Throughout Theresa Drew’s 30-year career with Deloitte LLP, she’s been through many struggles. To start, there was the time in 1991 when she was promoted to partner and, at the same time, was also diagnosed with cancer, which she overcame.
“That experience forced me to re-evaluate all of my commitments and really sharpened my focus on my priorities,” she says. “Work continued to be very important to me because it grounded me, and being productive helped me move forward during that difficult time, but it also put a spotlight on balancing my family, my career and my life.”
Most recently, the economic downturn has challenged her in her position as the managing partner of Deloitte in San Diego.
“Managing in this most recent downturn has been a significant leadership challenge for me,” she says. “At Deloitte, we have a lot of younger employees who have never experienced a recession during their professional careers.”
Smart Business spoke with Drew about how she leads employees and builds a stronger firm, despite the challenges thrown her way.
Stay close to people. Staying positive and staying close to our people during the last 18 months has been extremely important. I try to focus on how we’re dealing with the downturn, what our strategy is looking forward and communicating continuously. Part of my philosophy as a professional services firm is we have to take care of our people so they continue to take care of our clients.
A lot of our people work out at our client sites, so we encourage all of our partners and directors to also do the same so we’re there to answer their questions. It builds confidence and also allows us to communicate, on a regular basis, what our strategy is, what we’re planning for the future, how we’re working through the recession and so forth.
Communicate effectively. The key is to be very straight with how we deliver any messages, and this would be at any time, but particularly in challenging times, but also allow there to be a dialogue and allow our staff people to ask questions and to express their concerns. In that way, you’re able to truly communicate the messages that you want to get across.
The most effective means of communication is face to face, and we try to do that on a fairly regular basis. Because many of our people are out at client sites on a regular basis, we have to use other methods of communication. My second choice would be voice mail, and then our third choice would be through e-mail.
I start out with what are the messages that we need to deliver, and I think through an outline of what I need to get across to our people. If I’m struggling with the messaging, I’ll often turn to my other partners and directors to get their feedback before I deliver messages in a more broad sense. We have about 200 people here in San Diego. My partner director group is about 28 people, so I might ask one or two of the other partners and directors how they might think my messaging would be perceived. Does it answer the questions, or does it create more questions? So I’ll seek feedback before I — especially if they’re tough messages — would deliver those.