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Bob Sternfels in the Wall Street Journal: How do you move from “proving yourself to improving yourself?”

In a Wall Street Journal interview published January 7, our global managing partner Bob Sternfels talked about his career, his vision for our firm, and the changes we’re making to help our clients achieve sustainable and inclusive growth. Read on for edited highlights, or head over to the Wall Street Journal [paywall] for the full interview.

On his top priorities

Three words come to mind: courageous, inclusive and faster.

What our clients are saying is, as leaders, none of them want to miss the moment. And so my goal is how do we have the courage to help them do something they normally wouldn’t have done.

The inclusive is actually about us; we’ve come a long way in terms of the composition of our firm, but I think we’ve only scratched the surface.

On being faster, the world’s never going to slow down again, and our clients are demanding that we move faster than they do. So how do we create a model that can actually move more quickly?

On McKinsey’s partnership approach

Clients demand the absolute best insight on something and not a regional insight on something. So, in some ways a global partnership model—done right—does allow the best-known method to be imported anywhere in the world. There are differences on what types of clients should we serve, what country should we be in? To make a partnership model work, you have to really invest in sharing perspectives and having honest debates, and engaging all partners on some of these decisions.

You can have a delegated model that empowers people if you have strong accountability and compliance. So we have taken big steps on client selection, where we now run everything through a framework. In addition to a selection process, we’re adding professionals; we hired a new chief compliance officer. So we’re not going backward. Does it ensure that we’ll never have scrutiny in the future? I can’t say, but I do feel it’s a firm that continues to evolve.

On what he’s learned over his 27-year McKinsey career

I think the biggest thing for me as I think about different chapters is a notion of how do you pivot from being obsessed with proving yourself to improving yourself? It’s maybe less a function of what’s going to be good for my evaluation or promotion, and more, what do I want to do as a professional?

One of the biggest pivots we can make in our own talent-development processes is pivoting from a culture that’s obsessed with evaluating people to one that’s developing people. And we’re wiring in a whole bunch of changes around that to try and get people back to [doing] what you want to do as a professional, not what people are telling you in terms of the evaluation process.

On discounting tenure as an indicator of skill

Internally, we have an app that we’ve built to search the firm. It can search colleagues, it can search expertise, all kinds of things. One of the first things that historically pulls up if I pulled up your profile is your name, your title and your tenure. I got rid of tenure on this. Folks were screaming: “How can you do this? It’s such a great search tool.”

Part of the reason is we’re going to move away from time as an approximation for your skills, and rather be much more specific around what your skills are. So you may join us with 20 years’ experience but your tenure may say six months in the firm. That is not a good approximation for your skill.

On the evolving profile of McKinsey talent

Our work with our clients has really pivoted over the last 20 years. Similarly, the profiles of people joining the firm have widened enormously. [Years ago], the majority of people came straight from an M.B.A. There’s nothing wrong with that, but that’s 19 percent of our class today. The majority come from a much wider set of sources: both senior hires, technical talent. There are over 370 universities now that we recruit from.

On today’s CEO agenda

This is a moment, and it’s a moment unlike any other. So there’s this almost existential question of: I don’t want a board, or my predecessor, or the press, looking back and saying, how did that person miss this? There is a real imperative, particularly for CEOs, to drive growth: How do I grow coming out of this pandemic? The other aspect is, am I thinking about inclusion? This has aspects of everything from, “I just can’t find the talent that I need to do what I need to do,” to “Am I thinking comprehensively about reskilling the workforce?”

The last piece I would say on the minds of everyone is climate; the notion that it can’t be the next CEO’s problem. This is my problem. Almost 75 percent of our clients have made a net-zero commitment, and I’m sure we’ll be on a path to 100 percent soon. But underneath that, they’re asking: Is my approach material enough? Is it fast enough?

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