About Jeanne
Jeanne Kwong Bickford is a Managing Director and Senior Partner and Office Leader of our New York Office. Jeanne was recently recognized by Consulting Magazine’s Women Leaders in Consulting Awards for Excellence in Leadership. We connected with Jeanne to hear about her BCG journey and how she has balanced her various leadership roles with motherhood.
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You’ve been at BCG for over 20 years now, how would you describe your journey here?
A roller coaster! I have certainly had my high points – helping to launch the Asian Diversity Network and becoming the office leader for New York, for example. I of course have also had some lows along the way. It’s easy to look at someone’s resume and think ‘oh they’ve had this easy career trajectory at BCG’ but that’s not entirely true. I want to share the ups and the downs, because being authentic is so important to me, especially as a woman in a leadership role. You think about how women and girls today are being bombarded with these perfected images on social media. Then they struggle with self-confidence as a result – well, that’s because what they’re seeing is not the full picture. Looking back, I really have come to value both the ups and the downs in my career, because I can show people that I’m not perfect. As head of the New York office, I am proud of the fact that I have been able to create an environment where people can see that you can be the head of BCG’s largest office and not get everything right and certainly not all the time.
BCG has really allowed me to be me. The point of being authentic like this is to bring humanity into the workplace. That humanity is what I think makes BCG so special. Leaders can sometime feel like they have to perform and be what people think a leader should be. But I refuse to perform, I’d rather be me, and show that people like me can be leaders – you just need to be able to have that confidence in yourself. I’m lucky that I have had different mentors and colleagues here that have helped me to see that in myself, and I hope that I have helped others see it, too.
How did the Asian Diversity Network come to be?
As I moved along in my career journey and eventually became an MDP, I increasingly realized how my ethnicity was impacting how people perceived me. I kept getting feedback that I needed to make a stronger impression on clients and show my seniority. Things came to a head in one of these meetings where I was the lead MDP driving the case. I walked in with another MDP and a Principal who were both white men; we did our introductions, and then went through the meeting. But at the end of the meeting, the COO of this client, who had been taking notes, turned to me and said, ‘Young lady, why don’t you type these [notes] up?’ Suddenly I realized that I was working against this automatic assumption that I was a junior team member whenever I walked into a room. There was a group of other Asian BCGers that I had been in conversation with for a while who had also struggled with this same feedback around our presence, so suddenly this was a moment of clarity.
