Podcast
Podcast
- 01 Nov 2023
- Managing the Future of Work
Deloitte's Dan Helfrich on consulting in the post-Covid, AI-inflected new normal
Bill Kerr: The management consulting industry came through the Covid slump relatively unscathed. Demand for guidance and navigating the crisis ramped up digitalization projects, and economic growth kept consulting firms busy. Many of them expanded, although now in late 2023, we’re seeing an overall slowdown in hiring. Of course, consultants aren’t immune to the forces that affect their clients. These include the post-Covid new normal of remote work, generative AI, and overall economic uncertainty. What’s the view from the corner office?
Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast from Harvard Business School. I’m your host, Bill Kerr. My guest today is Dan Helfrich, Chair and CEO of Deloitte Consulting. Prior to assuming the top spot in 2019, he served as head of the Government and Public Services practice and Chief Strategy Officer for human capital. We’ll examine the post-Covid challenges facing consultants and their organizations and the transformative role of AI. We’ll also talk about the importance of employee engagement and work-life balance. And we’ll discuss fostering a new wave of enterprise leadership. Dan, welcome to the podcast.
Dan Helfrich: Bill, can’t wait.
Kerr: Dan, let’s begin a bit with your path to becoming CEO of Deloitte Consulting.
Helfrich: It was an accidental one, that’s for sure. I, like many people who start in the profession of consulting, assume that you do it for a couple years and use it as a launching pad for something else. And I guess I’m still searching for that something else, because 25 years later, I’m still here. A lot of it dates back to a life as the oldest brother of seven, a life as a team sport athlete—mostly in soccer—and the captain of all the teams that I played. And leadership was always something that fascinated me, always something that I strove to improve in myself, and I found both a profession and a firm in which what I consider a team captain mentality of serving your peers was appreciated and positively evaluated. And so, through a whole winding path of leading a lot of parts of our business, including our government business, I end up being, I guess, the ultimate team captain of the firm.
Kerr: And along that path, one of the interesting factoids is, you’ve continued to moonlight as a soccer play-by-play broadcaster. So tell us a little bit about that choice.
Helfrich: Yeah, the moonlighting/side hustle has been, frankly, a really important part of my life. And I do, I have for the last 19 years, broadcast soccer, mostly college soccer. And I’m the play-by-play voice of Georgetown University, where I played. I was debating when I joined Deloitte as to whether I would take an on-air job in the broadcasting industry or whether I join Deloitte. Against the advice of every single person in my family, I chose Deloitte instead of the broadcasting path. But I’ve loved having the side hustle, and I love the fact that I can tell our people for the last 19 years—by the way, 19 years ago, I was not some fancy Deloitte person, a partner with a fancy title. I was a mid-level senior consultant. I prioritized something that was really important to me. And being able to tell that story today and give our people the confidence that we actually want them to have outlets and activities that prioritize their own well-being, it’s super important. Interestingly, being a play-by-play broadcaster and an effective CEO have a reasonable amount in common, and the idea that you must always be prepared, but you never actually know what’s going to happen. You never actually know what conversation is going to take place. And so how you remain an active listener, how you are articulate and improvise in the moment, those skills end up being mutually beneficial.
Kerr: You spent, it sounded like, about 25 years as a consultant. And the industry goes back to the 1960s and 1970s, when I think it really got started. Tell us about how the job today is similar or different to what consultants were doing in the 1990s or in the 1970s.
Helfrich: Well, look, I think at its roots, it’s the same business. And the reason consulting exists—and I tell our people all this time—is, there are forces of change happening in the outside world, and great organizations want to take advantage of those forces of change. And they need advice and expertise and skill from outside their own organization to make that happen quicker and with higher quality than they could if they did it on their own. Now, with that sameness, there is a ton of difference. There is difference in the transition from what used to be largely an advice business—and a pretty antiseptic advice business—to one that is much more about outcomes and implementation and results and take your advice and prove that that’s going to work in my environment. The consultant, which connotes for most people, there’s this vision of an MBA who shows up at an airport on a Monday and comes back on a Thursday and that you probably conjure up an image in your mind of what that person physically looks like. That person is dramatically different, because there are hundreds of versions of that person. There are certainly still business strategists, but there are doctors and nurses in second careers and government executives in second careers, there are graphic designers, there’s the world’s greatest systems engineers, there are cultural anthropologists helping to understand organizational dynamics. The heterogeneity, which I find beautiful about this profession, is dramatically different than it was at the dawn.
