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The Making of a Minority CEO
Kellye Whitney , 03-09-2010
One doesn’t become a CEO by chance. It takes effort, planning and a good bit of skill. A mentor or series of mentors doesn’t hurt, either.
David Williams, chief executive officer of Deloitte Financial Advisory Services LLP, one of four operating subsidiaries of the larger Deloitte company, has been in his role since October 2008. With Deloitte for eight years, Williams worked at a competing organization for almost 20 years.
He said one of the first challenges he faced as an African-American male in the financial services industry was figuring out where his skills fit best.
“I spent a fair amount of time trying to acclimate myself to where would I be able to excel best, and I decided a firm like Deloitte, or my predecessor Pricewaterhouse, was the right place, in part because there was a lot of opportunity for skills to shine,” he said.
Williams said navigating the financial services environment was not without challenges, however.
“These firms are primarily up-or-out based firms, like many consulting or professional services firms are, and you had to demonstrate pretty quickly what your value proposition was and build relationships with people,” he said. “That was pretty hard for me, not having the background and being different than most of the people that I dealt with in that environment.
“The biggest challenge that I faced was how to navigate through that environment in a way that was going to serve the organization well but would also be very, very good for me.”
Williams said the solution to his challenge actually transcended race — it was to build relationships.
“There are lots of criteria around which you can build the types of relationships that you need in order to be successful in consulting or in a firm like ours. The fundamental way is to be willing to be vulnerable and to ask for help,” he explained.
Williams said he wishes he’d known 20 years ago how willing people are in firms like Deloitte to help people in apprentice positions. In the master apprentice-type model typical of financial services firms, a person will work with people who are more senior in experience and skill set, learn from them, and eventually move up and take on their roles.
“In most environments like that, people are more than willing to help, and that’s largely irrespective of whether someone is a minority or a woman or has any other quality that would be different than the majority in the environment,” he said. “Had I known that, my life would have been a lot easier.”
He said a few different mentors acted as his role models.
“One in particular was the partner that I worked for at my old firm, who basically I give much of the credit for my success,” Williams said. “Then there’s another category of people who came from a variety of backgrounds but had certain portions of their technical, management or day-to-day business skill sets that I learned from, and quite frankly stole from, in this apprentice model.”
Other groups of mentors that Williams said helped him comprised people who looked like him, had a similar background or were in positions that he aspired to hold. He was able to learn a great deal from them because when he asked, they willingly showed him the ropes.
While mentorship does much to alleviate some of the ills associated with minority success in business, many people inside and outside of corporate American believe that barriers still exist for African-Americans. Williams agrees. He said these barriers tend to be structural in nature or related to perception gaps as well as race.
“It would be easy if it [were] just about race, but it’s not,” he said. “It’s about opportunities, relationship building; it’s about convincing people of the business proposition around diversity from a client and a marketplace perspective. It’s much more critical thinking around business than simply an emotional reaction about somebody based on what they look like or who they are.”
The structural piece is finding ways to motivate people to believe their organizations are better because they’re diverse. Williams said normal processes to build an organization that looks like the community it serves or the world in which it operates may not work. Further, many organizations can function without building this sense of community. The key, he said, is to show why they should want a diverse workforce without involving the phrase, “It’s the right thing to do.”
The perception piece is the idea that others won’t fit into the organization just because they are different from you. Williams said this way of thinking suggests that if someone acts differently or is from a different background, that person won’t be as valuable to the business as you are.
Diversity, in its simple sense, means a level of broadness in what one observes, Williams said.
“To me, it’s beyond things that are visible, but it’s certainly made up of things that are visual. It’s diversity of the way people think; it’s diversity of their life experiences, their backgrounds, their ages, genders, races, religious beliefs, all of those things define diversity — it’s just difference.
“In our business, we’re paid for the quality of our ideas. There’s no question that difference is good because when you come at an idea differently, you always make it better,” he said.
