing discovery with all the people in the business. I want to make sure I don’t make assumptions about pain points, or anything else before I decide what I would do next.
To go back to software methodology in Agile, you would do the same thing. You gather what the client needs and continually iterate on what you've created to make it really fit, to make an answer to what they want. To change things that don't work the way that they should. I do the same with this work because a lot of time in D&I work you really want to fix things. You want to make them better. That means we tend to rush and when we rush we make assumptions.
So my biggest lesson is to make sure to give time for discovery but you must set expectations with leadership. After those first two or three months I create a report so everyone can see what I found. Sharing back is a key part.
But you've got to give me the time to find out what's really going on, not just what you know, you might think is going on. Because again, biased.
Assumptions are riddled with bias. They're riddled with the decision that I would make based on my echo chamber that I live in. That’s why I spend my first two or three months doing discovery with all the people in the business. I want to make sure I don’t make assumptions about pain points, or anything else before I decide what I would do next.
I love that. I did something similar when I came in as COO. I met with every person in the company. It was a small company so I could do that. It was important to understand what was happening. I wanted to know what people need. What do they think? There’s pressure to have a quick impact. We feel like we have to show our value. It’s actually to listen first.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. When I came to Valtech, we had a structure where there was a managing director for each of the 22 entities. So, I had hour calls with every single one of them to understand. Then we held a company-wide event for me to share back what I found. So I created a report that was broken down by entity so people could be on the journey with me. I agree that it’s easy to run in and try to do what you were hired for but you can’t do that to the best of your skillset if you don’t know what’s going on.
I just want to underscore the idea that when we make assumptions, we have biases. That’s just how we are as humans because we all have our lens on the world. The other thing was the report back and that taking them on a journey with you is just as important as your understanding. It sounds like you spend a fair amount of time reporting, and communicating back what you’ve discovered.
Oh yeah, absolutely. People tend to be very aware of what’s happening where they’re based. So if I work in the French office, I probably know what’s going on in France but I don’t know what’s going on in Switzerland or New York. The key part of that report is to start the collaboration. We can see that Germany is doing something similar to what we’re doing in Brazil but we’ve never spoken about that. Something as simple as that can really change how people view diversity and inclusion work. One of the privileges of working in a global company is that you can learn so many lessons without having to go outside your four walls. If you’re in 20+ entities you can arguably learn best practices just from listening internally to what’s working. But if you never listen, you never ask, you’re never going to find that out. So it was really important to make sure people started that collaborative journey.
I don’t think people think of D&I work as improving collaboration. I don’t know that they make that connection as much as they should.
Yeah, I agree. I think people forget that or don't realize that if everybody's on the same page they can collaborate better because there's no context missing. That’s ultimately what this work is about. If everyone has the same context or understands where we are then it’s very easy to jump into that conversation and get involved because they’re not missing any information they need. It’s as simple as 1+1=2 but people forget that.
They do. And also that there’s so much data involved in the work. It seems really important to have a data-centered approach when you’re in 25 countries and have 50 offices.
I have personally always said that you should never do this work without data being involved and certainly with people analytics. For me, that is so important.
How do people feel in your office around belonging, management support, non-discrimination, and so on? How do they feel when you break it down by, let's say gender, by seniority, by gender combined with seniority, by ethnicity, whatever it might be that you're capturing? That's when you get to the real nuance of what it means to do this work. We shared our first external full D&I report at Valtech this year. We broke it down by regions and then by other things like gender, entities, and so on. For me, that's where data is so important.
We’ve spent a lot of time with different initiatives. We run those different drivers within our people analytics system so we can see if this works. If it does it should change the score, if it doesn’t work the score might decrease. It’s important to have a temperature check (and report back) so people know when they answer that survey that it’s being used for something as opposed to it just going in the wind and being forgotten about. We use it for meaningful change.
Yeah, the level of specificity you can get when you're using data can help to pinpoint where your strategies and what you need to adjust.
Yeah, absolutely. It also means you don’t have to put people on the spot. One of the things that I noticed after the murder of George Floyd was that we saw a lot of companies trying to immediately jump start ethnicity inclusion, specifically focusing on black folks. But they did so by hosting a lot of like round tables that required people to stand there or sit there remotely, and say something. There wasn’t psychological safety. It's also very difficult for some folks to do that. Whereas, you know, using tools that embed anonymity, for example, means that people can share without feeling like they're raising their hand. It’s very important.
So many good lessons. I’ll make sure to link to the VALTECH D&I report.
You mentioned that these environments can be pretty fast-paced and global. I’m curious how you handle that being at a group leadership level.
The key thing for me, maintaining that fast-paced nature in a global company is ensuring that there's accountability with the people that are ultimately delivering.
Very often in global companies, people only connect with operational folks maybe once a year. What about the in-between times? How do we ensure that we’re connected to assist when it’s needed?
I have connections to all of our local leaders, that's our managing directors or our regional directors, and also our local people and culture leaders as well. I connect with those people once a month to make sure that we’re making progress. If we’re not making progress that’s an avenue for them to share why as well.
The other key thing with maintaining pace as well is the measurement. At Valtech I’ve created a global diversity and inclusion maturity index. It’s about 60 questions. Depending on your answers, you’ll get different scores. We also utilize our Peakon engagement scores. The key thing is that we have a scoreboard for our entities. Some of them are advanced, and some of them are beginners, but either way, everybody knows what they need to do next because there are clear beginner, intermediate, and advanced-level plans that you can follow. I create structures and frameworks for every single line in that maturity index – all of the templates, all of that is created. I’ve taken out vagueness. It’s all right there in black and white. That’s how you maintain a pace that you empower people to deliver. Leave room for people to bring things to life in the way they want to, but still provide that guidance.
A good example of that is that on top of the maturity index we know that outside of a group level, thereare nuances at a local level that are not captured in that strategy because that would be impossible. So, what we do in the Maturity Index is have an avenue for people to provide up to three initiatives that they have done that don't align with the Maturity Index and don't align with the strategy, but are important from a local perspective.
Again, making sure people can have that tailored element, but still know what to do and not feel lost in the process. If you help people in the journey, but empower them to deliver in a way that makes sense for them, you'll get the progress that you want. We move fast at Valtech now that we have all of those structures in place. We spent a lot of time – six to eight months – to get those structures and accountability in place. Sometimes things slow down, things happen in the economy, and things change but we still know what we’re doing and we’re clear on that.
That’s so good. What advice would you give to other leaders who have global roles or responsibilities?
Make sure you have embedded avenues to listen. Whether that's through councils, representatives, or an engagement platform – make sure that you have embedded avenues and spaces for people to share. Dedicate time in your diary to read and go through those things as well. So for example, we share our engagement survey every quarter at Valtech. After that goes out I have dedicated time in my diary to go through everything, to read the comments. I spend so much time digesting. As senior leaders, we’re asked to speak a lot because that’s our expertise but it’s also important to remember that there’s lots of stuff we don’t know. That willingness to listen to other experiences, and different perspectives, and a willingness to be wrong makes a really strong leader in a global context because there are conflicting views all of the time. It’s important to recognize that before you make decisions. Do that proactively instead of reactively.