Transcript: Interview With Wes Bricker, CPA

In our latest Leading Forward podcast episode, Maureen talks with Wes Bricker, CPA, vice chair and assurance leader at PWC, about the CEO Action Pledge, creating transparency and PWC's commitment to diversity and inclusion. Listen to the full podcast here, and now you can watch the podcast recording here. 

Maureen:
Welcome to Leading Forward. Today we are with Wes Bricker. He is the vice chair and assurance leader at PWC. And Wes is going to talk with us today about PWCs commitment to diversity and inclusion. So thanks for joining us West.

Wes:
Well, thanks very much Maureen. It's wonderful to be with you and to be with the Virginia society of CPAs.

Maureen:
So you're up in McLean, right?

Wes:
I am. I am. I'm a proud resident of the Commonwealth and a proud member.

Maureen:
Great, great. Well, we appreciate that. Wes before we dive into what PWC is doing on this topic, can you just give us a, a glimpse of your leadership journey? How did you get to where you are right now with PWC?

Wes:
Well, thanks very much Marine. My participation in our profession really started when, when I graduated, I joined PWC as an intern and worked a bit in the tax practice and then the audit practice finally settled on auditing, but my journey certainly didn't start with a background in the profession of, by my father was a small business owner, but was not an accountant. My mother was a teacher, nowhere close to the accounting profession. And so what I discovered in the accounting profession was opportunity to really understand something that was new to me. And so as, as I did that, I started in our Harrisburg, Pennsylvania office PWC. Grew up in that office would ultimately moved to Washington where I worked on larger engagements. And then also did a work in public policy with the public policy of the profession.

Wes:
From there, I worked in our national office on deep technical financial reporting and accounting issues. And at that point I was tapped on the shoulder to join the sec where I spent two years as a professional accounting fellow, working through some of the reporting issues of the global financial crisis. After that, I came back to the firm, led engagements led our people for PWC within the Washington Metro area all the way from recruiting to development and promotion. And then it was tapped on the shoulder one more time to respond to the call for public service. I went back to the FCC, ultimately served as the STCs chief accountant which was a real privilege to work with the profession at that level. And then came back to the firm after serving in that way to lead PWCs assurance practice, which I do for the U S and Mexico. And also sit on our global leadership team of, for the assurance practice here at PWC. So it's been a journey. It's been a journey of discovery. I didn't start with with any knowledge of the profession, but what I love about the profession is that for people who really have an interest in it, there's access and I'm committed to helping others find that same access that I found as, as I was on my own journey arena.

Maureen:
So you obviously have seen a lot of change within the firm, just, you know, you mentioned a lot of the technical issues, the, the global financial crisis, you you've really seen a lot. And along with that, you you've seen a lot with the organization's commitment to diversity and inclusion. And, and one of the things that we were chatting about before this is DWC really has had their, their, their commitment for a while. It's not just been you know, the latest fad. It's, it's been really been a noticeable commitment. So can you just tell us a little bit about PWC commitment to diversity and inclusion and maybe how it has evolved and especially in the last year?

Wes:
Yeah. Thank you for asking that question. It is something that I'm passionate about. And I joined all of our partners and leaders at the firm in being passionate about this topic of diversity and inclusion in our firm, but also in the profession and in business and in society much more broadly. We want to be the change we want to drive the change that we want to see in the world. It starts with us, and it starts with the inside of our organization. That's the change we want to see. So we've been focused on driving sustainable change in diversity and inclusion for quite some time, as, as you mentioned, Marine COVID was an accelerator in many ways of the change that we need to see. And, and and, and what I mean by that is COVID has changed the certainly the way people work and relate.

Wes:
And in some ways there are positive aspects of that, but in other ways, there are additional leadership challenges communicating by video. For example, everyone has the same size of box. So hierarchy is really reset in a virtual environment, but equally it can create distance distance between leaders and, and people distance between team members, where we have to be purposeful about connecting, making sure everyone has a voice. Everyone feels that belonging, everyone has a seat at the table. So we've been very focused on, on not only our diversity and inclusion journey over time, but also leading as COVID has accelerated our need to be very purposeful about this.

Maureen:
You know, one thing that you just made me think about when you said we all have the same size box, and I hadn't heard that as a resetting, but I had heard someone say, you know, when you're looking to get a seat at the table, but there is no table, how do you navigate that? So it has changed things in, in ways that maybe we're not even aware of right now.

Wes:
Yup. Yup. Well, one, one of the first steps that we found in our journey is the importance of being accountable. And it, it then goes beyond the importance of committing to diversity and inclusion. That's an important step, but it reaches beyond that to defining what that means in a concrete practical way, and then being accountable as leaders for making progress. I would say that's, that's the first thing that we learned. One of the ways in which we've delivered against accountability is by reporting as, as accountants, we, we live reporting, we know reporting we're very concrete. Well, we used that same discipline in diversity and inclusion. And last year we published our first annual diversity and inclusion transparency report. It's available on our website. I'd encourage our listeners to go look at it and it outlines our diversity strategy in our data, but also our progress of our actions and a commitment of our firm to continue to report annually.