Kerr: And how did that, accordingly, update your recruitment funnel and also the career development, the various paths that a cultural anthropologist is going to go on, versus the traditional Harvard MBA?
Helfrich: The answer is, you have to dramatically update them. And the enemy of progress and modernization in this area is trying to retrofit and recreate historical systems, processes, et cetera, to a new generation and a new dimension of talent. And so, when it comes to recruitment, that means things like, not only are we recruiting at different schools and for different degree programs, but we have far more people in the second, third, or fourth chapter of their career than 15 years ago, where it was mostly people in the first or second chapter of their career. We have far more people who have highly technical degrees and certifications as their on-ramp into the profession than what we consider more generalist pathways from 15 years ago. And then, one of the most exciting things that’s happened over the last few years is partnering with organizations like OneTen and the Management Leaders of Tomorrow, who are really leading in how do we find individuals from underserved communities, from less typical backgrounds, and how do we find on-ramps for them into the profession? And when we do that, suddenly the tapestry of what a consulting team looks like has far more diversity in every way you can measure than 15 years ago.
Kerr: And if you think about the leadership for consulting firms with that heterogeneity of employees and, likewise, for a number of your clients that are also attempting to have a much more diverse set of talent that they’re bringing to the business, how does that change the type of leader you need, how you cultivate that leader, for the enterprise level?
Helfrich: There’s a ton of interesting work to do there. I do think some of the basics still apply. I think the best enterprise leaders have a diversity of experience as they navigate the lattice of different opportunities within their organization. And dimensions of experience may mean things like having back-office roles and front-office sort of heart-of-the-business roles. It means having roles that expose you to things globally, to the extent you’re in an organization that has global reach. It means making sure you have experience running a P&L or equivalent. So some of those experiences still apply. But what we’re starting to do, and I think the most progressive organizations are starting to do, is identify things like how do you really cultivate employee engagement? How are you really an effective enterprise communicator, which means written and verbal. It means small rooms, medium-sized rooms, and huge stages. It means how are you as a navigator of conflict and how you navigate those moments of risk. Covid certainly revealed the importance of agility, and both leaders and organizations that actually are able to know when the moment is to throw the playbook out and to evolve. So that’s the frontier now, I think. Experience matters, but it’s experience coupled with the development, learning, evaluation of people on this broader set of skills that I think is the future.
Kerr: And do you still have people coming into Deloitte that would declare themselves to be a pure specialist? There’s some domain that I think you earlier had the systems engineer that was like the world’s best at that. Are there new tracks that you developed that are great for a specialist to be able to continue to refine their trade to be at the forefront?
Helfrich: Absolutely. And I think the fun is how you knit together an organization where specialists and generalists coexist in a fantastic way. And the number of those tracks you’re calling “specialist tracks” for us has increased manyfold over the last decade. You could be a graphic designer and be on a track that’s really about honing your creative skills. There’s multiple systems-engineering–type tracks. And then there are tracks in what you might call industry or sector domains. So your specialty may not be a functional skill, your specialty might be nursing. And you’re working with healthcare clients on new models for patient management. Your specialty might be state government, human services. And you actually are on Team Deloitte helping to imagine new models for the delivery of human services in states and localities through digital modalities.
Kerr: That’s great. And Dan, just one further follow up on that. As you think about the development of your talents, you’ve spoken to the advantages that multiple types of experiences that a general kind of background can bring. But we also highlight the specialization that some employees may want to have. How do you counsel people as to with their next assignment? Is it better to take that more diverse experience or to continue refining their trade? Is that left to each individual? Or is it one that the company has kind of got a plan or attract that’s trying to guide people through?
