February 2022 | Resource
What our mission—building the next generation of leaders—looks like in practice
West Monroe is serious about building the next generation of leaders. Here’s how we help our people grow.
What our mission—building the next generation of leaders—looks like in practice
West Monroe’s mission is to build the next generation of leaders through mentorship and ensuring people are set up for success.
Tanya Sukhu, a partner in the Los Angeles office in the Dental & Ancillary consulting group, knew early on how seriously West Monroe valued her success as a leader. Though she had worked in healthcare consulting for many years, the dental industry was fairly new to her. Naturally, Tanya was nervous during the onboarding process.
“Throughout my career I’ve seen a lot of experienced hires leave other companies having not been onboarded appropriately or the right way,” she said. “As I made this transition, I wanted to make sure that there was going to be a good plan in place to make sure I could get integrated into the firm and the culture in the right way.”
Her worries were quickly put to rest.
Prior to her first project, Tanya was paired with an experienced senior Dental & Ancillary leader who she was able to shadow. She wasn’t thrown into the deep end and made to fend for herself like she feared. Instead, she was able to have hands-on training and learn as she worked with her mentor on one of West Monroe’s largest dental accounts on the West Coast. This experience proved valuable to her during her first project where she helped her own client with a new claims system.
It really, truly is a very people-first company. People are very easy to work with and collaborative. They’re all willing to help out in any way possible and I’ve really enjoyed my experience,” Tanya said. “I will say the healthcare onboarding team did an excellent job of making sure that I was paired with the right practice.
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Tanya was able to pass on the knowledge she gained from her beginning months at West Monroe to her team members and new hires.
“Some of the guidance is really just helping folks understand who to talk to, how to think about the project experience they might be having and how to think about that relative to where they want to go with their career trajectory. I talk a lot with my team around which projects to take and why,” Tanya said. “I have one particular person that came on board and I’m super proud of the work she’s doing. She’s really becoming an expert in our dental practice.”
Making a global impact by volunteering through West Monroe’s Fischer Global Fellowship
This collaborative environment expands beyond West Monroe’s walls, too.
Madeline Verbeten, a manager on the Mergers & Acquisitions team, has been able to personally and professionally grow by participating in the Fischer Global Fellowship, a program that supports employees in taking a leave of absence to volunteer their time and talent to support a cause.
For seven months, she was able to pursue a challenging leadership opportunity with a nonprofit organization in Ecuador without having to give up her long-term career at West Monroe.
“West Monroe has a program where you can take time off to work with a nonprofit or other organization anywhere in the world that you’re passionate about to create a program with them,” said Madeline, who spent time working with the Mana Project in Ecuador.
Madeline is passionate about Latin American and Spanish culture, and she had hoped she could someday apply the skills she’d acquired at West Monroe to pursue that. While there, she helped the Mana Project with nonprofit management and best practices like making sure they were being efficient in how they ran the organization.
“[The Fischer Fellowship] is a really unique way to challenge yourself personally and professionally, but also really get a glimpse into different opportunities out there in the world and use your skills that you’ve been developing at West Monroe to work with and help a nonprofit that’s really mission-focused,” she said.
Supporting the growth of our people by challenging them to think outside the box
As a director in technology at West Monroe, Eric Chi invests as much in his team as he does his clients.
When it comes to finding solutions for clients, Eric makes it a point to push his team to think outside the box and come up with creative ways to tackle problems.
We frequently see the same problems with different clients, and it’s very easy for us to do a cookie-cutter solution, but really what we want to do is make sure that we’re tailoring it to the client’s specific needs. We make sure we’re being creative with what we’re doing and also challenging our team.
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By doing this, Eric has seen his team come up with innovative solutions to each client's need that oftentimes impress Eric himself. Consider the time one of Eric’s teammates automated a process that would have taken them a few hours to do by hand—and he did it during lunchtime while simply toying around with different potential solutions.
“I love pushing my team because being comfortable to me is not always a good thing,” he said. “I think being uncomfortable means that you’re constantly learning, you’re constantly pushing yourself. And for me, I’ve had my successes by people pushing me as well.”
