Deloitte's Kwasi Mitchell on 2024: It's our job to make college students less nervous about the future of work

• Kwasi Mitchell, Deloitte's chief purpose and DEI officer, said leaders need to be better teachers.
• Going into 2024, Mitchell is worried about college students' confidence in the workplace.

I first spoke to Kwasi Mitchell, Deloitte's first chief purpose officer, in March about change in corporate America.

He explained how embedding purpose touches on people, society, and clients. It's time to "be more deliberate than we ever have been because expectations have changed," he told me at the time.

We reconnected in November and a lot has changed for him. For one, his role evolved from broadly touching on sustainability, equity, and social impact to overseeing all DEI — diversity, equity and inclusion — responsibilities at the consulting firm.

Now, purpose and diversity and inclusion are "more central to all of the decisions that we're making as an organization critical to our broader strategy, and really a lens with respect to how we're going to operate," Mitchell, whose title is now Deloitte's chief purpose & DEI officer, told me recently.

"It has just been easier for my team to kind of work across different corporate silos move more quickly, and simultaneously, do things that are interesting that sit at that intersection of equity from the standpoint of DEI, social impact, and also sustainability," he added.

He knows there's been some pushback against the concept — and necessity — of ESG. He's not concerned though. It requires us all to be more thoughtful and deliberate around ideas and implementation, he said.

Mitchell's insights are part of Business Insider's year-end leadership package, "Looking Ahead 2024," which digs into vision, strategy, and challenges across corporate America.

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What are you most excited about for 2024?

I'm most excited about work that we are really continuing to focus on from an equity standpoint, and specifically highlighting through items that are taking place in two of our distinct institutes. One, we have what we call our DEI Institute. So, really working and driving cutting-edge research on diversity, equity, and inclusion: How do we fundamentally have employers create spaces of psychological safety for their employees to really embrace every aspect of their identity at work?

I see this as being a piece that really starts to pivot the dialogue associated with distinct aspects of DEI — making them more tactical, helping people to understand them from a humanistic standpoint, rather than necessarily continuing this dialogue associated with the broader business case. I do feel like the business case has been proven several times over for years and years now, but really taking these items and helping people to understand how they individually impact your people.

So impact beyond our organization is really what I'm excited about for 2024.

What are you most worried about for 2024?

I do spend time on college campuses, and I feel like there has been a coalescence of a few things that I think have both undergraduate and also advanced graduates a little bit nervous.

I think it's this conflation between several things: the impact that Gen AI is going to have on their positions for the next several years. It has been a cooling economy where they're seeing that they have fewer opportunities perhaps than what they envisioned — and what some of their counterparts had over the last several years. And a series of geopolitical events are having a definitive impact on their mental health and their perspective on the world.

Are we appropriately supporting, driving, and helping people to integrate into their careers without all of those anxieties playing out and driving adverse impact not only on their mental health, but also potentially eroding their their trust and alignment with their organizations and their organization's missions?

How do we make sure that all of these external events that are evolving don't turn into something that has the workforce that we were trying to recruit be a little bit more challenging from the standpoint of the trust that they have an employer? We want them to see Deloitte and other great organizations as being places where they can not only start their career, but that will help them grow in their career despite the multitude of reshaping that's taking place in the business environment today.

What's the one thing you got right in 2023?

One thing I think we got right in 2023 was the launch of an urban sustainability challenge in San Francisco called Yes San Francisco. The effort was a collaboration between ourselves, the World Economic Forum, Salesforce, and the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce. We assembled a group of organizations within the Bay Area that would support a series of innovators who are looking to really revitalize downtown San Francisco through distinct sustainability-focused ideas and business models.

I distinctly remember sitting across the table, starting to work with our collaborators on what actually could this be. Now, seeing this coalition grow, and knowing that we've created this model that can be replicable to other cities, we can lean in on a distinct challenge in that particular community, know how to organize an ecosystem of organizations around it, and really challenge systemic issues on a local basis.

I'm incredibly excited about exploring how we do this in other cities that are near and dear and incredibly important to our business. Having a coalescing force with a few organizations to drive momentum could be really really interesting and impactful in the future.

What's one thing you got wrong in 2023?

I think it's the evolution of a lot of the work that many organizations are doing on how to be attentive, listen, and grow with the sentiments of their workforce. I do feel that we've had this evolution with social and political issues that are stepping into the workforce from a geopolitical standpoint. There needs to be a broader focus on educating our people, specifically on some of these items, rather than assuming that they know and have a fair and balanced perspective on all aspects of things that are taking place.

Whether that be a debate associated with specific laws that are surfacing within distinct parts of the country, focusing on things such as transgender rights and also legislation. Whether that extends to geopolitical conflicts and crises that are evolving be that in Ukraine, Israel, Palestine, or what have you. Many of our executives and tenured leaders have global perspectives and have worked in a lot of different areas. How do we educate our people more broadly so that they can understand not only the stance that we may take on an issue or not take on an issue, but simultaneously, how to speak about it and support our people in instances of that nature?

So I feel what what really needs to be the focus for many of us in roles such as mine, is educating our people in ways that we historically have not had to before. Because there are nuances and also complexities with some of these challenges that we assume that people understand. In many instances, they don't have the frame of reference to. And it's our desire, and also responsibility, to educate them on them further.