She entered eight case competitions to prove a career switcher belonged in consulting. Now leading agile delivery teams at EY, she argues that most corporate mentoring is built the wrong way round; matched pairs where there should be rehearsal, structure and specific feedback.
Rita Korkor Agyei runs delivery teams for a living. As a senior consultant in technology strategy and operations at EY in Chicago, she leads agile teams building the tooling behind an IT supplier governance framework. Which means a standing responsibility for people who are, in her words, “about eighteen months behind where they think they should be”.
She recognises the feeling, because it is recent. Agyei arrived at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business as a career switcher, a Ghanaian brand manager who intended to pivot into technology consulting and was not at all sure the room would have her.
“I often dealt with impostor syndrome and the feeling of inadequacy,” she has said of that period. “That is what prompted me to apply and participate in case competitions.”
She entered eight. She won four, was runner-up in two, and did not get out of the group stage in two more; a record she recites with the losses attached, which is itself a small lesson in how she now coaches. In November 2022 her four-person team took first place in the GT-IDEA case competition sponsored by Grant Thornton, out of a field of twenty teams.
What she does with it now
The competitions ended; the method did not. At Kelley, Agyei served as a consulting case coach with undergraduate career services and as president of the school’s Africa Business Club. Two years into practice, she applies the same structure to junior consultants on live engagements, where the stakes are a client meeting rather than a trophy.
It has three parts, and none of them is encouragement.
First, rehearsal under judgement. “You cannot practise confidence alone in a room,” she says. “Confidence is a response to having survived something. Give people a real audience, a clock, and someone who will tell them the answer was thin.”
Second, structure before charisma. Career switchers, she argues, are routinely coached on presence when their actual gap is framing; knowing which three questions a problem reduces to before deciding how to say them well. “People think they are being judged on polish. They are being judged on whether they defined the problem correctly in the first ninety seconds.”
Third, feedback that names the specific move. Agyei is blunt about generic praise, which she treats as a failure of the coach rather than kindness to the coached. “‘That was great’ is not feedback. ‘You buried your recommendation on slide four and the client had already decided by slide two’ is feedback.”
People on the receiving end tend to describe it the same way: uncomfortable first, useful afterwards. [REGINA NWANGELE, [Finance Business Partner, Cook Medical Group], who was coached by Agyei during her MBA journey into the Indian University’s Kelley School of business and when she became the 4th President of the Africa Business Club at Kelley states,
“Rita’s style has always been a blend of specificity and empathy. When I took over the Africa Business Club, she didn’t just wish me luck and step back she shared useful material she’d built during her own tenure so I wasn’t starting from a blank page. She helps you define the problem first, so you’re sure the solution you land on actually answers the question, and then she encourages you to leverage what’s already there rather than reinventing it. I remember that most clearly during our fundraising efforts to secure funding from the Black Philanthropy Circle; her coaching heavily emphasized preparation. That’s a rare instinct. Most people leave a role and take the knowledge with them. She left a system behind, and she made sure you knew how to use it .
Agyei does not soften that. “The discomfort is the product,” she says. “If a rehearsal feels pleasant, you have a conversation, not a rehearsal. The kindness is in doing it in a room where nothing is riding on it, and then never letting the person walk into the real room unprepared.”
The stretch role, and who gets one
Agyei is unusually well placed to talk about the other half of talent development: what happens when an organisation decides to bet on someone early. In 2017, with two and a half years of experience at Vodafone Ghana behind her, she was appointed the first head of marketing at NSANO, a fintech operating in four African markets. There was no incumbent, no playbook and no department.
“It came with no manual, and I was thrown into the deep,” she has said of the appointment. She built the brand identity, ran strategy for both the B2B and B2C arms, took on employee engagement, managed a budget and reported to the chief executive. By her own account she grew the company’s brand, social and digital footprint by up to 100 per cent, from a standing start.
She later joined Nestlé as brand manager for NESCAFÉ across Central and West Africa, where she was named a “Digital Warrior” in 2020 and best performing employee in the coffee business unit in 2021, and where the company featured her in its own regional recruitment campaign for its digital marketing team.
The appointment is the reason she coaches the way she does. Stretch roles develop people faster than any structured programme; they are also the roles organisations are least willing to hand to someone without the obvious CV, and Agyei was handed one at twenty-something with no department to inherit. “The seeds I sowed have germinated and others continue to build on what I have done,” she says of NSANO. “That only happened because somebody decided that two and a half years of experience and a clear plan beat ten years and a safe one.”
What mentoring schemes get wrong
Her critique of corporate mentoring is that most programmes match people and then treat the matching itself as the intervention. Pairs are assigned, calendars are compared, a quarterly conversation happens, and nobody can say at the end of the year what changed.
The alternative she describes is closer to coaching than sponsorship: a defined skill, a repeatable exercise, a real audience, and a named outcome to hit. It is also, she notes, cheaper; the case competition circuit that rebuilt her own confidence cost her weekends, not budget. On a delivery team, she says, the equivalent costs twenty minutes before a client call and a willingness to be specific afterwards.
Agyei holds an LLB from the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration, has been called to the Ghanaian Bar and holds a 2024 MBA from Kelley with a double major in marketing and business analytics. She is a Fellow of both the UK-registered Commonwealth Academy of Leadership and Management and the Institute of Management Consultants.
Her friends at business school took to calling her “the girl who can”. She is careful about the phrase. “It was never that I knew I could,” she says. “It was that I kept entering.”