Helfrich: It’s such an important question, because there is a temptation to have one corporate view of the right path. The customization of the career path to the individual is where the magic sits. And, of course, you have to have a talent model architecture that sits behind that that has some predictability, so people know sort where their career might go. But people are motivated by different things in their career—in general, and in a particular moment. And I want to find the pathway that is most suited to the combination of the person’s skills, ambition, and current life circumstance. Now, there are certainly skill sets of currency that are required to navigate most of those roles. And so, it is important to us—and gen AI is obviously a current example—it is important to us to have some connective tissue around skills and learning, so that that part of evolving as a professional is relatively consistent.
Kerr: Let’s continue with that artificial intelligence—gen AI—work there. You’re both adopting it internally to Deloitte and you’re also obviously engaged with many clients about what it can [and] can’t deliver for them. Tell us about where your company is right now. What are some of the places you see the most potential gains in productivity terms? And also where are the big misconceptions? People come to you and say, “We would really like your company to help us do the following.” And you know that that’s probably not going to work out the way they think it will.
Helfrich: Well, I think to your last point, the first misconception is that gen AI is all hype and, therefore, you get the eye roll, like, “This too shall pass.” And I think those that have that perspective are missing a seminal moment and a seminal change in technology. And then, of course, the other bucket is those that believe that we have ready-made proven transformation models that can start eliminating big functions of what the client does. And they can start doing workforce planning within the next three months to take X tasks and say, “Well, I don’t need to do that anymore because the gen AI models are going to do it.” So, interestingly, I have clients and talk to leaders who have both of those misconceptions. So where we see the organizations that I think are doing the best, they are A) picking use cases or domains and running real-time proofs of concept. And so the kinds of things I’m seeing yield real value—things like talent acquisition and new processes you can run in talent acquisition. We’re seeing things like the redesigning and implementing your corporate intranet with a chat-like function underneath it to suddenly make knowledge management much more accessible and less costly to run than it ever has been before. And then you see people doing what I think is really important, is to fundamentally examine core heart-of-the-business functions that are customer-facing, and determine and run scenarios about the gen AI impact that can occur in those systems, and then build business “cases,” for lack of a better word, on that. The other thing that we see a lot of the leading companies doing—and we’re certainly doing it, ourselves—is understand and invest in increasing the sophistication and fluency of the board and the senior management team. Ultimately, those are the rooms where a lot of the bet-the-company, bet-the-organization investments are being made on gen AI. And then, the final thing on gen AI is the trust dimensions of gen AI and how, as you’re making decisions as a leader about gen AI applications—both facing inward and how you run the company and talk with your employees, and customer facing—how you do so with a lens of trust and, actually, with a lens of humanity. We all know you’ll see huge pullback as soon as an organization experiences and falters with a security topic or a trust topic.
Kerr: Many companies worry about a technology gap, but also the underlying skills gap, that they have toward implementing the technology effectively. And this can be with some of your clients at the most senior levels; it could also be throughout their workforce. What do you do to help them in terms of their skills and training to get them ready for this digital future for AI and similar?
Helfrich: We launched the Deloitte AI Academy to train our own individuals, but then we’re finding ways to avail the broader world and our clients with some of those skills. And we’re also finding ways to make sure we’re building that kind of learning alongside leading the universities and technology institutes. And we obviously partner a lot with the leading software and hardware platforms that exist. And so we think that the shared investment that leading companies and governments can be making is in raising the fluency level will yield real benefits going forward.
Kerr: Dan, if gen AI has been the topic of the last year, I think the topic of the last three years has been flexible work, hybrid work, return-to-office plans and this unsettled future. Where did Deloitte end up on that?
