Deloitte’s quiet achiever opens doors to opportunity

Named as a young executive to watch last year, Wendy Hartanti has her sights set on a roll in international tax.

Softly spoken, precise and measured, she’s not your typical high-performing executive. But modest presence aside, Hartanti is getting noticed as a standout in her field, named as one of the 40 under 40 to watch in last year’s Asian-Australian leadership summit.

Just 35, Hartanti is a corporate tax partner at Deloitte Australia, one of only a few female partners of Chinese-Indonesian descent at the consulting firm. It’s been an impressively rapid ascent, but her career path could have been quite different.

“I wanted to do architecture because in my extended family there were a few in the construction business,” she says. “Like many other children of immigrants I wanted a sense of security and to achieve financial stability. I had cousins in construction who were quite successful, and I thought I would do architecture or engineering at university.

“In high school, I liked math and science so the natural progression was probably science and engineering but it didn’t work out that way. Somewhere along the way, I decided I wanted to do something more practical.”

Practicality is hard-wired into Hartanti. At just 11 years old, she found herself in Perth, thousands of kilometres away from her parents in Indonesia. They had sent their three children to Australia to save them from the simmering anti-Chinese sentiment and violent unrest gripping parts of the country.

“My grandparents were immigrants from China to Indonesia in the early 1930s,” she says. “They had to start again from nothing, and they really instilled in us a role model for hard work and resilience.

“I remember my parents would leave our house early, before sunrise, to go to work and come back to get us up and drop us off at school before going back to work until the early evening.

“From a very young age, my mum would say the only thing they could provide for us was a good education, that nothing else was guaranteed but if we had a good foundation, we could do more with our lives.

“I wasn’t someone who liked to study when I was younger. I am the youngest of three siblings and I just wanted to get by. It wasn’t until I was in Year 7 in Indonesia that I started paying attention to my studies, and when I moved to Australia it gave me a bigger realisation of what my parents had to sacrifice.

“And because of their sacrifices, I wanted to make my parents proud.”

In Perth, Hartanti was placed under the guardianship of a teacher at an English language school, then enrolled in boarding school. With no mobile phone, she only kept in touch with her parents by letter or the occasional email.

“Calling from Indonesia was expensive, so they didn’t often call,” she says.

“It was tough to begin with. I came to Australia on a student visa and they found someone in Australia who worked with the language school to be my guardian and I stayed with them for six months.

“I moved to Sydney in Year 10 and lived with my brother. He was already at university and old enough to be my guardian. I often joke with my brother that he actually raised me. He is only four-and-a-half years older than me. Being with my brother was reassuring – to have someone I could trust – but we had to re-learn each other’s habits.”

In the penultimate year of a combined commerce/law degree, Hartanti started casual work at one of the big public accounting firms doing personal tax returns for ex-pats. She enjoyed the challenge.

“It allowed me to put accounting and legal studies into practice. When I graduated, I wanted to have a broader experience working with corporations rather than individuals,” she says.

In her graduate year she took a rotation through mergers and acquisitions and found she had a knack – and passion – for international tax.

“These were complex tax issues and I found I liked working across sectors, learning about clients’ businesses rather than just their tax,” she says.

But climbing the corporate ladder wasn’t in her thinking.

“When I first started my career at PwC there was only one female partner in Sydney for my area, but there were many female managers. I think that at the time I thought if I could at least progress to manager level that would be good,” she says.

“At that time, I wasn’t thinking about being a partner. There was a lack of culturally diverse background partners and female partners so I didn’t think about it at all.

“Then when I made senior manager, I wanted to try to be a director. It was really a step-by-step reassessment as I went along.”

Then in March 2020, Hartanti moved to Deloitte as a partner.

“I was fortunate enough to have mentors and sponsors who believe in me more than I believe in myself at times. They have helped me on the way, and I am still learning. I believe it’s crucial for younger people to have mentors and sponsors, so I try to do that as well,” she says.

Now as a partner, she can see that leadership is about being able to incorporate and respect diversity – not just in gender and culture, but in perspectives and personalities as well.

“It’s important to realise that people have different perspectives and personalities, and they can equally contribute,” she says. “My own leadership style depends on the circumstances. I am collaborative and like to listen to opinions but in the end, I have to make the final decision.

“I do find it hard sometimes. I am not naturally assertive because of the way I was raised being part of a community and culture. So being assertive can be challenging for me and I am still working on it. It has to be genuine and natural for me instead of forced.”

In her measured way, Hartanti says she now wants to play a roll in Deloitte’s tax practice.

“There are lots of opportunities in the international tax space and I want to contribute to growing that and equally contribute to mentoring other people and helping them with their professional journey.”