Patricia L. Harman, Editor-in-Chief, Digital Insurance (Moderator)
Melissa Gutierrez, Senior Vice President, General Manager, Pets Best Pet Insurance Services
Kathy Kranz, Vice President & CFO, Pinnacol Assurance
Camila Serna, Executive Vice President, Global Head of Digital Acceleration, Chubb
Transcription:
Speaker 1 (00:07):
Without further due, you've met Patty before. She is here to moderate our next panel. Patricia L. Harman is the Editor in Chief of Digital Insurance, covering the intersection between technology insurance for our industry. She chairs Digital Insurance's annual Dig in Conference, and this one Women in Insurance Leadership. Previously she served as editor in chief of the PC 360 group. Chaired the complex claims and litigation forum and hosted the insurance Speak podcast. Patty covers auto, property and casualty, workers' compensation fraud, emerging risks, and is a frequent speaker at insurance industry events. She has more than 20 years of experience covering property restoration and the insurance industry. For the next panel on leadership, DNA, decoding the Blueprint. Patty, take it away. Alright, thank
Patricia L. Harman (01:03):
You very much Ray. And I'll say it's just been such privilege to share the stage with all of you today. You're preparing for this presentation. I had the opportunity to review your entries for Women insurance leadership awards and I cannot honestly say that I'm just in awe of all of you that all of you have accomplished. Each of you is such a trailblazer and a leader in your companies and in the industry. And I know what you have to share with our audience today, just inspire and encourage them. So first, let me introduce Melissa Gutierrez, who's the Senior Vice President and the General Manager of Pets Best Pet Insurance Services. Melissa has been instrumental in growing the company, restructuring the organization, has technology initiative and expanding the disability and the importance of pet insurance in the market. And you've done a great job because I get lots of questions now from people should I have pet insurance cover, all those sorts of things. So congratulations.
Melissa Gutierrez (02:07):
Thank you. Happy to be here.
Patricia L. Harman (02:09):
You're really succeeding in that area. Next we have Kathy Kranz, who's the Vice President and Chief Financial Officer for Pinnacol Assurance. Kathy has led a number of initiatives at Pinnacle, including serving as one of the founders of kho, a technology startup subsidiary clinical. She helped to design the digital transformation program launch to reimagine the customer experience and she's one of the company's most successful and influential leaders, which is Camila Serna, the Executive Vice President, the Global Head of Digital Operation at Chubb. Camila focuses on's future plans and development of new capabilities programs, organizing the first studio innovation challenge that it for 300 innovators, which just stood fascinating, could about that. As part of our discussion, she used the Chubb's Digital Summits and was instrumental developing chunks, global digital team apprenticeships. So all three ways bring people into the treat industry, just expose them to what an amazing industry. So I'm going to start with an easy question for all of you and then can you share how you got into the insurance industry and briefly describe the journey to this point in their career because there are very few people who actually started and decided to go into insurance. Most of the people in insurance industry started somewhere else, which is what made them so amazing in their jobs because they had that depth of experience. But Melissa start with you first on that.
Melissa Gutierrez (03:58):
Sure. So how I got started in insurance is that I was the first in my family to go to college and I was on the eight year plan, which meant that after about four years, my parents cut me off. And so I had to get a job to pay the rest of the way through school. And my father was an insurance agent at Nationwide Insurance. So I spent over 30 years with Nationwide. And when it came time for me to get that job and to ask a company to actually help me pay for half of the rest of my undergrad and also my graduate school, my dad suggested I go to Nationwide. I made it clear to him that I would never stay in insurance and that I would never be in sales. And subsequent to that, I've spent now 36 years in insurance and probably half of that time in sales.
(04:46)
So it just goes to show, never say never. I think if I could give a quick overview of my career journey. So I am a General Manager. I've had opportunities working for a large company to run P&L's on three occasions. Those assignments aren't always readily available because usually if you're going to run a big p and l, they want you to have a whole lot of quantitative experience with a product line and on the product side. And for me, it worked out mostly because I'm on Gallup, if you've ever done StrengthsFinder, I'm a learner number one. And so I did take lateral moves. I've worked in pretty much every function there is. And so I think it did equip me to eventually move into that general management role. And I took some tough assignments. I mean, I honestly took assignments sometimes where the bench strength wasn't strong and they were looking for somebody who was willing to come in and take a chance. And I think those things are really sort of what got me to where I am today.
Patricia L. Harman (05:50):
Can you share your term for us?
Camila Serna (05:52):
Sure. I got into insurance unintentionally. So where a door closes, a window opens. I was living in Cleveland and had my car stolen and filed a claim. Me being me and taking some of what Sya said this morning, it was a yes, this is yes moment. I read the policy cover to cover all the terms and conditions. I called a friend and said, take me to an interview that I have. It was in retail as a supplier to Walmart, I need to get some cash while I figure out the car thing. So I ended up working for this Walmart supplier, but I continued on to interview and landed an interview with Progressive and they were like so much about car insurance. So yeah, tell me about it. Not by choice. So in a nutshell, that got me both a husband because the friend that drove me is now my husband and a career, a wonderful career in insurance. I started out at Progressive as a pricing actuary, then went to a product organization, did the state entries into Massachusetts and New Jersey for commercial auto. Then moved to management consulting with Oliver Wyman, and I've been for 15 wonderful years at Job in different capacities. And so it's always building new skills, being a learner and perfecting my craft of insurance.
Patricia L. Harman (07:31):
So Kathy, can you share your journey please?
