Christy Sovereign, managing director of Accenture's Minneapolis office and a working mother for more than half her career there, has been recognized as a 2018 Working Mother of the Year in Working Mother magazine.
Sovereign had fewer senior-level working mothers to look up to and bathrooms doubled as mothers' rooms when she gave birth to her son 17 years ago.
But the professional services consulting firm since has created employee resource groups and developed career counseling and networking opportunities among other changes, said Sovereign, who joined Accenture in 1989.
"The journey that our company has been on over the last three decades has been quite incredible in terms of a very intentional cultural pivot to embrace this integration of work and family and make it a great place to work for parents, not just mothers," Sovereign said.
Sovereign is leading Accenture's Minneapolis office in a push to expand its workforce by 400 jobs by the end of 2020. Accenture has more than 1,600 employees at its downtown headquarters.
Clients include Cargill and Xcel Energy. "We continue to be really happy with the profile of skills that we're finding in this market," Sovereign said of the hiring effort.
Q: How has your career evolved at Accenture?
A: I came up though the ranks working on multiple transformation programs for clients all across North America. Typically my role was having one foot in business and one foot in technology.
The last 15 years I've held multiple leadership roles, running some of Accenture's largest and most strategic accounts — we call them our "diamonds" — or running different segments of Accenture's business.
