Booz Allen is moving fast: This year alone, the giant consulting firm has sold a consulting unit, acquired a cybersecurity firm, and invested in two AI startups, all while being named as one of the best employers for women last year by Forbes. In 2021, the company’s CFO, Lloyd Howell, announced to investors that between April of this year and 2025, Booz Allen plans to spend serious cash on acquisitions: as much as $4 billion to be exact, up from the $1.3 billion the firm spent over the past four years.
A key player at the center of it all is Betty Thompson, Booz Allen’s chief people officer. Thompson helps the company identify how to be in the right tech market and hire the right talent at the right time. We talked with Thompson to learn how she communicates at times sensitive talent news to employees in order to educate, engage, and excite them about the benefits of each move for the firm and the futures of the employees who work there.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
In 2021, Booz unveiled a new strategy across the business called VOLT—“velocity, leadership, and technology.” How do you apply these principles to your HR strategy?
In the war for talent, particularly the technical talent that we are looking for, we have got to move faster—so that’s the velocity part of that.
We are looking at all of our HR processes—to streamline them, to empower our leaders, and even the people within my team, empower them to make decisions more quickly—so we don’t lose out on talent because of a slower process than is necessary.
The other things that we’re doing are looking at enhancing the value proposition, particularly for our technical talent, to ensure that they see Booz Allen as a place where they can continue their career and grow their career…We’re investing in their skill set, we’re investing in the incentives for them to grow their skill set, and we’re increasing the transparency of all of the many opportunities that are available to them.
Booz recently announced that it is selling its management-consulting business unit in the India, Middle East, and Africa practice. Were you involved in announcing the decision internally and communicating that decision? And what goes into making that sort of internal communication?
We call it our MENA business. There’s a lot of strategy consultants in that business, and that’s less of what we do. We’re mostly focused on the technology consulting…We felt like Oliver Wyman was going to be a very good home for those employees. We were very particular about the culture that we would be moving our employees into; we wanted it to be a really good experience for them.
There were lots of conversations first with leadership—we had an amazing leader there in [Souheil Moukaddem, Booz Allen’s EVP of the MENA business]— to get their endorsement, their buy into it, their excitement about it, so that they could then translate that to the employees in that region that would be affected by that.
On the flip side, Booz is also growing. In March, you acquired Everwatch, a cybersecurity firm, and your CFO announced a plan to continue the acquisition train through 2025. What’s the secret sauce to making acquisitions run smoothly?
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Acquisitions are absolutely part of our VOLT strategy.
We’ve had two recent acquisitions to enable that, and we identified a senior leader that would lead those integration efforts. We have a talented team that works on the acquisition itself. Due diligence obviously is very important, not just from the numbers standpoint and the kind of skills, but there’s a cultural component that’s really important to understand before you even decide that you want to acquire.
My team is very involved in that due-diligence process, really understanding how different are our benefits, how different is our culture, how different is the focus on things like diversity? We do a lot to understand that. We have certainly walked away from deals where we found that they weren’t in concert, or it was going to be not a good marriage.
Once you go through that process, then it’s a matter of having the right things in place for integration. We took a very senior leader and asked him to be the expert on integrating these acquisitions for us, and so he’s got a playbook now.
Can you give me a peek into that playbook?
Getting the right leaders of the entity that you’ve acquired really steeped in, “what is Booz Allen?” What is our culture? What’s important? Really spending time with them, to really understand our firm, introducing them to a number of people across the firm, so that they can get to know us better, and do a bit of immersion with them so that they are in a position to lead with the kind of knowledge and experience and feeling about Booz Allen that we would want them to have—so in some ways, [it’s] a little bit treating them like a new hire, if you will. We do the immersion for all of the staff, have meetings with them. Very senior people participate in those meetings, so they can see that this is really important to the firm. And I think those are the things—getting to know other people at Booz Allen—that [are] the most important thing so they can find that they belong here, [that] they have similar skills, that they have similar values, that they have similar aspirations.
Obviously, you want to make sure that you understand if there are differences in what they’re going to experience from a benefit standpoint, or their bonus program. We’ve tried to phase things in if there are changes—in some cases, we hold them separate for a period of time and don’t try to do a full integration. We’re doing that with Everwatch, where we are letting them continue to operate with [us], but maintain the things that they are already doing. In other cases, it may be that they’re so similar, that it’s much easier integration, but you don’t want to move everybody’s cheese the first day you make the acquisition. You need to phase in some of these things and get to know each other.—SV
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