Corporate Culture
The fire inside
How Ernst & Young's Susan Bell follows the silver rule to develop winning relationships with employees and clients
By Kristy J. O’Hara
Smart Business Atlanta | April 2009
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Like any good parent, Susan R. Bell strives to teach her 7-year-old son about how to properly treat other people.
“Remember the Golden Rule,” she always tells him.
The rule is simple: Treat others the way you want to be treated. But her son asked her a question that caught her off guard regarding this rule.
“Mommy, is there a silver rule?”
While technically there is no silver rule that has been handed down through generations as a means to live by, the question got the wheels in her head turning about life and business.
“It occurred to me that maybe it’s not that,” Bell says. “Maybe it’s realizing that people don’t always want to be treated [how you do] — they want to be treated the way they would like to be treated.”
As Atlanta office managing partner of Ernst & Young LLP — and the first female office managing partner at a Big Four accounting firm in Atlanta — Bell keeps this realization at the forefront of her mind each day. Her firm has clients all over the world, and she and her 1,100 employees have to communicate and build relationships with them all and ultimately serve every one of them. She says that a big part of learning how to satisfy each client’s needs comes from starting with the basic principle of having integrity. While this word can mean different things to different people, Bell says that for her, integrity means to operate with honesty and respect in every situation with every person.
“Integrity is doing the right thing every time, regardless of the situation,” Bell says. “From a respect perspective, I like to say treat others the way you want to be treated. There’s a nuance to that because the way you want to be treated may not be how they want to be treated, but that’s how I have to start. Absent a relationship, where I know something differently, that’s where I start. That’s the starting point. Once you’ve determined that someone has a different need or a different point of view, then respect is about understanding that and relating to that.”
Bell says that honesty and respect guide her in focusing on her employees as well as focusing on her clients. By doing these two things, she can adapt to their needs, and in turn, her firm will be successful.
“The most important things we do is serving clients with a passion and being equally passionate about our people — recruiting and retaining the best talent,” Bell says.
