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After 15 years at St. Pete technology manufacturing giant Jabil, the last two in the C-Suite as chief talent officer, Audrey McGuckin, with her own business, has focused on helping companies with leadership development, talent management and organizational design. Her firm, St. Petersburg-based McGuckin Group, also does a lot of work with clients on the topic of diversity, equity and inclusion.
Founded in 2017, the McGuckin Group has worked with a range of clients, from startups to Fortune 500 companies. Demand for women’s leadership consulting services has been so strong, McGuckin says, she now plans to launch a new company that will focus solely on boosting women leaders. McGuckin says, “This transcends sizes of business and it also transcends industry and it transcends location.”
Businesses are seeking help with diversity and promoting women leaders for a host of reasons. McGuckin points to statistics that say having women and people of color on an executive team increases both innovation and top-line growth. “Often the business case is strong,” McGuckin says. “Sometimes it will be the board of directors that says to CEO, ‘We’re at risk because we don’t have diversity on our leadership team.’ Sometimes it’s a customer that says, ‘We don’t want to work with you anymore because you don’t have diversity in your organization.’ Deep down, the CEO has to believe in it for it to happen.”
McGuckin says traditional thinking has focused on developing women themselves instead of developing a supportive system. “Most of the time they’re not developing their men on how they develop their women,” McGuckin says. “Sometimes there’s no equal pay for equal roles, and sometimes women opt out because of this. Sometimes they don’t create space for women to move into power roles.”
McGuckin Group’s program seeks to solve those problems and others. The process involves interviewing the leadership team, surveying employees and holding focus groups. Then the firm deliveries a blueprint with three or four areas the business should focus on.
Chief Client Officer Erica Jossim says McGuckin Group doesn’t use a cookie-cutter approach to every client. “There’s a cultural overlay,” Jossim says. An engineering firm might have a different culture than a distribution company, for instance, and that context is taken into account.
McGuckin also uses some lessons from her own career. One key, she says, is for women to receive honest feedback. “Sometimes men are reluctant to give women the feedback they need to grow,” McGuckin says. For more women to attain leadership positions, that needs to change. “Getting that hard feedback helps you adjust quickly and rise even faster.”
McGuckin says women should find a sponsor who knows and believes in her already and is willing to speak on her behalf when she’s not in the room. She says, “Often it will be a male and not a female because often it’s the males that are in the room, at the table."
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