Christina Canavan

Leadership opportunities

When Christina started as an analyst at Deloitte & Touche LLP in 2001, she was “really drinking from the fire hose, trying to figure out what to do and how to succeed.” Fourteen years later, including a short stint when she left to work for Navigant Consulting, she’s in a very different space. “Now I’m leading the team, helping to identify opportunities for clients and mentoring the next generation of leaders.”

Leadership and confidence are qualities she picked up on early. Back in 2002, she was working in the Cleveland office when a senior manager was tasked with launching the Data Quality and Integrity practice in D.C. He took a small team of young analysts with him, one of whom was Christina. It was a significant move away from her hometown and into work that was focused on data analysis. “He was brave enough to transfer with me and some other campus hires and build this practice by himself.” That confidence made an impression.

Today, Christina is managing teams for the very practice she’s helped build. She’s part of teams working to help agencies become audit ready over the next several years. It’s a massive project. “Federal agencies have so much data that it can be a challenge for them to analyze such large volumes. We’re trying to help them get their arms around it.” Much of her work is helping the agencies slice and dice the data in different ways to ultimately confirm that financial statements are “sound and supportable.”

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Team work

If you ask Christina what makes her happy at work, she’ll say, “It’s the nature of working on a team,” the way quality people push one another to be better as individuals and to accomplish more than they possibly could alone. It’s an idea she passes on through community service. An avid runner, Christina volunteered for three years with Girls on the Run, a program for third- to fifth-grade girls meant to build self-esteem. The program covers lots of topics like bullying and standing up for one another, but at its core is exercise. As the name implies, the girls run together each day. “It was just great to see those girls — especially because some of them did not want to—all run a 5K at the end of the program, to see them grow as people.”

Christina is a mom with two sons, Max and Ian. She and her husband love roadtripping with their pop-up camper and the boys, and they recently visited Yosemite and Zion National Parks. Christina enjoys art history. She has a brother in the Navy, which makes her work in Government & Public Services all the more satisfying. And she insists that if you are ever asked what you would be doing if you weren’t working at Deloitte, you should say, “I’d be trying to work at Deloitte.”

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