Deloitte’s former Chief DEI Officer Kavitha Prabhakar shares lessons learned and advice for the chief DEI officers of tomorrow

As a prominent champion for social change and women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), Prabhakar co-leads the Executive Women in Technology initiative for Deloitte’s Chief Information Officer (CIO) Program and is personally committed to increasing representation of girls in STEM by engaging in K-12 education in local communities. She serves on the board of Girls Who Code and has led various women’s initiative programs for financial services, including 100 Wise Women and Women on Wall Street. Prabhakar has been recognized as one of Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Next Gen and Crain’s Notable Minorities in Accounting, Consulting and Law. She additionally received the 2023 Ascend A-List Award for her work in supporting Pan-Asian professionals to thrive and drive positive societal impact for all.

At the second annual Chief DEI Officer Forum, where she served as the co-dean, Prabhakar announced she would be transitioning from her position as chief DEI officer (CDEIO) into a new role leading Deloitte’s Core Business Operations portfolio of offerings, which includes Application Modernization and Innovation, Cloud Engineering, Core Technology Operations, and Operations & Technology Transformation. Core Business Operations supports organizations as they modernize their systems, realize the opportunities of cloud computing, and re-engineer their processes to take advantage of new platforms and business models—and she is committed to bringing her DEI thinking to that work. In the following interview, Prabhakar reflects on her time as CDEIO at Deloitte and shares the valuable lessons she has learned, her advice for others committed to doing this work, the importance of authenticity and allyship, what makes her optimistic about the future, and much more.

Identity and authenticity are very important to me and how I show up as a leader. They are also very intertwined. There are so many aspects of identity that come into play when I show up authentically, whether it is the fact that I’m an immigrant, someone who took bold moves to come across oceans for an education, or someone who leapt into computer science when it was an emerging field in the early ʼ90s. Being a woman in technology continues to be a platform that I love and use to inspire and reach other women and young girls. Finally, the most cherished part of my identity is being a mom, and my children keep me humble, real, and fun!

When purpose meets passion, magic happens. There are few times in one’s career journey when that alignment between personal purpose and passion naturally happens. For me, the societal moment in June 2020, when I took the chief DEI officer role, was my calling for impact. It was so important to respond to the racial crisis and address systemic inequities collectively across corporate America, and it was a humbling opportunity to lead both within Deloitte and across the industry. I had tremendous support and sponsorship from Deloitte’s executive team—they trusted in my ability to lead at that critical moment and empowered us to take bold action. I’m fondly called “Chief Troublemaker” because I create “good trouble” to accelerate change, to disrupt, to challenge orthodoxies, and to move into some places that made us somewhat uncomfortable at the time. From all of this came growth, and we had the mindshare of our people and the unwavering support of our leaders to do just that.

For me, on this particular journey the first lesson I learned early on is that you can put a lot of structures and systems in place, you can incent behavior, you can enforce behavior—all of that’s important—but the best way to really create change is to inspire. Inspiring people to be part of the change they want to see is huge. This was not a role of authority; it was a role of influence. And roles of influence are very much anchored in inspiration more than anything else. I did that through transparency, trust, and earning and re-earning trust on a regular basis.

The pride and joy of the organization was the inaugural DEI Transparency Report, which was industry leading for the breadth and depth of data and insights we transparently shared with our people and clients. I love that we let the data speak for itself, and we established a clear and common understanding of our baseline for change. As a result, we busted some myths based on anecdotes and perceptions, and that transparency engendered trust across levels in the organization and in the public.

We were also very proud of our professional-led Self-ID campaign, where we added new self-identification options to our internal talent portal—beyond those necessary for federal reporting purposes—as a way to encourage authenticity, to strengthen a sense of belonging, and to provide deeper insight into our people. Self-ID is not about counting our people but rather accounting for them! As a result, our people are more empowered to tell us how they see themselves and have a wider range of options that can accurately reflect their overlapping identities and lived experiences. Our Self-ID journey continues to be an appreciation of the intersectionality of identities and the complexity of our world today, working to ensure our people feel like they can share their whole selves with the organization and not feel like that will impact their professional outcomes. I believe equity can be achieved when your identity does not impact your outcomes, and that’s why this is such an important dimension.

The conversation we amplified around allyship also stands out in my mind. First, understand what allyship is. I always say, “Being a good human is not enough anymore.” It’s important, but it’s not enough. To be an ally, you can’t just always stand in the “do no harm” quadrant; you need to actively lean in and use your power and privilege to help change the outcomes for others.

And to embed this behavior systemically in the talent processes was also a needle-moving change: What do allyship behaviors look like in a leader? How do we teach and model good allyship behaviors? And where they’re not good, how do we call them in? Because both are equally important.

