Kyle Matis
Class of 2011
Undergraduate University: Union College
Class Year: 2005
Major/Minor: History
Employer: Deloitte
Since the onset of his career, Kyle Matis has felt consulting is a "team sport." Now as a Senior Manager in Deloitte's Human Capital practice, he finds himself in the role of coach or team manager more often than as a player on the team.
Kyle was hired into Deloitte's Washington, D.C. office out of the full-time MBA program. He's spent the last seven years working his way up through four different roles within the firm's Human Capital practice, which aims to provide clients with transformative solutions to complex problems involving their biggest asset—their employees. He attributes his success directly to his time spent at Miller Hall.
"One of the things I was deliberately focused on at William & Mary was making sure I absorbed as much as possible, making sure I took as much time to learn, to get to know my peers that I was going to school with here, and working to understand their perspectives and learning from those around me," he says. "One of the thought areas that we have here at the firm is approaching the business of management consulting through our own lens of how we think the best or the most direct avenues are to solve problems. I approach the problems through the lens of people first.
Currently, Kyle manages a team at Deloitte that is focused on IT organization transformation, digital enablement, and strategic change for technology, government, and commercial clients. He's observed an evolution in the skills he relies upon on a daily basis from when he first began his career to his current, more senior role.
"At this point in my career, I'm less hands-on with the work on a day-to-day basis. Now I'm much more involved with the management of people. I'm more focused on making sure I've got the right ability to advise and connect with clients, all of which puts me in a position to use some of those broad-based leadership skills you spend a lot of time on in school," he says. "At this point, I'm responsible for knowing and helping to understand what drives financial performance within the firm. I do less of the creation and more of the review, making sure that it's the right set of Deloitte quality."
Kyle sees strong parallels between the corporate culture of Deloitte and the academic environment of William & Mary, which is why he's often on-campus recruiting MBA candidates for the firm.
"The people who I work with from William & Mary are very, very humble. They have worked collectively very hard to get where they wanted to be prior to William & Mary, and they worked very hard as MBA students. I think the nature of the coursework at William & Mary that focuses on leadership, and diversity, and embracing folks of all backgrounds translates very well into the types of leaders we want to have here at Deloitte," he says.
"We deliberately call ourselves a Deloitte practitioner in the same way you would call a doctor or a lawyer a practitioner. We could go out and start our own consulting firm. What's in my head about the way I approach clients or how I advise clients is how I would do that on my own. I choose to practice my craft at Deloitte because of the reinforcing infrastructure and the peers that are around me, and by way of that, William & Mary students have always had that same sense of 'I am a practitioner, I'm an entrepreneur, I embrace the idea of owning my career'," he concludes.