Helfrich: Well, I’ll preface my answer by saying one of the most interesting things about being a professional services firm that works in every industry and serves thousands of clients is you get a front-row seat to the diversity of views and diversity of policies that are being experimented with. There is not one memo from the CEO that can create a common work model. And so our flexibility says we need to get to the unit where work is done and then find the right rhythm of work for the moment in that work team. And we’re pretty happy with how that is going. But the part that many organizations who’ve adopted a more flexible model need to work on is, how do you make sure that there’s enough common denominators in the work experience so that there’s enough consistency of culture building, enough consistency of network building, such that those individuals who have a more intense in-person environment, compared to people whose work on a day-to-day basis is largely virtual, that they don’t at the end of the day feel like they’re working for two different companies. And we’re still experimenting with the right ways to do that. How we got there, interestingly, Bill, is we’ve done a bunch of pretty structured, transparent, non-moderated debates. And so, one of the things I’m a big believer in, and I think the research will back up, is that the organizations with the highest degree of employee trust, the employees believe that they have not only transparent access to information, but that they have some way to have a voice in decision making on the things that matter. And so we’ve run multiple debates over the last three years to basically say, “Hey, our management team is weighing option A versus B versus C. What do you think?” And we’ve gotten incredible value from the texture of the feedback that’s come back in those debates. And the employees have gotten tremendous value, because they’re seeing there’s a lot of their peers that disagree with them. And so you can come up with this model in your head that “everyone that looks like me feels the same way that I do.” And what these open debates reveal is that that was a very faulty assumption.
Kerr: I would love to continue for a minute on this constructive tension that you bring into the workplace, because I think it’s a very distinctive part of your leadership approach. So could you share with us a few of the other topics that have gone through this multi-round, open-dialogue process? How do you bring in the voices and then also report back about it?
Helfrich: We open these debates up both asynchronously in some sort of chat-teams–like forums and synchronously, and we let the data be what the data is and the comments be what the comments are. And they don’t go through some CEO approval filter for it to be there. You have to identify something that you know is percolating in the hallway conversations of the company. Then the second thing that makes a great debate is, you have to know that different smart people have strong opinions on opposite ends of the debate. That’s, essentially, the recipe for us. And so the most recent one we ran is whether or not career-performance management coaching should be opt-in or not, because we’ve been getting a lot of feedback. Historically, for us, it had been required. Some people said, “I think I’m at a disadvantage, because my career-performance coach doesn’t take the role that seriously as my colleagues’, and I think that puts me at a disadvantage.” The decision we ultimately made, which was a little nuanced—and we did allow certain portions of our population to opt out—was informed by the debate. We ended up realizing through the debate that the pool of people we could assign to be coaches was actually smaller than maybe it should have been. And so we actually changed the rules of who were allowed to be a coach, essentially making less-tenured people able to be a coach, and we never would’ve done that without the texture of this public debate.
Kerr: I want to return back to flexible and hybrid work. Working with the clients that you do—and you have the whole spectrum there—what do you see as the open challenges on the less-flexible side on those that have a more back to office kind of policy set? Is there something, in particular, you’re consistently seeing over there?
Helfrich: Organizations run into all kinds of challenges with the practical implications of implementing the one-page memo. And it makes the job of the front-line supervisor much harder, because they’re having to deal with all kinds of permutations that weren’t contemplated or addressed in the memo. In a very homogeneous workforce, having the single approach can make a ton of sense. It just has to be in the context of work. And the last thing that we’re seeing in a lot of places is, the death of prescriptive policies is when certain types of people, often high performers, are given exceptions to the policy. Of course, organizations that don’t allow the flexibility that they seek have retention challenges. So that’s one of the vagaries of the very prescriptive model.
Kerr: Dan, with the time remaining, I’d love to just run through three or four of those other big things, besides technology and remote work, that are I think weighing on many people’s minds. One of them is about gig work, internal talent marketplaces, trying to build much more around a project-like basis and match talent to that. That’s clearly something you as an organization embrace from the beginning. But where do you see that frontier right now?
Helfrich: We actually have a system we call “My Gigs” that allows project managers to fractionalize work and team members, regardless of where they are geographically, to find fractionalized work to deal with in their additional time. That’s been of huge value to us. And we’re doing more things like creating pools of individuals and pods of individuals that might work on five projects at once, where historically they would’ve worked on one project at once. And if you do that, you are catering to this variety desire, and we think you’re building muscles for the long term more predictably.
Kerr: Okay. Next step is building organizational diversity and measuring its impact on the business, itself.
