To date, two different meetings with bosses have ended up defining Lindsay Stevenson's career.
In the first, she was distraught and overworked in the office of the Arizona accounting firm where she was employed as a CPA about nine years ago.
"I sat in the managing partner's office and cried that I didn't think the profession was ready for me, that I wanted to change how I worked and served clients," she shared.
Her husband was worried she was a workaholic (a condition she describes as mostly self-inflicted, not due to the particular firm) but she had started public speaking about change leadership at industry events and volunteering at the American Institute of CPAs, which gave her more satisfaction than her long hours of client-facing work.
So she left her public accounting job to work as a vice president of finance and tax at a bank, and then launched her own consulting firm that helped firms become more purpose-driven by aligning culture with strategic initiatives, and introducing equity and inclusion initiatives and training.
But then came her second pivotal meeting, this time with Jim Wallace, CEO of San Francisco-based Top 50 Firm BPM.
"He asked, 'What would you do if you could create your perfect dream job?'" she recounted. "I wanted to work in transforming and helping firms, and the profession, to think differently. He said, 'Let's do that.' I said, 'Oh, really?'"
While Stevenson had enjoyed her job at the bank and "really, really loved" the work her consultancy was doing to help firms innovate, her external role had some drawbacks.
"The bad part with consulting is that you never see the end results," she said. "You're designing what's important and getting pumped up, but at the end of the day, they do the heavy lifting, they can celebrate, and they see how it is operating on a daily basis."
But since Wallace gave her that opportunity to draw up her dream job, Stevenson has been able to do all of that, becoming BPM's chief transformation officer three years ago. She has since built a transformation team of nine people to guide the firm's wide-ranging innovation efforts.
Incremental changes
Among the recent initiatives that Stevenson's team is undertaking is a firmwide project: building a "data lakehouse," which improves business intelligence and machine learning by migrating data to a new management platform created to house both structured and unstructured data. From forming the committee to implementation launch, the project took 11 months.
"The process is essentially, we need this, and we submitted it to the PMO [project management office] and [said] 'It will take this investment, this energy' … and we got the greenlight," she explained. "We created a separate steering committee of genius people that understand the data, internal and client-facing, and then had months of researching vendors. We went through demos before finally choosing vendors and a new product team and, with the IT group, identified the resources we needed from them to be successful."
Large-scale projects like this require project managers, but BPM's transformation team also oversees smaller initiatives that don't require a full-time PM. Recently, the assurance team wanted to use artificial intelligence-assisted writing tool Grammarly to improve their internal and client communications, so BPM beta-tested it with a small group to great success before expanding the user base. And Stevenson's team is also helping the firm try out and collect feedback on virtual-office software Kumospace for potential future implementation, while the IT team recently built the tax department a chatbot to provide quick, safe and relevant tax information within the firm's internal, private environment.
The range of project sizes underscores Stevenson's philosophy of gradual shifts being key to success.
"Any organization wishes they spent 100% of their time on innovation and cutting-edge, crazy ideas that could change the world," Stevenson explained, "but in reality, most transformation is all incremental changes that bring you closer to the outcomes we are really passionate about."
Of course, this runs the risk of instilling impatience — or even disillusionment.
"The challenge in the day-to-day environment is you can feel not as inspired by big ideas, the kind that trigger that excitement, when working on one step to make it possible," she shared. "Those incremental shifts build a strong foundation for meaningful transformation — if you don't spend time on that, there is failure on the big side. All of us are daydreamers by nature, envelope-pushers, but [change] needs to be realistic and impactful: the steps to get outcomes; the big, flashy things to report at the end are not the whole process. There's always so much going on, so focus can be challenging."
Transformation is inevitable
Daydreaming and envelope-pushing is not only what attracted Stevenson to her role but led her to create it, and with that, a new way of thinking throughout the firm.
"When I was first brought on, we were building innovation and transformation into the culture, to be woven in and directed in more intentional ways," she said. "Quickly after that, we brought in our transformation manager and worked to build out change in our leadership strategy, and what that looks like as we progress and weave it into projects … . At the same time, our director of business intelligence and data governance has a team focused on transformation, how we are leveraging data, do we have a data roadmap, how do we position ourselves to have access to business intelligence. We have two teams inside the transformation [department], and since then we have built out our project management office where we manage and filter products, and the PMO helps with resource management and allocation."
Stevenson oversees weekly team meetings that are structured to give every direct report four minutes to address their top three priorities, then list any barriers or "asks" of the team or firm.
"It's really effective for us as a team, to collaborate with each other; it works really well," she said, explaining that as none of the team members are in the same location, meetings are conducted remotely over Microsoft Teams.
Stevenson credits BPM's being "really great around strategic planning" for helping work these ideas up the leadership chain: "There is a lot of connection to strategic priorities. We make time for ideation, because you never know when something really great is going to strike. With our strategic ideas and outcomes, we keep each other in check. It's so fun to work on that … . Sometimes it isn't as fun to be accountable, to [ask], 'Is this something we want to be five years from now?' If the answer is unclear or no, we don't focus on that."
Having to shoot down ideas is a continual, but necessary, hurdle for Stevenson and her team.
"There is so much talent in the organization, from the interns up to the CEO, really smart, engaged, incredibly bright people who have ideas all the time," she shared. "The hardest thing, in the beginning, is saying no to something. There are a lot of really good ideas, but only some are really great."
It is Stevenson and her team's job to help the firm discern the difference, and to inspire staff to tap into the kind of idealism that has guided her career, and led her into this role of guiding others.
The transformation team was created "so people don't feel so discouraged, so they keep thinking, keep dreaming, keep considering," she said. "You don't know when a good idea is going to become a great idea … . We want the firm to transform, for people to share ideas, to continue to grow, and we have to lead by example."
