| Topic Name: |
Managers and team leads younger than you... |
| Message Name: |
Yes, but not the way they've told you |
| Date Posted: |
03/14/2006 |
| In Reply To: |
Having experience (even management expereince) is not the same as having Accenture experience. It takes time to learn the Accenture culture and way of doing things as well as how to be successful within it.
I can't speak for any particular bad experience anyone can point out on the board, but in general, Accenture's experienced hires at the manager level and above struggle to be successful within the firm for a while before they get it right.
You can have deep industry skills but still have no Accenture style delivery skills. You can have management skills, but still will not know ADM (the methodology) or how to navigate the the KX. It takes time to build up these skills and build your network within Accenture.
Most experienced hires struggle with this. If you are an experienced hire ask for the coaching. If you are leading an experienced hire, develop these skills and then you can unleash the power behind the other excellent and relevant experience.
Ans you should also know that I joined ACN as an experienced hire. |
| Message: |
"Accenture's experienced hires at the manager level and above struggle to be successful within the firm for a while before they get it right."
It's not a matter of the the more experienced employees "getting it right" while the less experienced, "I joined right out of college" employers automatically getting it "right" from the get go.
The experienced employers, particularly those with real world manager experience, already have it right. They have to forget the "right" way and do it the cookie-cutter, auto-pilot, Accenture way. Having an official Accenture way makes sense, since most of the employees are very young, mostly in their 20s or, at best, in their early 30s. Having the step-by-step, one way of doing things, don't be a maverick, way of doing things assures that every one is doing things in the chosen, proven to work most of the time, fashion.
Experienced people already know many ways of doing things and also have the flexibility of moving with the situation and choosing actions and protocols based on the situation. Being forced to do it the cookie cutter way is frustrating. The experienced hires are struggling, that true. But they are not struggling to "get it right." They're struggling with the frustration of having a toolbox full of techniques and experiences under their belt, but still being forced to use the one, Accenture toobox.
It's not a matter of them failing to be successful at the company. It's a matter of the company failing to take advantage of their experience and skills. They have strong skills (probably stronger than the young kids who joined out college and have no other experience other than ACN). They have strong delivery and management and end-user / client facing abilities. But they just don't know the secret, Accenture, handshake. They know how to research the net and make use of lessons learned and the documentation from their previous projects, but until they are at Accenture for more than 3 or 4 weeks, they don't know how to specifically use the internal resources of ACN found on the company intranet (just as the "I grew up with the firm" youngsters probably couldn't figure out how to get the phone number of the taxi company if the KX went down, let alone start project related work from scratch).
Put an experienced person in a room without a laptop, and she'd still be able to get started. Put some young exp consultant or new manager in the same room without a laptop and she'd probably sit there, inert, until they get get back online to get instructions how to proceed.
This is why the BIM-BAM-SQERT automatic transmission is a good thing. If you don't have any doctors around, you need to leave very detailed instructions on how to perform a medical procedure. Very detailed.
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