Accenture

Variety of projects and skills you can work on. You get the option to cross-train if your primary skills are not used anymore. The top leadership inspires a zeal in you to give your best, to grow in the organization, and work to achieve those goals. The exit process is well-defined. The new skills they are moving towards are good for learning and growth.

But it stops there because the layer which is actually into execution kills the core values of Accenture.

There is no work-life balance for the majority of projects because of unprepared middle management who are neither good technically nor in delivery management. They try to put the failures on juniors to save themselves in about 60% of the cases.

If you raise your concerns to middle management about wrong things happening, it impacts your career growth.

There is partiality in appraisal feedback. It's said to be done as for large projects, people form groups and use small issues to highly judge an individual or a team if they are not liked. Be in good books and surely you will be promoted in 2-4 years per level.

You need to have a middle management "good father" to grow higher up the ladder. People who want to build long-term careers are directly or indirectly demotivated to make sure they leave. HR is the worst function, which never understands any employee constraints, especially if people are on the bench. Hopefully, with COVID-19 remote work from home, they would understand remote work can be equally, if not more, productive than on-location work.

The bell curve is never good for talent management. Though myPerformance, it's still not an absolute rating; it goes to relative rating and fitting people into numbers.

Understand diversity is not only specific to gender (it means language/region etc.) but at so many aspects, which you should coach your middle management layer. They are just at the beginning of the year deciding these are people I will project for this year for the next level, including the diversity factor.

Understand that it's good to promote diversity but not at a cost of playing with someone's professional aspirations.

Train your level 7, 6, 5 to be open and transparent. Make sure myPerformance is an actual replication for an individual's annual appraisals.

People write good stuff, and at the time of the final discussion on rating people, they say, "We tried, but it was changed at the next round." That shouldn't be the answer.

Have a 360-degree feedback system.

Have a random test with your middle management of how many remember the code values. I still remember them, and they are mentioned below. As I said, so many blue-blooded 'accenturites' who start as freshers have a dream to grow in the organization, but a lot of your middle management doesn't let that happen.

I still wish Accenture top management all the best for all the progress. Thank you for helping me learn the things I should aspire to do.

To mid-management: Thank you for helping me learn the things I shouldn't do as a mid-level manager.

I still remember them:

• Stewardship
• Best people
• Client value creation
• One global network
• Respect for the individual
• Integrity