Equity, Diversity and Asking the Right Questions

Deloitte Executive Chair of the Board Janet Foutty is a member of the Catalyst, Inc. Board of Directors and member of the Catalyst CEO Champions for Change. She’s a leader, who drives the conversation around disruption and is a staunch advocate for workplace inclusion, women in technology, STEM education, and the future of work. We recently talked about leading with empathy and developing a diverse and inclusive pipeline of talent. Here’s the transcript of our conversation.

Lorraine: I wanted to start out by saying, you know, we’ve got three crises happening at the same time, the healthcare crisis, the economic crisis, and this social justice movement. What does that mean for your personal leadership style, and general leadership in this moment?

Janet: One of my colleagues, who actually succeeded me in my two previous senior leadership roles, has a wonderful expression, which is that we’re all leaders-in-training. That expression absolutely is pitch perfect for this moment, because when you talk about any one of those three crises, when you think about the sets of things that we’re leading through, there is no playbook. But I believe as a leader right now, the need to fundamentally focus intently on listening, and really empathetic listening, to a wide variety of people, has never been truer than it is right now.

The second thing, is the importance of taking care of each other. Whether it's a board or a management team or a working group, the support that we give each other both in the work that we're doing, as well as around us as individuals. The concern for our mental and physical wellbeing, I feel is now more important than ever.

And then the last thing I’ll say, because it's such a good question, through my role as chairing a board is, balancing our support of the management team and our fiduciary responsibility for the long-term health of the organization. Many chairs I’ve talked to say the same - we are all in the here and now with our respective management teams, helping them, supporting them, coaching them when needed while not losing sight of the long game and the strategic direction of the business.

Lorraine: Well, that was a fantastic articulation of a very complex and evolving challenge for all of us. At Catalyst by definition, we are focused on diversity and inclusion. What has this done in terms of your focus on D&I, both at Deloitte with your supporters and, more broadly, in your board role? Do you think it's focusing more? I mean, I feel like our mission is right front and center, but I'm curious how you think about it.

Janet: From a Deloitte perspective since 1993, when I was brand new to our organization, we were really in the center of helping shape the inclusion conversation. Our CEO at the time was frustrated with the lack of progress in and around gender, women rising to ranks of leadership, and he took a very deliberate and clear internal and external stand. And so that has been a constant for us, as it has for many organizations over the last couple of decades.

The combination of how hard the Covid-19 health crisis has affected the Black community, intersected with the high-profile murders of Black citizens, and the resulting unrest and protests has had a really, really profound impact in how we think about and address systemic bias and racial inequity.

I think of myself as a fairly sophisticated well-read person on matters of race. It's something I was focused on. I established the first Deloitte Black Leadership Summit five years ago, which is something that we had never done before to bring together all of our Black managers and above to spend time together. I felt like I was pretty advanced in my thinking, but I can tell you that this moment has made it super clear to me that I have a lot of listening to do. But this isn't just about me, this is about the organization. So, first it's taking the time and space to listen and understand and acknowledge.

And then I bucket the work into two things that you hit on, Lorraine. One is what is the action organizations are going to take? I think education is at the absolute top of the list.

I've been really working hard not to drive overly simplistic parallels between gender and race. I don't think the issues are the same, but I believe there are some really important parallels and learnings that can go both ways. And some of your researched-based work has been incredible in helping create education for all of us to become much more aware of the systemic issues that our Black community is facing.

The other is, how do we fundamentally think about our recruitment, advancement, and retention? One near-term example I can share with you now that encapsulates these elements is our formation of a Black Action Council to architect and execute a long-term strategy to advance our Black colleagues and communities by developing and sustaining a culture of anti-racism for our people, our firm, and our society. 

And then the third piece, is what do we do externally? And how do we use the strength of being the largest professional services firm in the world? And that's everything from the organizations that we ally with like Catalyst, and how we spend our money and time in the communities, and how we exhibit influence in Washington.  

Along with that is how do we use our individual voices as individual leaders? How do I use my voice in this conversation broadly, which as you know, I've not been shy about doing.

Lorraine: We have to seize the moments and actually have actionable change. I do feel it's different this time. That's what a lot of people are saying. People are trying to do something real.

Janet: Okay, so I spent most of my career in management and I transitioned a year ago into leading as a full-time chair of Deloitte’s board. Right away, building off the work that my predecessor did, we did some really groundbreaking work with Stephanie Creary of Wharton in terms of how you think about diversity and inclusion on boards. Diversity in the boardroom is incredibly, incredibly important. But what we've come to appreciate is if you don't have an inclusive board room, it doesn't matter actually, how diverse your board is. That's probably an extreme statement, but you really, really need to have an inclusive boardroom.

And so, we did a bunch of work actually over the last eighteen months on this topic, which is how do you foster a boardroom that's inclusive. We created a board inclusion framework, which we used ourselves and I assessed our own board against this framework. Think of it as sort of a classic maturity model framework and then we're beginning to use it with clients as well. And that's how do you think about every dimension of the thing that happens in a boardroom, from what your committee constructs look like to what your agendas look like to make sure that inclusion isn't a topic that is, or diversity isn’t just a topic that is discussed as a topic, but it flows through the way you run your boardrooms.

Lorraine: That's exciting. You can't just have diversity in an organization. You have to have an inclusive workplace. It's the same thing in the boardroom. I'm going to shift now. You've been involved in the future of work, some of the trends in the future of work have to do with reskilling and upskilling, as well as remote and flexible workplaces. What do you think this current crisis is doing for that?

Janet: It has forced the issue, frankly, on all of us in terms of different ways to work. And there's incredible goodness in that. And one of the things we're really focused on and encouraging our clients to focus on is not to lose that goodness, in terms of that flexibility. On the flip side, as we well know that mental health and wellbeing absolutely has to be a very different focus.

And then there's a more fundamental topic, which is what does an optimized virtual work environment really look like? How do you rethink roles? How do you rethink meetings? How do you rethink building relationships? And we're just scratching the surface, but the crisis that we're in is an accelerant to that. And what I want to make sure is that it's not just about the logistics, which have worked incredibly well, but it's about how do we now rethink work. What is important to do in person when we have the opportunity to do that again? What do we want to rethink in terms of how we work? That is the next chapter to be written.

Lorraine: Well, thank you. I know we're over time, but I have one last question. Deloitte issues an annual Global Human Capital Trends report. What does this mean for human capital and especially for the board, thinking about human capital as an asset and a resource?

Janet: The thing I found the most interesting in that conversation was about the data. A statistic that stuck most in my mind, was that only one in 10 organizations produce real time workforce information. And we know there's so much data, but when you think about real time workforce information as whether I'm sitting leading a business or whether I am leading a board, this idea of what questions do you ask and how quickly can you get that data around your workforce is so important.

• One question that the report highlights is around meaningful diversity. Which is not just diversity, but of your diverse population how many are in a position of influence?
• Another is around cultural risk sensing – getting better at identifying deeper root causes for workforce behaviors and trends – which only becomes more challenging in a remote work environment – so this is critical.
• A third is around job evolution - as job catalogs and the jobs themselves change, does your investment in continuous learning support that? Are you making sure that those opportunities are being filled through a very racially and gender diverse team?

So, in my mind, it's all about the data, asking the right questions, and making really sure that boards and management teams have the data that they need to be able to help steer the organization.

This interview was condensed and edited for clarity.