Wes:
And what that does that transparency of where we are. We're not satisfied with where we are, but that transparency of where we are helps then drive accountability for more forward progress. It helps communicate to all of our people internally where we are not just a small group of leaders. It also helps communicate to our stakeholders where we are not just the firm. And so it helps reinforce our strategy and our actions with clear accountability for continuing to make progress. What are, what are some of the types of data points that you report on? Yeah, so we report the full lifecycle from recruiting. What is the representation of the class that we're recruiting? We also report on red tension, we report on promotion, we report on pay. So it's the full life cycle. As, as we looked at our opportunity to put together this report, we looked at the add it.

Wes:
We, we said a target of being the most transparent among business on a topic that re really care about for our people, for our values and for the experience that we're creating. And so we benchmarked against the, the best of diversity and inclusion of reports that we could find. And I'm proud to say that that our ambition is to set out data points that are very transparent, but also data points that are woven into the way we actually manage our practice. And that's the second point of accountability that I wanted to come to. It's one thing to be transparent. It's one thing to have a sense of ownership and accountability. The third point is that it's woven into our operating model. There's not two sets of books, one that we're reporting externally, and one that we're managing internally. There's not two sets of books. Instead. It's a set of measures that we actually use inside the firm. And that creates the confidence for all of our people that the narrative they read outside of the firm is also the experience they get inside of the firm. Now it also creates an opportunity for feedback because we're not perfect and we're not at the end of the journey. It creates an opportunity for a conversation and feedback from all of our people around where we can move next.

Maureen:
What are, what have you recently, or maybe over time, maybe it's improved, but what are some of the, the areas in that life cycle that you feel like has more opportunity for, for improvement?

Wes:
Yeah, I, I think there's, there's more opportunity for all of us, whether it's the firm, whether it's the profession, it's an opportunity to continue to focus on cultivating an environment that supports open dialogue. And that's hard. I don't want to walk past the, the complexity of this topic, the complexity of learning, and and growing from this effort, if our listeners find that hard, I'll join them and say, this is hard, but it's worth doing hard things in life are worth doing. And so number one, we've learned that it's important to create an environment that supports open dialogue on complex and difficult conversations around diversity and inclusion, recognizing that giving voice to that, and then moving forward is important. The second piece is implementing and expanding training and education around unconscious bias. That's an important element of this as well, training and education, and really committing to building the skill sets.

Wes:
And the knowledge is critical. That's a critical second step. And then the third piece is understanding the best known, even the unsuccessful diversity and inclusion programs and initiatives. We should be sharing. What's working well, what's not working well. And in that way, it helps all of us move forward. And then last engaging leadership at all levels. From the most junior of our leaders to the most senior, from engagement level leaders, to from practice management, to our board of principals and partners, engaging at all level at all levels on this topic, those four areas are areas that we also incorporated into a program for CEOs, the CEO action for diversity and inclusion, those come out of our own experience on this topic. And those come out of experience that we see other business leaders also focusing on.

Maureen:
I I'm glad that you brought up the CEO action. It has been a resource that has been a great value to our organization. And we talk to our firms about it a lot, because it is just, everyone has shared what they've done. There's so many resources. Some of the things, once we signed on as an organization, we did training for our board of directors on unconscious bias. We did it for our staff. We've been holding these conversations throughout the year and coming up, we're going to be doing our first day of understanding, which we're really excited about. So, and that's all thanks to the platform that you all have provided. So thank you for that. And I think that's a great message that our members need to hear about. And CEOs brought more broadly.

Wes:
We have 2000 signatories and it's growing this, this started from a coalition that we co-founded we co-founded with a group of other world-leading organizations. We started it in 2017. We're now at 2000 CEOs signatories and we're counting and it's really around those four core concepts, cultivate the environment, build in knowledge, through training and education, share best known practices, even ones that don't work. So we can all learn from those and then engage, engage boards in the development of diversity and inclusion programs. One of the additional things Marine that we learned last summer as the U S came through horrific events adding on top of that, COVID what we learned within our firm, just to express those core concepts of, we needed to take a series of additional specific steps. So we created a diversity and inclusion staff advisory council.

