In his new role as head of PwC Ireland, Enda McDonagh wants to attract the ‘best and the brightest’ with a culture of openness and trust
As the incoming Managing Partner at PwC Ireland, Enda McDonagh is busy preparing to take over in his new role from 1 July.
Although still “very much in the transition phase”, McDonagh is, he says, already clear on one of the biggest priorities ahead for his four-year term at the helm of the professional services firm.
“Our people are our single most important asset. Fundamentally, our business is about people,” McDonagh says.
“What differentiates the firm in the market is the calibre and quality of our people, so attracting the next generation of leaders – the best and the brightest – will be a key focus for me.”
McDonagh has been Assurance Leader with PwC Ireland for the past eight years and part of the leadership team reporting to Feargal O’Rourke, the firm’s outgoing Managing Partner.
McDonagh’s career with PwC Ireland stretches right back to 1994, however, when it was still trading as Price Waterhouse and long before the move to its current flagship premises on Dublin’s North Wall Quay.
“When I walked through the doors of our old office on Wilton Place that first time, would I have thought I would be where I am now 29 years later? I don’t think I could have predicted it,” McDonagh says.
“I’ve worked for one firm in that time, but I’ve had multiple careers through the roles and the experience I’ve had.
“Working closely with so many clients across different sectors has taken me from indigenous companies operating in the domestic market right through to multinationals trading in Ireland – and offering them the support mechanism they need to invest here.
“Ultimately, I think I’ve gotten to where I am now by taking every opportunity that has come my way and making the conscious decision to keep learning at every stage of my career.”
The team around McDonagh has also helped. “I’ve had some ‘bad hair days’, we all do, but I’ve always had that support around me, not just when I’m at my very best, but also when I’ve needed help. That’s really crucial, I think. It’s why I’m still here and why I absolutely still love it.”
Of particular importance to McDonagh has been the support and guidance he has received from Feargal O’Rourke, who has been Managing Partner at PwC Ireland for the past eight years.
“Feargal has been a great role model and mentor to me,” he says. “His support and enthusiasm for our people and the business over the years has been unrelenting. I have really valued his leadership and would like to wish him every success in his next chapter.”
As the new Managing Partner at PwC Ireland, McDonagh will lead a firm with national reach extending to 3,000 people in Dublin, Cork, Galway, Kilkenny, Limerick, Waterford and Wexford.
It will be far from a solo endeavour, however. “One of the most important tasks right now for me is assembling the leadership team I will work with over the next four years.
“One of our core values at PwC Ireland is that we work together as a team and this extends right through to me and how I work with the team around me,” he says.
“Everything we achieve, we achieve as a team. No one person ever has the monopoly on good ideas. Equally, no one should ever be in a situation where they are left on their own to try to solve a problem, or to figure something out.
“You absolutely have to support people and give them the space to understand what they want from their career and what they need to grow as professionals, and as people.
“They can only really do that if they know and trust that they are in an environment in which it is okay to make mistakes.”
A Partner with PwC since 2006, McDonagh held the role of Assurance People Partner for four years before he was appointed Assurance Leader in 2015.
It was this role that gave him his first real insight into the strategic value of good people management and meaningful employee engagement.
“I learned so much in those four years about how to make sure that all aspects of how you engage your people is as it should be, both operationally and from a management perspective,” he says.
“It’s really about how they experience the firm from recruitment through all the stages in their career, and making sure that what we are giving them is rewarding and exciting. That is enormously important.”
McDonagh’s own interest in accountancy as a career took root when he attended Templeogue College in Southwest Dublin.
“I had a tremendous accounting teacher who really kindled my interest and, after I did the Leaving Cert, I went on to study Commerce at UCD followed by the Master of Accounting at UCD Smurfit School.”
He joined PwC Ireland, then Price Waterhouse, in 1994 while still studying for his master’s. “We hadn’t yet merged with Coopers & Lybrand at that stage to become PwC Ireland, so I’m really one of the dinosaurs here,” he says.
In the years since, McDonagh’s career has centred mainly on large-scale listed Irish companies and multinational corporations.
“From a business perspective, I’ve always worked in the non-financial services part of the practice,” he says.
“What we’ve called this has changed more times than I can tell you over the years, but, essentially, my focus has been on big companies in sectors like manufacturing, industrial products, pharmaceuticals, life sciences and food.”
Although he has spent much of his working life with PwC in Ireland, McDonagh recalls a three-year stint with the firm’s Boston office in the early 2000s as a particularly important period in his career.
“That time was really key for me in terms of the lessons I learned and how important they have been to me since,” he says.
“I moved to Boston as a manager and then became a senior manager over there. I think, for many of us, when you take yourself outside your own comfort zone, you learn the most.
“For me, moving to Boston was like starting again. I didn’t know anyone. I didn’t have any connections in the city.
“In that situation, you have to build your brand and reputation from ground zero, and in a much bigger market. It was a challenge, but one I loved and learned a huge amount from.
“People are much more direct in business in the US, so you very quickly form a thicker skin. As my career has progressed in the years since, that resilience has stood to me.
“At the same time, I made some lifelong friendships professionally and personally with my PwC colleagues in the US, but also with people at the companies I worked with.
“Those relationships have stood me in good stead because Ireland as an economy has such a vibrant trading relationship with the US. Having experience and connections there is very helpful.”
Now, as companies in Ireland, the US and elsewhere grapple with a fresh set of challenges post-pandemic, McDonagh is seeing a “singular view” emerging in boardrooms around the country.
“It’s an interesting time. The global economy is clearly softer now than it has been for some time and, as we know, there are multiple elements to this.
“There are the rising interest rates, inflation, the cost of doing business, and the general economic outlook, which is far from clear.
“Everyone is facing these challenges but there is also something else that is very much front-of-mind now in the boardroom and that is the pace of technological change.
“There has been this sudden acceleration in the development of technologies like Artificial Intelligence, and that means that many companies are looking ahead to a pretty demanding change agenda no matter what sector they operate in.”
This change will bring opportunity as well as challenge. “The positive here is that companies are able to see beyond current challenges, and they are thinking about how to position themselves for the opportunities that lie beyond,” says McDonagh.
“And from an Irish perspective, economically we are certainly in much better shape than we were at the time of the global financial crisis.
“We have strong fiscal returns, and we still have good investment trade flows into Ireland. This tells me that we have the capacity to weather the storm and navigate the headwinds coming at us.”
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