The value of connection: Reflections of an advocate for women

Alicia Antonetti-Tricker, a principal at Crowe LLP, remembers a time when she saw very few women in leadership roles in the accounting profession. Whether barriers were real or perceived, she said, “there were barriers for women advancing in the profession.”

Today, that’s changing, and events such as the AICPA & CIMA Women’s Global Leadership Summit, which is in November in Bellevue, Wash., have helped to continue the momentum for women ascending to accounting leadership roles.

In this podcast episode, Antonetti-Tricker discussed highlights of a session she took part in last year, one she says typifies the summit’s agenda. She also touched on some of the initiatives Crowe has put in place and why finding advocates and allies is important for women to continue to advance to leadership roles.

What you’ll learn from this episode:

• What stuck out to Crowe’s Alicia Antonetti-Tricker about meetings nearly 30 years ago.
• The value of powerful connections in helping to grow the number of women in leadership roles in the profession.
• A look back at a session that is typical of the AICPA & CIMA Women’s Global Leadership Summit.
• A by-the-numbers look at progress made related to women in leadership positions.
• Why Antonetti-Tricker keeps coming back to the summit.

Play the episode below or read the edited transcript:

— To comment on this episode or to suggest an idea for another episode, contact Neil Amato at Neil.Amato@aicpa-cima.com.

Transcript

Neil Amato: Welcome to the Journal of Accountancy podcast. This is Neil Amato with the JofA. Today’s focus is a look ahead to the AICPA & CIMA Women’s Global Leadership Summit. One of the speakers for that event in the past is our guest. Again, that event is in November in suburban Seattle, and I’m happy to be joined by Alicia Antonetti-Tricker, who is a principal at Crowe and serves as the firm’s talent and risk relations leader. Alicia, first, thank you for being on the JofA podcast.

Alicia Antonetti-Tricker: Neil, thank you so much for having me. I’m excited about our conversation today. I’m excited to talk about my experience at the summit, and I’m very much looking forward to this year’s session as well.

Amato: Great. First, tell us some about you. What’s been, briefly, your journey in the accounting profession?

Antonetti-Tricker: Neil, thanks for that question. I am, as you said, currently a principal at Crowe. I lead our firm’s talent, risk, and relations function. I’ve been at Crowe for 23 years, and my journey really started outside of grad school. I went to graduate school, and then after grad school, I came to Crowe and started as part of our government finance team.

As I say, that’s where the journey started, and it’s been an incredible ride since then. I have had the opportunity to serve in many different roles at Crowe, providing everything from finance, where I started from, to operations to information technology consulting services, to many of our clients at Crowe over the years.

A few years ago, I pivoted away from our consulting practice into our talent solutions team, leading talent acquisition and then, more recently, leading our talent, risk, and relations function, which is part of our core HR team at Crowe. I’ve had an incredible experience, giving back to our accounting profession through many different roles. I’m excited to talk to you about some of that today.

Amato: Thank you for that intro. What inspired you to become an advocate for women in the profession?

Antonetti-Tricker: Early in my career, I was looking around the virtual rooms or sometimes real rooms and noticed there were not a lot of women in leadership roles, not only at our firm at the time, but also in the profession. Early on in my career, we were just getting started with our women’s programming initiatives. I raised my hand pretty early.

I really wanted to help make an impact in our profession and get more women not only into the profession, but help them stay in the profession. Women’s programming has been something that has been very important to me since I was very young in my career. Having the opportunity to get involved and advocate for women in the profession has really been a key part of what I’ve done at Crowe, beyond just the types of services and day-to-day work that I performed.

Amato: You were part of a session, a panel discussion a year ago at the Women’s Summit. What were some of the takeaways from that session?

Antonetti-Tricker: That was a fun session. We were incredibly fortunate to have a great group of men and women join us for about a 45-minute session last year. We really talked about women navigating a career, and our goal was to give the attendees some tools in their toolkit to help navigate and grow their career as part of the time with us in the session.

Some of those takeaways that we really talked about during our session as tools in our toolkit were the concept of creating a board of directors. Really what we meant by that and really helped our attendees really think about was developing a board around you. These could be individuals that you interact with from a professional perspective. They could be community members, but really wanted everybody to think really intentionally about creating a board of individuals [that] can offer you advice and guidance and provide feedback on your career and life. Some of them could be helping you from an advocacy perspective. Some of them could be helping you navigate maybe a current situation you’re going through.

But one of the key concepts that we talked about during that session was how to create and implement a personal board of directors. What was really exciting during that session was we provided some work time that everybody could take some notes down and start thinking about their personal board of directors.

Then we started seeing the networking that was happening in the room around it. Individuals connecting with each other to say, hey, I’m looking for some help. Maybe how to navigate a promotion, who has gone through something similar, and making some connections in that room was really powerful to see. We had a lot of fun with that session, had an opportunity to meet some amazing attendees, and I’m looking forward to hopefully reconnecting with some of them at this year’s summit as well.

Amato: That does sound like a great session. It sounds like something that really can apply to anyone, thinking about creating a personal board of directors to advance their careers. How would you broadly describe the current state of women’s representation in leadership roles in the profession, and then what are the positives and what challenges are persisting?

Antonetti-Tricker: That’s a great question, I would say, as I have really worked in the profession for just over two decades, really in my third decade right now, working in the accounting profession, we’ve made a lot of progress as an industry, as a profession with women in leadership roles. I would say there’s still a tremendous amount of work still to do together.

As I think about that, some of the positives are just really awareness, being aware that we had some challenges helping women navigate careers. Whether those barriers be real or perceived, there were barriers for women advancing in the profession.