Helfrich: You’d be hard-pressed to find an organization that doesn’t talk about it, and so that’s a good thing. But where the real action is is in demonstrating that that pervades the organization on a day-to-day basis. And so we think organizations that are leading—and we consider ourselves one—are doing a number of things, but I’ll highlight three. The first thing is, that they are setting goals around certain dimensions of diversity and inclusion. And they’re setting them publicly and then measuring themselves against it. So we issue a transparency report every year that’s against goals we’ve set around certain things like workforce representation on a bunch of different dimensions, and we think that’s super powerful, and, as an accountability mechanism, that’s important. Second and related, we think organizations that are using a concept like self-ID, where you are disaggregating the identity information about your employees and allowing them to opt in to share a ton of information about themselves—their race, their ethnicity, their sexual orientation, their gender, their affiliation with groups like veterans, et cetera—at the corporate level, if you have that information—and again, people have opted in—then you can create communities and communicate to those communities in much more-effective ways. I had this incredible experience recently where I was congratulating one of our new partners, and as you know, Bill, becoming a partner at a firm like ours is a big honor. And I said, “What was your biggest takeaway over the last few weeks since you earned this recognition?” And she identifies as queer, and she didn’t hesitate, and she said, “When there was an email, not an unofficial email, but an official email, recognizing the 20-plus of us who identify as LGBTQ+ who were getting promoted to partner, it was this incredibly powerful moment,” because self-ID allowed that to happen. There might’ve been an email like that underground, and we wouldn’t have had it fully right, but this was official. That’s the thing self-ID does. And the final thing is, people who invest in allyship programs that make the pursuit of diversity, equity, and inclusion everybody’s pursuit.
Kerr: Another big topic is environmental social governance, or ESG, goals, which are sometimes highly trumpeted, other times they get a lot of pushback. Where are you hearing about clients on those fronts?
Helfrich: We certainly believe that, within ESG, there are dimensions of climate and sustainability that are among the world’s most-pressing challenges, and addressing them will benefit the planet, people, and is unambiguously smart and responsible business. And investments to that end will benefit everybody. So I think the key for any leader—and I certainly put myself in this bucket, and I’m a work in progress every day—is to make sure that you aren’t conflating purpose and politics. And it’s easier said than done, but if you set up a rhythm of communication—both with your employees and with the external world, including investors for public companies—then you will stand, not on the political winds of the moment; you’ll stand on the basis of business strategy as the reason you’re investing in certain things.
Kerr: And, Dan, maybe I’ll come with the final question here, which relates to our MBA listeners. We have a number of graduates that go and take up jobs at consulting companies after school. What advice would you give to someone embarking on that profession right now?
Helfrich: In a world of intense change, it’s hard to find a cooler profession than consulting, because you’re in the middle of helping leading organizations in the world navigate the change. So that’s the first thing. The second thing I would say is, make sure that you are open-minded to the pathway that a consulting career might take. If you’re open-minded and love the idea of exploring different types of work in different industries with different technology and human capital implications, it’s a great place. And then the last thing, Bill, that I would advise people—because I get this question all the time, particularly from students: “Besides my coursework, what should I be investing in to prepare myself to be a better consultant?” I go back to invest in becoming a better enterprise communicator. The world is short of great enterprise communicators. And a great enterprise communicator is extremely effective and personal in how they write. They’re extremely effective in one-on-one situations, whether they’re giving inspiring and uplifting messages or very difficult, critical messages. They’re really effective in Q&As, where they can’t rehearse and predict. And, ultimately, they’re really effective in larger platforms as they grow in their career. And I’ll close it by this: Take improv classes.
Kerr: That sounds like great advice. Dan Helfrich is the CEO of Deloitte Consulting. Dan, thanks so much for joining us today.
Helfrich: Cheers, Bill.
Kerr: We hope you enjoy the Managing the Future of Work podcast. If you haven’t already, please subscribe and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts. You can find out more about the Managing the Future of Work Project at our website hbs.edu/managingthefutureofwork. While you’re there, sign up for our newsletter.