Empowered women
Three PwC alumnae shed light on leadership
in the ever-changing energy industry
Millicent Chancellor finds both challenges and rewards at Halliburton.
As the energy industry becomes increasingly diverse and global, women are filling more and more top positions. Meet three women—Millicent Chancellor from Halliburton, Karie Anderson from Exelon and Alyson Mount from Entergy—and find out how their experiences shaped their leadership style.
Millicent Chancellor
Senior Director of Finance, Global
Operations, Halliburton
In 1991, when Millicent Chancellor was interviewing for a position at Halliburton, she asked to meet a woman executive. There weren’t many. Today, women hold several leadership positions at the company, including positions in the finance area such as the vice president–corporate controller and principal accounting officer, the vice president for internal audit and controls, and Chancellor herself, who is senior director of finance for global operations.
Chancellor joined Houston and Dubai-based Halliburton, one of the world’s largest providers of products and services to the energy industry, after 12 years with PwC. In January 2008, she was promoted to her current position as senior director, overseeing the financial side of operations in 70 countries.
Moving up through Halliburton, first on the executive management team of a division at Brown & Root, a Halliburton subsidiary at the time; then as the vice president for finance at Landmark, a software and services provider that is part of Halliburton, Chancellor developed a leadership philosophy rooted in the idea of service and a belief that people want to excel.
“I view myself as being a servant to my team,” she explains. “I’m there to help them do their jobs the very best they can. I work the same way with my internal customers, whether it’s the president of a business unit or the CFO.”
Chancellor herself has long admired that style of leadership. At Landmark she worked with a president who made a lasting impression on her. “What I most admired about him was his focus on creating an organization that could achieve. He made sure we all shared the same goals as a team, and at the same time, he also showed that he valued diversity in thinking. By encouraging team members to challenge one another and our direction, he actually made our commitment to the shared goals stronger. That really enlightened me. Ultimately, it was one of the things that motivated me to go back to business school.” She earned an MBA at Duke in 2003.
Although she has taken part in formal mentoring programs, Chancellor also considers informal mentoring part of her responsibility as a leader. “One way of doing that is to reach down one level below your managers,” she says. “I know and work personally with everyone who reports to each of the people who report to me.”
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