Finally, I’d be remiss not to mention my pride and joy around the DEI Institute and our ability to put leading-edge eminence out into the broader market. DEI work is very much about collective impact —we are in it together. In my opinion, shifting that mindset to be collaborative across our clients, our competition, academia, research organizations, and nonprofits has been a huge part of how the Institute came about. And the Chief DEI Officer Forum will continue to be the collective community to drive this agenda forward and help shift the momentum.

To be an informed and effective ally, proximity to the challenges really matters, which is where you need to make space to listen, to learn, to truly empathize and not just look at things from the lens of privilege. To me, that is where a big shift can come from. You must also be very curious about the “normal” or the “expected” and really push on flipping orthodoxies and challenging the status quo. That should be fundamental. In organizations, there are many times you might hear people say, “Where is the precedent for this?” We could flip that orthodoxy and say, “Well, we could be the first.” For the DEI Transparency Report, for example, we published pay equity data, which was unprecedented.

Also, one of the most beautiful things about effective allyship to me is intentionality. Everyday, small, intentional actions matter way more than programs do, whether it is making space for those individuals who haven’t had a chance to contribute 45 minutes into a conversation or using your personal social capital to advocate for an individual who’s not in the room. All of those are intentional actions that make all the difference. And it’s going to make you uncomfortable many times, but being comfortable with the uncomfortable is critical to our collective progress. Because ultimately, at some point in our lives and careers, each and every one of us will need an ally.

Yes. It is important to recognize and understand that systems are designed by people. And systems have been around for a long, long time because nothing, especially in large-scale organizations, just happened overnight, whether that be performance management or talent acquisition. Deloitte has been around for 178 years, which means these systems have been built over 178 years. So stepping back and assessing systems, processes, and policies with an equity lens to see if they are yielding equitable outcomes often takes a lot of time and effort. And even after you assess, if you identify gaps, you’re going to need time, effort, and commitment to change. My biggest learning is that while you can focus on incrementally changing existing systems, you can have outsized impact if you teach people and leaders how to incorporate the equity perspective into design at the onset of the process.

For example, we have designed accessibility (e.g., ramps, gender-neutral bathrooms) into the extension that we’re building for our leadership campus and training facility, which we call Deloitte University. We’ve designed it as opposed to retrofitting it. So, when you think about equity during design, it is typically much easier than changing 178-year-old systems in many ways.

It’s important to keep in mind, though, that you cannot just rely on systems being changed. There’s systemic change, and there’s individual behavioral change—because the last mile is often still being affected by humans. You cannot lose focus on individual behaviors while you’re trying to make systemic change.

Shifting our focus from activity to results. The theory of change says we can move from activity to results and focus on measuring outcomes of our actions. Sometimes DEI work can get labeled as a “feel-good” activity, but if you move to outcome orientation, you can be confident that, yes, it feels good, it feels right, as well as about the outcomes for the effort you have put in.

Additionally, let disaggregated data be your friend to help you avoid making generalizations. Let data empower your insights, because that improves your proximity to issues and really helps you zoom in on where you want to put in effort to see change.

From a racial equity perspective, the fundamental aspect here is we must continue to commit to working toward a set of aspirational goals. And while DEI progress is not ever linear, it’s important to have a set of clear goals tied to racial equity, holding yourself accountable to that, and really driving the work to get to those outcomes. And that is at the individual level, organizational level, and social level.

Racial equity was so hard for corporate America, and I’m so proud that we committed externally to Management Leadership for Tomorrow’s Racial Equity at Work certification to help keep us even more accountable. We can make statements about goals and create public goals, but having someone from the outside, an independent organization, assess our journey was super helpful.

My first “aha” moment was this: To create true change, all levels of the entire organization must engage. And the way I always talk about it: I had the title of chief DEI officer, but it’s a role I shared with every professional every day. So it is super important to recognize that you need to inspire people to move and to show up differently in small, intentional everyday actions.

The second thing I would say as I think about other future chief DEI officers is it is important to recognize that there is going to be a small percentage of people who don’t fundamentally believe in this being a business imperative. I can focus on the larger group who do believe in it and not on the ones who may never move out of this position.

And my third piece of advice is don’t mistake culture for process. You have to address systems, processes, and policies and also continue to build the right culture in an organization and hold individuals accountable for the behaviors that contribute to culture every day.

It’s the upcoming generations—their expectations of us; their ability, without hesitation, to hold us accountable. It’s just beautiful to see. They’re empowered. Many in my generation were all about showing up at work and doing hard work; whether the purpose of the organization aligned with my personal purpose was not a question I chose to make personal choices on. But for so many workers of today, it better align, and they’re going to hold you accountable.

DEI progress is a journey without a finish line. I hope that people can stay bold and stay courageous and always remember to create good trouble.

This article was written by Marianne Schnall, a widely published journalist, author, and contracted Deloitte writer.

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