Wes:
We wanted to hear from our people more specifically, more frequently and synthesize that voice because there were a lot of ideas we wanted to synthesize it and engage all of our people in helping to move forward on racial equity from last summer. So we created a staff advisory council, and then from that staff advisory council, again, the concept of transparency, we reported out to the entire firm for the us farm. That's 55,000 people. What are the recommendations? Where are we moving forward on those? But we also wanted to stretch beyond the firm. And so we created opportunities for our firm to donate to social justice organizations alongside our people donate both time, as well as their resources. And then we empowered our people to operate at a local level because many of those experiences were local, but as they were empowered at a local level, it also created an opportunity to report up through the firms so that we had visibility and transparency into that.

Wes:
We could share ideas from across the firm so that we were putting our best minds towards some of these issues. And that created for us. Then the next CEO action platform, the CEO action for racial equity help begin to identify and solve on a sustainable basis, the public policy challenges. And so the CEO action for racial equity as a second big platform that we're really excited about. And it's designed very similar to to CEO action for diversity and inclusion. But with a couple of differences, one is it's fellowship based organizations can contribute their talent into this platform for a period of two years on specific fellowships, it's fellowship based. And then it's also specific to public policy issues. And so that team, which is up and running, it's now been six months. But that team has landed on choose very specific issues. One is telehealth, and the second is the digital divide, digital upskilling health, and the right skill set can help enable a wider participation of all of our people in society into productive ways, whether it's the profession, the public accounting profession, or much more broadly having the right skills and having the right health programs help all of us operate at a much higher level.

Maureen:
I, I love, I love what you're talking about. It just broadens, I guess the thinking of that, what we've had typically in the CPA profession you know, how to make a difference, you know, in and many, many States, the, the whole broadband issue is, is coming up for our members. And it's really great to see them starting to talk about this in terms of education and entrepreneurship. And so, yeah, I think that our members, from what I've seen have typically not talked at least in our forums about these types of things that are, you know, more societal based, but the push is becoming, we've got to, we've got to talk about them and we have to act on them. So that those are, those are really interesting recommendations from the group.

Wes:
I love your point about acting and, and it, it really I've just underscore for all of our audience that in many ways, this is a topic diversity and inclusion and participation is a topic that requires us to listen and to hear, but then to act and for our people to see that action and identity, I identify with ways that they can participate in that action that I think we've we've crossed over the period where words alone sort of are sufficient to get by. That's never been sufficient. But words as a strategy is no longer a sufficient strategy for any organization. That's requires action. And, and as, as we've gone through this through this experience with many other organizations who are learning with us, it's that action that then helps us create a much better organization. What are the very specific areas that we learned over time?

Wes:
You know, taking, taking a discipline that I know many many accountants will identify with, and that is problem solving through a root cause analysis where you see an error in a financial statement, or you see an error in a tax return or some other report, and you begin to ask, well, why, why did that error come up? Why, why, why? And you ask a series of whys until you get to the root cause we applied that same discipline that the profession has trained in us over time to diversity and inclusion as a firm. If I go back several years, we thought that we had a recruiting problem, that we would have a much more diverse workforce. If we could just solve the recruiting problem, if we could recruit different people from different schools.

Wes:
And we did that, we recruited different people from different schools, and we still weren't as diverse as we wanted to be. So we had to go through a root cause analysis, why, and we discovered that we had to not only recruit the right people, but we also had to retain those people. And that required us to then look differently at the way, we engaged at a process level around review of performance assignment, two engagements, the feedback that people would get, how they would get it, the access to opportunities, all of those things were retention problems. And it was the profession's training around root claws that help us move forward. And, and so action done with the professions training around root cause, but being willing to really lean into that can, can really drive different outcomes. So again, we're, we're not happy with with having hit the destination. This is still a journey for us, but that's some of the learning that we've encountered over time. Right.

Maureen:
So, given all of this, that your firm has learned, what is something maybe that you personally have learned where have you grown over these years?

Wes:
Yeah. What, what I've learned as a leader as a white male leader, is that there is always more for me to do as an ally of all of our people. So one, the importance of being an ally, number two, I've learned also as a dad in a multiracial household, the importance of connecting with the experience of others. Some may know my wife is Korean American. My kids are Korean American, and I'm so proud of them. I have two boys and a daughter, so I have the wealth of diversity in my household, but also the intensity of desire that they'll get the same privileges that I have as a white male that equal or equality of opportunity is what we're really pursuing here. And so what I've learned as both a leader and a husband and a dad, is the importance of leaning in and understanding the perspectives of all of our people, and then acting to create an environment where all of our people can feel like they belong, where their voice is heard and they're safe. That's what I'm committed to.

Maureen:
Well, it's, it's, it's interesting what you brought up because I have two children. They were born in Korea, they're adopted, and this past year, few months has been very interesting in our house and it really made me reflect on their life and how things had been there and just the awareness, or maybe the cultural norms that were there, you know, 10, 15, 20 years ago are the, you know, the, the unconscious bias is, is really, really shone a light very personally. And it, I think about having difficult conversations, even in my own house, you know, if it's hard to talk in your own house, think of it with others. So it's, it is it's just interesting that you brought that up and that connection. So thank you for sharing that.

