Meet Natasha Allen

“I bring me to the table – so what if me happens to be brown? Maybe the brown me brings a new perspective because my experience is different. Wouldn’t that be helpful to hear when looking for solutions that work for everyone?”

In preparation for our interview with Deloitte & Touche LLP senior manager Natasha Allen, we gave her a task -- Describe your job in a way a middle schooler could understand.

Immediately, she ran into a problem. “I don’t know any middle schoolers,” she says. As is her lifetime habit, Natasha discovered a solution. One of her nieces is in fifth grade, close enough. Together, they crafted a simple description. I am a guidance counselor for IT leaders in real estate companies.

In addition to a concise summary, it revealed Natasha’s penchant for collaborative problem solving. “I love coming back to my clients with a solution,” she says. “I'm like done. Okay, cool, what else you guys got?” She believes it is something she was born to do.

“It’s almost as if I didn’t have a choice,” she laughs.

“Every summer we lived in Atlanta, my sister and I would spend time with my grandparents, who owned a farm in Florida,” Natasha says. “It was like going into a completely different world. On the farm we experienced growing and selling strawberries, harvesting corn, and cutting okra. It was a chance to learn from a new environment and come away with a different perspective.”

One summer, Natasha remembers her grandmother teaching her and her sister how to fish with cane poles. After lessons, for motivation, she made her two granddaughters a promise – to cook all the fish they could catch.

“I’m like, OK. Let’s get this going,” Natasha laughs. “We ended up catching 10 fish or so, but the problem was how tiny they were. Un-cookable in my mind.”

“Birth order means something,” she says. “I’m the oldest and, in my culture, a lot is expected. It’s on you. Learning how to be flexible and solve problems is essential.” Recognizing and trusting her gift for leadership, her parents delegated critical family responsibilities to Natasha.

“My parents treated the role of the oldest child as a serious thing,” Natasha remembers. “One of my father’s nicknames for me was E.D. (eldest daughter). My role was practically family manager. They respected, valued, and invested in my leadership. It kept me busy and focused on problem solving.”

She developed an impressive resume of responsibilities and achievements, including peer leader, student government, first chair alto saxophone in concert and jazz band, safety patrol, lead dancer, lead handbell ringer, track team manager, church youth president, scholar athlete, family care giver and executor of schedules.

Growing up, she says issues of race did not touch her. “If someone did something bad to me because of race as a child, I have no recollection of it,” she says. “My parents and church family were the ones who had to teach me about being black.”

Her first experience of racism occurred working her first professional job, as a realtor at the age of 22. “Something was going wrong with the printer – it was printing in black and white instead of color,” Natasha says. “When I said it needed to be fixed, one of the realtors laughed and said, ‘Oh, yes, in black and white or color. What’s the difference to you?’”

Having never dealt with a racist comment, Natasha ran the story by her parents, who said – Yeah, that was not a great thing to say.

“Each act of racism I experience as an adult just makes me more perplexed,” Natasha says. “Other people identifying me as the unicorn works against the power of diversity in solving problems. I bring me to the table: so, what if me happens to be brown? Maybe the brown me brings a new perspective because my experience is different. Wouldn’t that be helpful to hear when looking for solutions that work for everyone?”

In her current job as Advisory Senior Manager in Deloitte’s IT and Specialized Assurance practice, Natasha leads a team of gifted specialists whose goal is to problem solve.

“In my practice, our focus is technology controls,” she says, “across a client’s environment. We help organizations understand risks associated with IT and emerging technologies and I do this work for real estate companies. “‘We tell the client, ‘This is what we are seeing and assess if that was what they were expecting. Then you problem solve together. Given these circumstances, how can we help the client come up with the best-case scenario so they can move forward?”

Natasha smiles and says it’s the same thing her grandmother taught her to do. But instead of a meal of 10 tiny fish, it’s like feasting on a marlin it was your joy to reel in.