Intuit
- Humera Shahid works on diversity, equity, and inclusion and talent development at Intuit.
- Shahid says she wants to support employees so work can be a "safe space."
- Shahid's insights are part of Business Insider's year-end leadership series, "Looking Ahead 2024."
Humera Shahid is Intuit's chief diversity, equity, and inclusion officer and vice president of talent development.
"That's quite a title," I said to her recently. "How does that work?"
"One of the most important parts of creating a diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplace is the role your manager plays," she told Business Insider. "Managers make a lot of decisions around 'Who am I going to hire?' When you combine the power of 'How does the manager create the right environment?' and do all of these things to really advance our DEI strategy for employees, it felt like it made sense at the time to combine these two things together."
Shahid has been at Intuit, which owns software products including the email-marketing service Mailchimp, the tax-filing software TurboTax, and the credit-rating service Credit Karma, since 2019. "I was hired to do talent-development work and to kind of rebuild that function for the organization as we were going through a massive business transformation to become an AI-driven platform," she said.
Shahid said she asks herself about the shift's implications for talent. "What kind of talent do we need in terms of leadership and management?" she said. "How do we develop that talent? How do we then build the skills for all the learning and development for what we need in the future?"
She said she's proud of how Intuit helps managers talk to and support their direct reports during challenging personal and political times, partially through providing trainings and guides for managers.
About 2 ½ years into her career at Intuit, she was also asked to take on DEI. "What I love about it is the willingness to learn about different people's experiences and how that shows up in the workplace," she said.
Shahid's insights are part of Business Insider's year-end leadership series, "Looking Ahead 2024," which digs into vision, strategy, and challenges across corporate America.
The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What's one thing you're excited about for 2024?
Being able to have technology work side by side with people — how it will make them better, do their work faster, be able to learn more.
It builds this agility and speed automatically. So I'm just excited to explore that with our employees — and feel like we can do more than we thought possible by taking advantage of technology, and not being afraid but just leaning in.
I'm really excited about what the future will bring.
What are you most concerned about for 2024?
There's a lot going on in the world today, and I think COVID taught us: How do you really help manage the well-being and even energy levels of our employees as you think about things that are going on that are affecting them?
Every day those things become bigger and bigger. There's so much coming at people, whether it's an election year that impacts you or whether you're dealing with something with a family member. There are just so many things that happen in life that affect you at work, and so I worry about our ability to keep supporting our employees in every way possible — and providing a safe, inclusive place to do that while also doing great work.
I worry about our mental well-being across the board, for all of us. Work and community can actually be a really safe space where you can be yourself and you can share. I don't want people suffering in silence.
What is one thing you think you got right in 2023?
We as a company spend a lot of time on manager accountability and DEI together. As large social issues impact our employees, how do we prepare managers to check in with our employees to make sure that they can provide the right support and resources? And just to acknowledge them as people when something tough is happening.
When we created the guides, we started to think about what the use cases would be. I think we were like, "Oh, this is really going to be important as we talk about issues around race."
If there's an act of violence affecting a specific community, this is a really helpful way to acknowledge it, to own it, to create space for people. There are prompts for how you can have the conversation, what you can say, if you need help, how to contact HR.
We didn't imagine that as 2023 went on we would want to use those same guides for people struggling with reproductive rights. We will use those same guides when thinking about different legislation introduced around LGBTQ+ rights. We use those same guides as we saw what happened with Israel and Hamas and that conflict and employees wanting to talk about it.
Our intention was to have something that was durable. We prepared our managers on how to lead with empathy and curiosity and compassion and gave them resources to do that. Fortunately or unfortunately, we've been able to use them in a variety of situations that are really personal and meaningful to different employees.
What is one thing you got wrong in 2023?
Wrong is such a strong word, because I'm such a learner.
One of the things I wish we would have done more of, or differently: We spend a lot of time wanting to grow our employees' skills, and I think there are a lot of areas where we could continue to actually build more skills and upskill.
We're just starting on our AI learning journey. Could we have done that three months earlier? It's just about operating with speed and being able to do that quickly, at the right time, in a concerted way.
So it's probably just doing things a little bit faster than we would have imagined.