You never know when your big break will come knocking. For Julie Sweet, it came just a month before she was diagnosed with breast cancer at the end of 2014, during a regular one-to-one with her boss—then-CEO of Accenture, Pierre Nanterme.
“At the end of the meeting, he closes his notebook and he pushes it aside, and he says to me, completely out of the blue… ‘I think you could run this place someday,’” Sweet recalled the pivotal moment in her career to Fortune’s Titans and Disruptors of Industry podcast with Alyson Shontell.
It was a surreal moment for Sweet, who was serving as general counsel at the time and did not fit the mold of a typical CEO: she had a legal background, not a traditional business one, she was a woman in a company historically led by men, and unlike previous leaders, she had not spent her entire career at Accenture.
Even her boss admitted that jumping from general counsel to CEO was not a feasible jump, leveling that she would have to “run something else first.”
But instead of letting doubts slip out, the now-57-year-old leaned on the advice she once heard from Dina Dublon, the former CFO of JPMorgan Chase who served on Accenture’s board: “When someone gives you a stretch role… chances are that the person offering you a stretch role is as nervous or more nervous than you are. So, don’t say anything, like: Are you sure?”
