KPMG WORC Webcast Spotlights Women Leaders Across Cyber, Legal, and Audit

Promotion packets are being assembled across KPMG's member firms right now, and the five women on the WORC "Going for Gold: Women Leading the Way" panel had a specific message for anyone preparing one: the story of a setback, navigated well, is more promotion-ready than a story of frictionless execution.

KPMG's WORC community brought in Nasrin Rezai, chief information security officer at Verizon, and Sarah Fortt, deputy general counsel and corporate secretary at Ford, alongside three internal leaders: Katie Boswell, managing director for cyber security and tech risk management; Lisa Rawls, Americas GRC service network leader; and Julie Gerlach, a partner in internal audit and enterprise risk. The webcast ran March 31 at the close of Women's History Month and carried one CPE credit for qualifying live participants.

The panel's organizing framework was "bouncing forward," a reframe of adversity that treats setbacks not as deficits to recover from but as data to accelerate with. For a KPMG senior associate who comes out of a bruising busy season with a mixed performance review, this is not abstract philosophy. It is the difference between framing that review as a failure and framing it as a deliberate inflection point in a promotion narrative.

Four additional tactics ran through the session. On sponsorship, the panel sharpened a distinction that matters at every KPMG level: a mentor coaches you privately, but a sponsor names you in calibration. A senior manager in audit or advisory who can identify a partner-level sponsor before promotion slates close is operating with a structural advantage, not just a network one.

On stretch roles, the argument was specific: take the assignment that exposes a visible gap, not the one that confirms an existing strength. A senior associate in internal audit requesting cross-service exposure to a cyber or GRC engagement before the promotion window creates a documented record of range. Deepening a familiar client portfolio without lateral movement optimizes for comfort over trajectory.

Boundary-setting came up not as a self-care concept but as a management skill. A manager in a year-end audit engagement who defines availability windows explicitly, rather than leaving them open-ended, becomes easier to sponsor; the people above her can predict and rely on her capacity.

The panel's counterintuitive point on celebrating success: not marking milestones is itself a career liability. Promotion narratives need source material, and that material is generated in real time or not at all. Gerlach, Boswell, and Rawls brought KPMG-specific context to this; Rezai and Fortt brought the view from Verizon and Ford, where the stakes of that gap are visible at the executive level.

In the next 30 days: Watch the replay on KPMG's U.S. webcasts hub and confirm whether the CPE credit applies to your license through your learning and development coordinator. Identify one senior leader who can advocate for you in a calibration conversation and schedule a 30-minute call framed explicitly around your next promotion cycle. Write two sentences describing your last significant setback as a bouncing-forward story and use that language in your next one-on-one with your manager. If you manage a team, assign the replay before May performance reviews close and ask each person to return with three career takeaways and two concrete sponsor or mentor action items.