Wes:
Yeah. The importance of, of all of our people to feel safe. For example we, we see the horrific the horrific incidents of anti-Asian behavior on the streets that has no place in our society, right? It certainly has no place in our profession and it has no place in our firm. And so it takes all of us to make sure that our people feel that, that they feel safe. They feel heard one, one of the, one of the very specific things we've done as a firm, this gets to accountability as well. We look at data as much data as we can find inside the firm. We scrutinize it. We get outside perspectives around whether we're looking at the right data whether there's a different way to look at the data so that we make more informed decisions. The second thing we do, we incorporate into our definition of leadership that we use in evaluating an individual's readiness to be promoted also their performance in a given year, we've incorporated into our expectations of a PWC professional, global acumen, their track record around diversity and inclusion.

Wes:
Again, getting beyond labels to the day to day experience that they can create for our people. Why? Because it creates a better, stronger set of people, better, stronger firm, and we deliver higher quality services, right? We're at our best as a firm, living our purpose of building trust in society, solving important problems. Whenever we're bringing the widest set of perspectives and experiences to our work, because our work is led by people it's enabled by technology, but it's led by people. And so it's so important that we've incorporated it into the core definition of what it takes to be successful at our firm,

Maureen:
Right? It's not optional, it's not optional. So for some of our from smaller companies, you know, don't have the, the breadth of resources that, that you have or other you know, multinational firms, what are some reasonable steps or first steps that you might suggest they take?

Wes:
Yeah, I I would say the first step is sometimes the hardest stuff, and that is being clear-minded about why diversity and inclusion is important to your organization, that it gets beyond just words and a value statement. Although that's important, I don't want to minimize it. That's important, but really landing on why it's critical to the success of the firm, the organization it's in landing on why it's important, that that then translates strategy into the operating model of our firm and from the operating model of the firm, or the company translates into the reporting that we need as leaders within the organization to understand how it's going.

Wes:
Do we have the right measures? Are we measuring the right things? Do we have the right data? That's internal reporting. Is it being escalated all the way up to the board? And then the last step is transparency disclosure outside of the organization. The reason I go in that sequence from strategy to operating model to information inside the organization in landing with disclosure outside is that that's what it takes to commit to diversity and inclusion from top to bottom. And it gets beyond value statements. It gets beyond just a diversity of report is sitting on a website. It embeds it as a commitment for the success of the organization. That's the first step. And in many ways that's the most important step because everything else will fall in line after we commit as an organization that it's critical that it's embedded at all levels. Right. So have that why?

Wes:
Right. That's right. That's that's, that's right. What, what I've found over time, you know, I worked on, on these issues here at PWC. I worked on these issues at the FCC when, when I served as chief accountant, what I found is that our people are smart. Our people are sharp. We should expect that, that our people well ferret out instances where where, where we're just sort of painting an aspiration, but aren't really committed, right. They'll hold us accountable. And that's a really good thing. So good second step is to really bring in feedback from our people, show them the strategy, be transparent around what we're doing and get their feedback. Is that asking the question, is that creating the experience for our people to feel like they belong, have a voice and are safe? Is that the experience that we've created and if not, how could we change? Right. So that's the important second step.

Maureen:
So maybe not be afraid to hear, no, you need to, you need to do more or you're in, you're going the wrong direction. So asking the question and wanting to hear the answer

Wes:
That's right. That's right. And sometimes that's hard. It creates vulnerability as leaders. But this is a time to be confident that although we may not achieve the destination immediately starting the journey is critical.

Maureen:
Right. Right. So once you've really given us so much to think about it, one more question for you. What do you do for fun? What do you do in your free time that gets you away from all of this heavy, heavy stuff?

Wes:
Thanks for that question of, I enjoy spending time with my kids and literally league. So I have a little league player. I have two rookie ball players. I got twins. Two of my children are twins, boy, girl twins, outside of that. I love reading. I love talking with people. I enjoy history, understanding how we got here, because that unlocks so many ideas about where we're going in the future. Right. So family is really important to me and understanding context.

Maureen:
Yeah. Any books you'd recommend,

Wes:
You know, I'm, I'm reading right now bill Gates, his latest book on climate, and he comes at it from a very data-driven approach. So I'm just getting into that and understanding climate from bill Gates, his perspective,

Maureen:
That's some heavy stuff I'm sure. Well, I really appreciate your time today. I appreciate PWCs commitment to this. Not only for the profession, but for the broader business community and the world. So you guys are doing great stuff and we really, really appreciate it. So thanks a lot.

Wes:
Thank you very much, Marine