Fargo, North Dakota-based Eide Bailly approaches the profession’s chronic gender imbalance in the leadership ranks with the same analytical skill and strategic planning that has made it a Top 25 Firm. In its years of work to boost the firm’s number of women leaders, Eide Bailly began with some simple calculations. “We need to level the playing field,” explained chief human resources officer Lisa Fitzgerald. “We looked at numbers — accountants like numbers — and they were really telling us the story that we needed to do work in this space.”
When Eide Bailly crunched those numbers over a decade ago, they revealed 17% of the partnership was female, prompting the firm to launch its women initiative, First Focus, in 2007. “Our first conversation stemmed from concerns with female senior associate retention, the number of female partners,” Fitzgerald shared. She, along with then-COO, now managing partner and CEO Dave Stende, attended an American Institute of CPAs workshop about starting a women’s initiative, which was “really, really eye-opening for both of us, especially him,” she recounted.
Fitzgerald and Stende got to work convincing the rest of the firm leadership. “It took a year, a year and a half of laying the groundwork with partners and creating the business case for why the initiative was important,” Fitzgerald said. “To get everyone to understand why it was important to support and implement it, a task force committee was created made up of partners, an HR representative [and more]. That group came up with the mission and vision of what the initiative was going to be. We essentially created what we called Focus Forums.”
A central First Focus program, Focus Forums are a series of videoconferencing sessions facilitated by the firm’s female senior managers and designed for female senior associates and first-year managers who are specially invited to participate. In that first year, 120 participants met six times over Skype to discuss a variety of female-focused topics.
And while the forums were created to enhance the leadership skills and provide essential networking for the firm’s rising female professionals, they also greatly benefitted the facilitators, Fitzgerald shared. “One of the things that happened along the way, unexpectedly, is that those women who we trained and were leaned on as facilitators had phenomenal success throughout our organization,” she explained. “Every year, our partner list, promotion list [includes] facilitators. That has been an unintended success. We knew these women were high performers, but we could point to their time as facilitators, in training, that made them successful through their whole career.”
About half of these facilitators over the forums’ 14 years have stayed with the firm and been promoted. And that 17% figure that helped kickstart the Focus Forums has risen to women comprising 31.5% of Eide Bailly’s partnership, well above the profession’s average of 23%.
The firm identifies new facilitators by seeking recommendations from the current class and fielding referrals from partners. Facilitating is a two-year commitment of eight to 12 sessions (four to six per year), with a few days of training, and new facilitators partner with second-year facilitators who mentor them as they co-facilitate.
Facilitators “delve into the content more fully than as participants,” Fitzgerald explained. “They point often to things they learned from this initiative, the content, and learning to facilitate as well. It’s one of the key reasons they continue to move through their careers the way they have. It’s fun to watch those women succeed, and be one of the reasons they are able to make partner.”
Making the case
The Focus Forums are an integral part of the firm’s wider women’s initiative, which has further expanded in recent years with the launch of an inclusion and diversity initiative in 2018. The forums are open to all genders, though women still make up 90% of participants and all the facilitators. While First Focus continues to evolve, the business case has only gotten stronger since Fitzgerald and Stende first pitched it to firm management.
“There were a couple of things,” Fitzgerald recalled about the bullet points of those early meetings. “Clients were more and more owned by or had people in leadership positions that were female … There were a lot of [studies] pointing to businesses that had women on boards as being more successful. So it was really about, we had to retain women at the senior associate and manager level to funnel into the partnership, and we needed those women to get the work done — we couldn’t have turnover at that level, so we needed to make sure we were giving the tools and having the right conversations so women weren’t self-selecting out at that point.”
Fitzgerald credits the peer networking aspect of the forums as critical to retaining women, with participants sharing best practices and books that have inspired and guided them on their career paths.
For firms looking to start or improve their own female-focused programs, Fitzgerald said swapping book titles is an example of the many small ways to begin initiating deeper conversations.
“Take some action; it doesn’t have to be grandiose,” she advised. “Start somewhere: a lunch and learn to get together and talk, with a loose agenda. Saying ‘I read this great book,’ and reading it with the other females in your office. Or encouraging women to run for your board, or seek leadership opportunities, mentoring.”
Fitzgerald stressed that firms shouldn’t be afraid of starting small, though it’s critical to solicit support from the top in those early stages. “We’ve done a lot of great things, but it can be overwhelming — you need commitment, resources and leadership buy-in,” she said. “Someone who is passionate about the topic, who can spearhead and coordinate.”
Fitzgerald expressed gratitude for having that person in Stende, who remained committed even as he transitioned from COO to CEO in 2013 (and is now preparing to pass the baton to his successor, Jeremy Hauk, who will assume the role in May 2022).
“[Stende] and I got this going,” Fitzgerald shared. “He was very visibly supportive of this initiative from the very beginning. He and I appointed the organizational committee... to tell the story about Eide Bailly and our culture — specifically when we are recruiting and with retention, the investment we’re willing to make.”
That investment continues, with a greater focus on inclusion and diversity efforts, Fitzgerald reports, which also began with scrutinizing the numbers: “We look at the metrics and the statistics to determine what story this is telling us. Where are the gaps, and what are things we need to put into play to help with those gaps, and why is it important?”
“There is plenty more work to do,” she added. “We’re off to a great start, and have had great success, but it’s not like it’s over. We have work to do.”
