A great team experience with talented women

By Denise

Originally from Australia, Denise joined our Stamford office in the fall of 2014 as an experienced hire, and transferred to the Seattle office in the fall of 2016. She's served a wide range of clients in her consulting career and is now focused on food companies in the consumer, retail, and logistics industries. Denise holds degrees in commerce and economics from the University of Queensland. She has lots of personal interests, including cooking, restaurant-exploring, anything outdoors, playing the saxophone, keeping up with the latest on entrepreneurship and gender issues, and exploring her new home country with family and friends.

June 26, 2018Hi again,

Since completing the KIP project I wrote about in my last post, I’ve also worked on a client engagement focused on product optimization. This was really cool work with very tangible impact, and I’m really proud of what we were able to achieve in partnership with the client.

One of the highlights for me was the people side, both at McKinsey and at the client. On the client side, we’ve worked side-by-side with a group phenomenal people with whom we’ve built lasting relationships. On the McKinsey side, we had a heavily female team (all female from associate partner down!), which has been such a fun experience and so great to see in operations.

My team with our ‘team gong’, which we a for our clients when they hit a milestone or goal!

I worked closely with three associates who were all within their first year at McKinsey. I really love the opportunity to coach and mentor our newer colleagues, and I continue to be blown away by how incredible these people are—and yet how different they are. All three of my team have very different strengths, so I have put a lot of time into thinking how to best coach people to bring out their individual strengths while also maximizing the team’s overall effectiveness and cohesiveness. All while fostering a great environment in which they can all learn from one other.

One of the things that resonated with my team is peer-to-peer feedback. McKinsey has a strong feedback culture, and it’s important for my teams to know that this is not only “downward” feedback. It’s important to me to create an environment in which peers feel comfortable early in their tenure giving feedback both laterally and upwards. This concept was quite new to some of my teammates, and they commented that it really helped them.

We just wrapped up the project, which we started at the beginning of the year (see some snippets from our team experience here). It was sad to disband the team, but I’m so grateful to have had such a positive and impactful experience to kick-off the new year!

Denise