There are few HR leaders who can say they’ve led people operations for one company for nearly their entire career. But Ellyn Shook, the CHRO of Accenture, has been a mainstay of the global IT services and consulting firm for more than 36 years.
She joined the team back in 1988 as an HR director. When she leveled up to CHRO in 2014, the business had 300,000 global employees, and she played a prominent role in scaling and training the workforce ever since. During her executive tenure Accenture has grown to nearly 750,000 staffers across 120 countries.
Shook is retiring at the end of August, and as she passes the torch on to her successor, Fortune sat down with her to discuss her career, how the landscape of people management has changed, and what the future holds for the world of HR.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
What has been the highlight of your career as an HR executive?
As an organization, we needed to bring innovation to the doorsteps of our clients. You can’t do that unless you’re diverse, because you need cognitive diversity in your people to be able to innovate. The FTSE Russell Diversity and Inclusion Index is the most comprehensive and objective measurement of diversity in the world, and we’ve been number one on that index four of the last six years.
We understood that becoming much more diverse is so important to us in being able to serve our clients, and nothing is easy about that. You have to lay a strong [talent strategy] foundation, you have to access, create, and unlock strategy. You have to find new sources of talent, develop people appropriately, and engage and inspire people differently. And we’ve done it at a massive scale.
We’re almost at 49% women, we’ve been number one on the Human Rights Campaign for 14 years. In seven countries where we’re part of their Disability:IN indexes, we’re number one. We’re also regularly talking to clients about inclusion and diversity.
How has the HR landscape changed over the course of your 36-year career?
I’ve seen three massive shifts: one being this concept of HR, when I started, being very administrative, to now being experts.
The second shift was that HR people are probably great HR people because they had a good gut. They had good intuition, they understood people. It moved away from that to using data and analytics to bring insights forward.
The third shift is CHROs leading across the C-suite. Companies are reinventing at a faster rate than ever before. What I tell CHROs is, “Yes, there’s a lot of AI that can be applied inside your function, but you really should have your functional HR team do that work.”
CHROs should be leading across the C-suite and really reinventing work, therefore preparing your workforce for change. CHROs broadly repositioned themselves during COVID, and now are well-positioned to play this large-scale transformation role across the business.
There’s never been a more exciting time to be a CHRO.
What are you looking for in a successor?
Succession planning is part of my job, and I felt a very strong sense of obligation to prepare my successor. And I’m happy to say that I did—her name is Angela Beatty. I hired her nine years ago when I was looking for someone with a background consulting CEOs, CFOs, and CHROs about talent and total reward strategies, because that was the beginning of this big transformation we were doing. She understands our business deeply, and cares deeply about the people of Accenture.
She’s going to reimagine the work, planning, and education of our people. She’s going to be able to bring her innovative mindset, and her caring for our people, to really move further and faster than we’ve ever done. I really believe she can do it. What allows me to retire with peace is that I have such a great successor.
What do you think the future holds for HR?
Preparing frontline managers to lead in such a fast-paced world with so many societal issues happening not just in our own company, but around the world, is going to take up a lot of focus.
One of the things we learned is that compassion is probably one of the most significant leadership characteristics of our time. It’s not just being empathetic, it’s being compassionate, taking action on that. HR leaders also have to have very sophisticated listening frameworks that allow you to constantly be in touch with the pulse of the people, what’s on their mind, and what’s in their heart. Companies that can do those three things together are going to be the winners.
What advice do you have for other HR professionals?
Wake up every single day with intention. Intention about your professional life and about your life beyond your profession. And also dig deep and understand what sets your soul on fire, so that you can work at the intersection of what you’re great at and what you love to do. That’s why I stayed in HR for this long at this company—because I found that intersection.
