I Am a Leader in Training

Let’s talk hypotheticals. A year ago, when I became the Deloitte Consulting CEO, if you asked me “Are you ready for…”

A Global Pandemic? Nope. Completely new territory and something I would never have considered when envisioning first-year scenarios.

An incredibly charged US business and social climate as a result of racial injustice? If I’m honest, I probably would have humbly (but confidently) said yes - that I felt largely prepared for that type of environment. After all, race was not an uncomfortable or unfamiliar topic for me, surrounded by immediate family members, friends, and colleagues of color.

In my first year captaining our team of ~50,000, my leadership team and I frequently and plainly put the topic of race on the table. Together with our professionals, we set meaningful goals to recruit, retain, and advance diverse professionals; we acknowledged the microaggressions and biases that our teammates of color face every day; I continued my sponsorship and formal coaching of some of our most talented Black and Latino emerging leaders.

Fast forward to recent weeks. With this foundation, it felt natural for me to immediately address the injustices and tragedies surrounding the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor, the flagrant act of white privilege in Central Park, and the long shadow of systemic racism with our society. And yet…

I learned more in the past 10 days than the past few years combined.

I have been very outspoken “internally” with our entire team but very quiet “publicly” in recent days for two reasons. First, I am incredibly proud of Deloitte’s unambiguous statement, and the leadership of friends, Joe Ucuzoglu and Janet Foutty, who are leading a Day of Engagement as a first step towards action.

Second, in every moment that I am not trying to help navigate our people and our clients through this global pandemic, I am spending my time reading and listening and educating myself. I am particularly indebted to the thousands of my team members with whom I have personally connected. Your ideas, your grace, your frustration, your passion and your pain have made me better. And so now I share these thoughts because I want my own words to join the global chorus of commitment to a just, enlightened future. 

I tell people all the time that to truly be a servant leader is to be perpetually in training. I am in training.

And so here are the people I am learning from, the lessons I am processing, and the issues with which I am still wrestling.

The People I’m Listening to and Learning from:

• My younger brother Keith, a neighborhood ambassador for the city of Charlotte. He’s an incredibly talented amateur photographer, marching alongside protesters and capturing the rawness of the moment. I keep heading back to his Instagram feed for inspiration. One of my favorite photos is the cover image for this post.
• My incredibly talented sister-in-law Liz. As we all ask ourselves, “Is there anything I can really do to make change?” she assembled, in a matter of hours, a petition from alumni to the administrators of her former high school. The demand: assemble an anti-racism plan and curriculum for the upcoming school year. The result: hundreds of signatures in just a few days.
• Raw, unedited, personal stories from people that I admire and follow. There have been many who (like me right now) are clearly sitting at their kitchen table, pulling up the Notes function on their phone and without the guidance or coaching of a PR/branding team are simply typing the words that capture their feelings and sharing them. I have read many personal perspectives over the past week, but three have really stuck with me:

1. From a good friend and Georgetown soccer alum, JT Marcinkowski, who is a current Major League Soccer player for the San Jose Earthquakes.
2. From Niele Ivey who is the head women’s basketball coach at my dad’s alma mater, Notre Dame.
3. And finally, this one from a Deloitte teammate, Josh Davis, who wrote a piece for Medium that he describes as “providing a glimpse into what it feels like to grow up black outside of what we often see on the news cycle.” Truly incredible and worth your time. 

• Coaches of sports teams. As a white male leading a diverse, high-performing team, I am always looking for lessons from leaders who have credibility and experience leading diverse teams Turns out that professional sports coaches are an interesting cohort to learn from in this regard. A recent episode of The Ringer’s “Flying Coach with Steve Kerr and Pete Carroll” podcast, featuring legendary San Antonio Spurs Coach Gregg Popovich, was particularly valuable to me. Pop’s comments on inherent white privilege at the beginning of the audio really made me pause.

The Lessons I am Learning:

• I was completely unprepared for the consistent fear that Black parents describe for their children. It comes up without prompting in nearly every conversation I’ve had and it is overpowering. The fear of what might happen when a child leaves home for something as mundane as a drive to the grocery store. The fear of “what could happen if my child is pulled over?” is a burden no parent should carry – ever. This articulation of fear in everyday experiences was sobering. I realize a pain I had failed to recognize in so many friends, and one that reaffirms that empathy is always a work-in-progress. 
• My interactions with my four kids (ages 16, 15, 13 and 11) has caused a lot of introspection. Each of them has friends, teammates and relatives of color. And each was a bit na?ve about the impact of race on those individuals’ lives; after all, they see joy, success, and in many ways the appearance of an even playing field. And I love their innate belief that equality and justice are human rights as well as their total indignation as their eyes have opened to the widespread injustice. But perhaps their naivete is a bit dangerous too. As it means that our education systems probably aren’t sufficiently discussing the history and the present-day implications of racism in the U.S.…and that I haven’t devoted enough time to nurture the understanding. More work to be a better dad.
• My kids also pushed me on another topic: voting. They rightly noted that my personal voting consistency (local, state, federal) is spotty and, therefore, a bit hypocritical. They are right; we all need the reminder that our democracy is a privilege that demands each of our participation.
• It’s become very clear to me that for people less comfortable around race, particularly those in the majority, that a way to help them learn and become more comfortable is to proactively suggest books and articles to read…and then follow up to discuss. Among the most powerful catalysts for discussion that I have seen in this moment: anything written by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson (I prefer the book, though the movie is solid), this Refinery 29 article by its Managing Editor Danielle Cadet, and this piece by Shenequa Golding on Medium.

The Issues I am Wrestling With:

• The importance of “allyship” has always been clear to me and an area of deep personal passion. Allyship is the idea that a person recognizes and actively seeks to remove barriers for others, specifically supporting people from marginalized communities and actively helping them advance within an organization. For me, this has meant immense focus on those for whom social justice is so often elusive. Beyond race, this has included religion and sexual orientation. But what I have heard loud and clear from my Black colleagues in recent days is that me being a role model for allyship is simply not enough. Change needs to happen fundamentally and quickly. Therefore, this moment requires the people (like me) who occupy the most senior roles in organizations to permanently change the performance goals and incentive structures for our management teams. As a Black leader I really trust told me (paraphrasing): This means setting measurable goals and unambiguously tying reward to clear progress and negative consequences to its absence. The stakes are too high for just rewarding the positive – we must also directly address the negative behavior in our organizations.
• The risk of overly generalizing in these intense moments can cause unintended consequences. Right now, this is clear as I hear some people’s passionate concerns about the depiction of law enforcement (at times explicit, at times implicit). Many people (across all races, religions, and backgrounds) have intense pride for their own distinguished service in law enforcement, for their spouses, children, parents or clients in law enforcement. How can we move beyond these generalizations to get to specific action and meaningful change?
• I mentioned earlier that race is not a new conversation in my practice. And I am very proud of my teammates’ intense degree of self-reflection from across races, genders and generations that’s accompanied by a desire to both learn and act. It’s so much stronger than I observed or felt after Charlottesville or Ferguson or other tragedies of the past ~6 years.

And, as a naturally optimistic person, I experience this as totally genuine…and therefore, it is as a massive opportunity to seize the momentum and energy to instigate real change for the long-term. We in business, government and academia must set the foundation for change while we have the undivided attention of all… while being careful not to overly simplify the effort required to drive it.

Okay, back to listening. So much more to learn, so much more to do.