As we think about those barriers, and as we’ve navigated those barriers the last two-plus decades, we’ve really been able to move the needle of looking around the rooms, if you will, to see more women in leadership roles. That really started out as needing to get more women into the profession and keeping them there, creating programs and initiatives around helping women be successful and really focus on career advocacy.

We know mentoring is important, but having someone above, being an advocate for women, and helping them get the seat at the table and making the table even bigger for more women, too, is an important concept as well. As I think about the positives, we’ve come a long way. The challenge is we still have more work to do. We’re not at gender parity in the profession. We’re not at 50/50. Whether that’s the goal or not, I don’t know, but we still have more work to do.

But if you look around the profession as a whole, there are definitely more women in leadership roles. More women entering the profession, still have some work to do. I do think we still have some challenges, especially coming out of COVID, of getting people back into the profession, getting people focused on at men and women. But it’s an exciting time, and I still always say, I’m optimistic for our future and I’m excited to continue to work in this space and help women continue to navigate their career journeys.

Amato: Tell me some, if you could, about some of the initiatives implemented at Crowe and what’s been the impact on supporting women’s advancement through those initiatives?

Antonetti-Tricker: Neil, thanks for asking that question. Crowe has been really focused on women’s programming efforts for well over two decades and that’s really exciting. We have had multiple iterations of our women’s programming initiatives that really started off as an opportunity to connect women across the firm. As I mentioned earlier in my introduction, when I first started at Crowe, I looked around, and there were not a lot of women in leadership roles. So, really, out of the gate, women’s programming at Crowe is really about connections and helping women see opportunities to move into leadership roles.

Then, as I look in future iterations of our women’s programming efforts, it really evolved and continued to build off of that great success of women making connections across the firm to providing opportunities for growth and advancement. In our current structure, which is called Women Leading at Crowe, which I do lead for our firm, we have some great programs.

We have four tiers of programming – a Connect programming tier, where we connect women across the firm. We have Grow programs here, and I’ll talk some more about that. But that’s really focused on connecting women and having the opportunity for growth and advancement. We have an Inspire tier, which is programming for our partners and directors that are women. Then we also have an Amplify tier, which is really about supporting community and community events in our various geographies.

Specifically as it relates to growth and advancement, this is actually really exciting. Our Grow program targets, high-potential senior manager women to help break down real and perceived barriers to advancement, to getting to that partner or director level. We’ve seen great success with our Grow program. The majority of women have moved into partner or director roles after they have graduated from our program, which is really, really exciting. That program is really focused on career advocacy and also on helping women have tools in their toolkit to help build their books of business, create and launch new service lines, have a lot of amazing opportunities in the firm.

I’m pretty proud of the work that Crowe has done related to women’s programming over the last two decades. You can see those results in our Transparency Report. Our most recent Transparency Report was released in December of 2023. As you read through that, you’ll see that we’ve had some great success with women in leadership roles at our firm. We have almost 36% of our partners, directors, and senior managers are women, and we have over 31% women at the partner or director level.

You also see that 40% of our firm’s management team are women as well. We’ve made some great progress. We have more work to do. We all do in the profession, but this is the exciting piece for Crowe as we’ve had these amazing programs that we’ve been able to implement over the last two decades to really help women grow in their careers and move into these leadership roles.

Amato: Not every firm or organization has similar resources, so what is your advice for those trying to just do something even if it’s just getting started, even if it’s just baby steps?

Antonetti-Tricker: Yeah, very much understand that all of our different organizations have different resources available to us. What’s great about some of the initiatives that we’ve seen be successful not only at Crowe but in other organizations is really career advocacy, and career advocacy doesn’t really have to cost any money. It doesn’t have to have a formal program. It’s really about connecting women with those above them that can help move the needle with their careers.

That’s an intentional decision, an intentional ask that has to be made. But it is not a high-cost program. Creating opportunities for our career advocacy for women in any organization definitely does move the needle, as a lot of research will suggest. I would say, in addition to career advocacy, creating opportunities for networking and for helping women to connect with other women, not only in their firm but also in the profession and community, are great opportunities.

Attending such things as the summit that’s coming up is an awesome opportunity for that and one that, if resources are available, I really recommend women in the profession attending get that sense of community. It’s an amazing experience. Really recommend it for anybody.

Amato: You mentioned the Women’s Global Leadership Summit. We will include a link in the show notes to that event’s agenda. Tell me for you, why do you go back? What are the benefits that new and repeat attendees can expect to gain?

Antonetti-Tricker: Neil, as you probably heard from the excitement in my voice, this summit is an amazing experience for women and for men, not just for women, but for anybody in our profession to go and have an opportunity to learn and connect. With a focus on a lot of leadership development, personal development opportunities, I’ve learned a lot, and that’s why I keep going back. But honestly, it probably what brings me back year over year is just the amazing opportunity to connect with women and our male allies and have that sense of community across our different firms and have the opportunity to also give back.

That’s something that’s really important to me. I love being able to network and meet with professionals across the industry and having the opportunity to connect and give back and share. Not only my experience, but to help navigate any challenges that I might be able to help others going through based on my own experience is always an amazing way. That’s what keeps bringing me back every year, just the networking and the leadership development components of the sessions. It’s a great time. Really recommend it for anybody.

Amato: Alicia, thank you. This has been great. Anything you’d like to add in closing?

Antonetti-Tricker: Neil, thank you for the time today. I’m really excited about this. Just in closing, really recommend anybody that has the opportunity to go to the summit: Attend. Please reach out to me, too, if you end up there, let’s get connected. I really look forward to the time together in Seattle in November.

Amato: Alicia Antonetti-Tricker, thank you very much.

Antonetti-Tricker: Thanks, Neil.