Thought Leaders: Chris Crespo, Inclusiveness Director, Ernst & Young LLP

Welcome to Pride Week on The Glass Hammer — we’ll be profiling successful LGBT business women all week long!

When Chris Crespo was applying for her first job out of college, professional services firms hadn’t yet taken many steps to address diversity challenges. “When I started in the industry, we didn’t talk about diversity and inclusion. They made an effort to have a woman interviewer, if you were a woman. And that was it,” she recalled.

“Now we see diversity and inclusion as part of what we do to brand ourselves as leaders in the industry in terms of meeting client needs, learning new things, and doing everything we can to be as strong as we can in this area,” she explained.

Crespo has had a lot to do with that change. In addition to working as Inclusiveness Director at Ernst & Young LLP, she was the catalyst behind the firm’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) professional network, Beyond.

“The biggest way I’ve changed over the course of my career is listening more and figuring out what it is that I don’t know. It used to be very easy for me to argue with people,” she reflected. “It’s been an important lesson for me along the way that sometimes what seems so obvious to me is not obvious to other people. I needed to learn to ask more questions and find out the reasons behind why people were seeing something differently from me.”

She continued, “There were times on the LGBT side where it was easy for me to get angry – for example, ‘why don’t we have partner benefits?’ And more often than not it was a lack of other people’s understanding. It became evident to me that there are some things other people had never thought of. The Beyond network is a good example of that. We had a women’s network, a few ethnic minority networks, and I said, ‘Why don’t we have an LGBT network?’”

“And the next thing I know, I’m leading one,” she said with a laugh. “That’s the other thing – when you ask questions, be prepared to follow up on them.”

Career at Ernst & Young LLP

Crespo joined Ernst & Young LLP right after college. “But even within the firm, I’ve had the opportunity to do different things. I started in assurance and, honestly, I was not fond of the work. So I took an internship in tax and found that I loved it. I did a great job and that led to a process improvement position. That was a win for me and it led to an HR focus on career development,” she said. “When I look back, even though I started over 25 years ago, up until a few years ago I didn’t spend more than 2 years in the same job. I’m always looking to improve things. This opened doors for me and made it interesting.”

“There are lots of cool little moments that make the job what it is. It’s making a difference for people every day by sharing one little nugget of information where they figure out, ‘That’s how I can do this better.’ These little achievements make me proud of what I do and inspire me to keep doing it.”

She added, “Even though I am working internally now, I put in more hours than ever before. And I love it.”

One of the achievements that brings her the most pride was receiving Ernst & Young’s first Chairman’s Values Award for her work in founding the Beyond network.

Driving Diversity

Crespo explained that the LGBT focus pushed Ernst & Young to a new level on diversity and inclusion. She said, “It’s hard to figure out LGBT from the diversity side, because unlike our efforts with gender or ethnic diversity, it’s not a group that is easily countable.”

She continued, “LGBT pushed us further to think about different aspects of diversity, such as where someone went to school, whether they had a blue collar or white collar upbringing, their geography – these are things that are not captured by an EEOC survey.”

“It pushed us to figure out what inclusion was in the workplace. We really hadn’t talked about it. Now other companies come to us to ask for advice on how to handle LGBT issues.”

Crespo says that the importance of having buy-in from leadership on diversity issues cannot be underestimated.

“The most important thing, when you are working on LGBT issues or any diversity and inclusion work, is to have support from the top,” she said. “Coming up on our Global Chairman and CEO Jim Turley’s retirement, it is becoming more and more evident to me what a significant role he played in ensuring that we stayed on this path. He really fostered that.”

She also believes Ernst & Young’s experience shows the importance of building diversity into the culture of the firm. “A lot of people and companies look to programs to solve problems. But the real issue is integrating inclusive processes into every day practice to the point where you can’t differentiate whether they’re for D&I or business purposes.”

For example, she said, a company could encourage its people to set up a calendar prior to beginning every work project to ensure that the dates when team members are unavailable are understood in advance. This can be helpful to parents who need to keep up with their kids’ school schedules, people caring for elderly relatives or who need to monitor doctors’ appointments, or other personal commitments. But it also makes the project run more smoothly for everyone.

That said, she continued, diversity doesn’t just happen – it’s something that must be continuously cultivated. “Diversity and inclusiveness fit into so many elements of the business. If programs are not supported, they won’t succeed. You’ve got to make it real.”

Advice for Professional Women

Crespo advises young women to be flexible about their career choices. “I don’t want to sound naive, but people are much pickier about what they want out of their careers and lives now. They are more introspective about what they do and what they are willing to do.”

She continued, “When I was coming up in the workforce, we had to figure out how to ask for things to make things work – they were not handed to us. You have to be creative to make it work. People sometimes want more structure and these things don’t always exist in the workplace.”

“I think that pickiness stems from the fact that today we have more options. The job I’m doing today didn’t exist when I first started. I think I’ve got the best job in the world. But I also have to be flexible. I get to travel and when I’m not traveling, I get to work from home. But sometimes that might mean I have to be on a phone call at 10 p.m. Some people don’t want that, but I love it. Some people don’t try hard enough to find that right mix and many don’t have the opportunity. I’m lucky in a lot of ways.”

She also encouraged women to be true to themselves. “Don’t be afraid to be different,” she said.

“Those who differentiate themselves – through their abilities and interests –stick out. More often than men, I see women trying to fit in more. We need to make sure people don’t have perceptions about how they have to act. That keeps them from taking their authentic selves to work. The more they can bring their unique perspective, the better we all will be.”

Crespo believes that networking can unlock doors to advancement. “Build your network and use your network. When I was first starting out, I thought that if I did good work, and kept my head down, good things would just come to me.”

But, she continued, things are more likely to come to people who build relationships with others. “The connections I have through my network have helped me to develop the most and have helped me to succeed. Go to lunch with someone. Look for creative ways to connect. Invite people into your life. People notice when you go out of your way to meet them and down the road, this pays itself back in huge dividends.”

Specifically, she encouraged LGBT women to bring more of their authenticity into their professional connections. “I think LGBT women have a way of compartmentalizing – many of us grew up keeping our personal life separate from our professional life. We didn’t have what you might call ‘golf relationships.’ We didn’t have those types of networks. On the women’s side, we are getting better at that, but it is still a challenge for many LGBT women.”

Finally, she said, it’s important to know how to deal with mistakes. “I learned pretty early on that it’s okay to fail. If a project I was working on didn’t go so well, I learned not to take that personally. It’s how you react to failures and challenges that will really move you forward.”

In Her Personal Time

Outside of the office, Crespo enjoys spending time with her family. She has three 15-year-old children. “They challenge me every day to think about how I have to be consistent and make sure my actions mirror my beliefs. We have conversations that make me realize what I do in my personal life counts in my professional life. They’ve even participated in some of the events I’m involved with. They keep me young and help me to realize my age at the same time.”

She is also Chair of the Board of the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce. “It has enabled me to work with Fortune 500 CEOs and LGBT business owners, as well as a broad array of people with different perspectives.”

By Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)