Diversity breeds success

Anti-discrimination regulations lead to the ghettoisation of gender, ethnic and disadvantaged minorities, says Sacha Romanovitch

When Grant Thornton partner Sacha Romanovitch was asked last year if she would put herself forward for the ICAEW-sponsored Women in the City accountancy award, she hesitated. As the firm’s head of people and culture, she has spent the last few years promoting the idea of a diverse business environment that embraces everyone, no matter what their background, race or gender, so to go for an award that celebrates women seemed to be counter-intuitive.

However, after thinking ‘long and hard’, she concluded that, if she wanted to change the way business thinks about diversity, what better platform could she have – if she won – for getting her particular brand of thinking across to a wider audience?

Romanovitch won not just the accountancy category but the overall Jaguar Woman of Achievement Award. In 2001, aged 34 and with just a year’s experience as a partner, she became the first woman managing partner of the London office core practice. Under her guidance over the next five years, the business tripled in size. At the same time, she mentored other women in the firm, including seven whom she brought through to partnership. She also brought in partners from outside, increasing the number of female partners by 20%. She is one of the first women on Grant Thornton’s national leadership board since the 1990s and the first to be appointed while on maternity leave.

‘If we really want to change, then diversity has to be a strategic imperative,’ she says. Applying this approach to the London office saw its size triple and profits quadruple. Romanovitch is now in the process of embedding these principles through the rest of the UK firm as well as internationally. It’s too early to say whether the London success will be repeated but early indications are positive: ‘We’ve made some changes at national level to open up how people think. And it’s already started to make quite a difference.’