Mover and Shaker: Dale Meikle, Regional Human Capital Communications Manager at PricewaterhouseCoopers

by Elizabeth Harrin (London)

“As a temporary secretary without the first clue about how business worked, I would never have seen myself ten years down the road as a senior manager working outside of the U.S.,” says Dale Meikle, Regional Human Capital Communications Manager at PricewaterhouseCoopers. Dale says it was “total chance” that she ended up in consulting. “I had just graduated from university and was temping at PwC in Washington, D.C. as a partner’s secretary,” she explains. “I was saving up to attend a master’s programme in Shakespeare. Working for what I perceived as an accounting firm was pretty much the diametric opposite of my career vision at that time.”

Dale ended up getting on well with the partner she was working for: he saw the talent in her and recognised that she would be an asset to the firm. “He let me sit in on conference calls with clients, he brought me with him to meetings on Capitol Hill and with firm leaders – always making sure I had an active rather than passive role,” she says. “He trusted me with sensitive tasks and was transparent in all of our communications. He always asked me, ‘what do you think about this?’ This early and intense trust and exposure to high level client and PwC executives developed me at a quick pace and primed me for future roles.”

Retrospectively, Dale acknowledges the role luck had to play in being paired with this particular partner, whose office she ran as if it was a small business. However, you can’t help thinking that she would have made a success of the job regardless. Her communications and analysis skills, honed through her time as an English major, complimented the more quantitative skills of the other professionals in the office. “Within the year I was promoted to an associate on the partner’s team, and later, a senior associate,” she says. “I worked with experts in the field of tax – and of course being in Washington, D.C., their focus was on national developments in the executive, legislative and judicial spheres. I helped take insight from these experts and turn them into something readable by a wider client audience via our communications platforms.”

Through PwC’s rotation scheme, Dale spent some time on a national Human Resources project in New York – and discovered that HR was a perfect place for her skill set. “We don’t have a product at PwC; our success depends on our ability to effectively amalgamate our people’s ambitions and talents with our clients’ needs,” she explains. “That’s why Human Capital is so interesting at a professional services firm – we’re not in a manufacturing business, we’re in a people business.”

Dale actively sought out a European secondment to further broaden her experiences and network. In 2005 she set off for Brussels and since then she has worked on Human Capital projects and communications across PwC’s presence in Europe. “I’ve focused on the entire HC value chain, from attraction and recruitment to employer branding, from talent management and development to diversity, from global mobility to alumni.”

Moving from the US to Belgium – a big country to a very small one – has had its challenges. “It can be very frustrating,” she says. “From technology snafus resulting in botched conference calls to miscommunication about roles and responsibilities, to evidently disparate priorities, working globally has been a steep learning curve for me. Working internationally is idealised by a lot of people whereas the reality is very different.”

This desire to gain international experience is something that Dale has seen through her day-to-day involvement with HC projects. While working on an employer branding project Dale and her team looked carefully at what European students desire in an employer. “Despite disparate cultures ranging from the Nordics all the way down to Cyprus, these desires largely overlapped,” she says. “In Europe a key aspiration of students is early international experience – that can mean working in another country, working for international clients, or working on international teams. The work we did ultimately led to a greater openness by territories to welcome young recruits on cross-border projects.”

Working abroad with a global team has given Dale the opportunity to see things through another culture’s eyes. “Working with a global team has diminished an arrogance in me that I wasn’t even aware of before,” she confesses. “It’s instilled in me not just a theoretical respect for differences, but one that I’ve internalised and practice. I think it’s made me a more compassionate person, both professionally and personally. It has definitely made me a more patient person.”

But Dale wouldn’t have it any other way. “The exposure to culture, language and projects has been unparalleled. By nature, I think humans can be very self-interested creatures and that goes for business units and territories as well. In my role, I get to see evidence of people and territories subverting pure self-interest for the greater good – something that brings enormous positive consequences on a global scale to our organisation. That encourages me and far outweighs the frustrations.”

Moving to a new country also brings the problem of learning a new language – something that many would-be expats forget when they set their sights on working overseas. “If you’re interested in specifically working abroad in a non-native English speaking territory, take language classes now,” Dale advises. “I cannot emphasise enough how critical that has been to my personal and professional development.” Dale has found that having ‘good enough French is essential at a basic level to be able to communicate, but more importantly it helps build credibility and trust. “When colleagues see you’re making the effort to speak their local language, it has broader implications than speaking the same language,” she says. “It says about you that you are interested in other cultures, that you are open, that you are flexible, and that you’re not afraid to make a fool of yourself while you’re trying!”

The gender balance in Dale’s European team is also different to the one she worked with in the U.S. “In the U.S. I rarely worked with anyone in HR that was male, however the HR leaders were predominantly male,” she explains. “In Europe, the same phenomenon applies with respect to men largely leading our HC functions. However, I also work with a large number of male HC colleagues in operational functions – probably at least half if not more of my colleagues across Europe are male.”

PwC has a strong reputation for supporting female emerging leaders and last year Dale was involved in female leadership interviews for PwC’s Leaking Pipeline report. “Over and over again in those interviews, the female partner leaders of our firm kept imparting the same message, albeit in different words: Stay true to yourself. At the time, I was perplexed by this message – it seemed so obvious,” Dale says.

“Recently, as I’ve witnessed gender dynamics at higher levels in our organisation, I’ve begun to see how important this concept is and what it truly means. There’s this whole ‘men in a skirt’ theory whereby it’s said that many women in leadership sublimate their instincts to fit into the patriarchal culture of business. Of course that’s a generalisation, but let’s say in a specific case it might result in a woman choosing savvy, self-interested political manoeuvring over a team dynamic that makes better sense from an efficiency point of view. When that sort of phenomenon happens consistently and on a broad scale, businesses lose out on the very traits that make gender balance optimal for business success.”

Dale had to look at her own behaviour before she could consciously make decisions about how to act in different situations. “I believe that for optimal business results, women need to change a little bit and business needs to change more,” she says. “I’d like to think that by staying true to ourselves in both a personal and professional sense, we can lead more fulfilling lives. When you approach work from a place of genuine enthusiasm and energy, great things happen.”