Kathy Kranz (07:34):
Sure. So my first year in public accounting here in Chicago, I got put on the State Farm audit. What does it, so I specialized in insurance there. After four years here, I moved to Denver and started doing captive insurance consulting for a while. Consulting was more fun than auditing I will say. And then I moved into working for a home builder, working on their captive insurance companies, but got to work in their corporate finance department for a while and just sort of broadened my experience. And 15 years ago I went to Pinnacle Assurance. We are a workers' compensation company in Colorado. We've been around since 1915 in one form or another and have about a 50% market share in Colorado. And I came in as an individual contributor and just sort of worked my way up through that organization. And I've been in my current role for nine years, but it looks a lot different today than it did nine years ago. It's evolved over time. A lot more strategy now, less finance, more strategy.
Patricia L. Harman (08:37):
Just think of how much are going to change coming years use of technology and the way that insurance, all those sorts of things. One of the things that I'd like to know is what were some of the challenges that you had to overcome? Nobody just walks in and you're automatically a leader or a manager and someone who has earned the respect to the team and that sort of thing. What were some of the challenges that you had to at least address or prepare for overcome? Can you start with you on that?
Camila Serna (09:13):
Sure. So when you walk into an insurance meeting, it is rare that you find a Latino woman that is highly technical and that grew up speaking German and with an Italian passport. So it has always been like where and how can I fit in, be a progressive Oliver Wyman and Chubb, but how do I preserve my authenticity and how do I not come across as overly technical given my training as an engineer and as a financial modeler? But eventually you figure out the right balance and figure out what works with the DNA of each one of the organizations. I like to read Sylvia Ann Hewitt, she's a Columbia professor and economist, and she has written a lot about executive presence and what it means and decoding what works for each one of your organizations without losing your authentic self. So it's a balance.
Patricia L. Harman (10:18):
Melissa, can you share any challenges you had to overcome?
Melissa Gutierrez (10:22):
Sure. I mean, I think about the challenges I've had to overcome and I think there are always sort of external challenges, but for me reflecting on it, the biggest challenges I had to overcome were sort of self-imposed. And by that I mean I've kind over the years gotten to the point where I've started to realize that just because you can do a job doesn't mean you should do a job and you need to be really in touch with who you are and what you want, not what you think you should be achieving. And I'll say this, I mean it's a responsibility because sometimes what you think you should be achieving, you might be doing on behalf of other women. So I was a single mom for many years and I did feel a sense of responsibility in terms of moving upward in leadership to show other people that those things don't have to be obstacles and can be empowering.
(11:19)
But I do think many of my challenges were self-imposed, meaning there are times I've said yes to a job that I probably shouldn't have said yes to a job. And then I ended up sort walking around being a little, I don't know what the word is, but we'll just say having a little angst over it and do I think that showed up in the way I showed up probably. And sometimes those jobs didn't work out. So for me, I think the answer is you have to find a way to be true to yourself and then still also think about what matters to you, what's important to you. And when you say yes, be really thoughtful about it. Not always just say yes because you can do it and you think you have a responsibility to do it. I would say that's probably one of the hardest lessons I've had. And I think that then feeds resilience because when you're walking in your own shoes as opposed to maybe shoes that are sort of made for you, you can bounce back if you have a challenge because it's a challenge of your making, not a challenge, maybe because you accepted something thrown out in front of you just because it was there. So yeah, there's a lot behind that. I could talk for a long time, but I don't think we have that kind of time. So I'll talk to you at the cocktail hour.
Patricia L. Harman (12:37):
I think there are a lot of things that we learned when we're overcoming a challenge. I think it teaches us things about ourselves, it teaches us things that people around us who we can trust, who we can depend on, that sort of thing. And along those lines, I'm wondering what have been some of the most important lessons that you've learned along this leadership journey? There are things that come to mind for me, and this is you all at this, but one of the things that I've, early in my career, something will happen and in this day and age with technology is so easy to just up an email or text message or something like that. And what I've learned is that one of the best strategies I can have is to just write it all out in an email. I don't put a name in it, but I just write it out and it gives me an opportunity to think through whatever the issues are, sometimes maybe all little steam if that's necessary. And then nine times out of 10, I never said to or when I looked at it later wrong. But there are just certain things that you can't help and that you learn along the way. So I'm wondering what some of those lessons,
Kathy Kranz (13:46):
Sure, this probably seems very basic to most people in the room, but it took me a long time to figure out that not everybody thinks the same way I think. That not everybody wants to be managed the same way I want to be managed. It probably is the accountant in me. Other people probably do not have this issue. But it took me a while. And one of the things that I was always very self-aware, I wasn't aware of others, I wasn't aware of how others respond differently. And one of the things I would recommend is doing a team exercise of some sort of assessment, personality assessment, whether it's Myers-Briggs or Emerge Genetics or disc or I don't actually have a tool that I think is better than any of the others. I think they're all valuable. And getting to see how others on my team scored on things told me a lot about how they respond to things and actually made me start thinking about things differently. So I learned that you need to have more tools in your toolbox. You can't treat everybody the same, you got to flex. But I also learned that I can still be authentic while doing it. I can make fun of my own tendencies. I can make sure everybody knows how I respond to things so that they're not surprised or taken aback. I don't want to be a mystery to people, I just want them to understand what they're going to get when they come to me.
Patricia L. Harman (15:03):
Melissa.
Melissa Gutierrez (15:06):
First I would say Kathy, I spent a lot of my career in sales, not in accounting, and I have the same problem, but for me, I think there's two big things. One is really when you're in a meeting or when you're engaged in something and you have a response, sort of an emotional response, whether you're start buzzing or your neck gets red or you're hot all over, whatever the thing is, I think it's really important to try to figure out why that happened because, and again, I don't know if it's just me, but I'm not terribly in touch with my own emotions. I spent a lot of my career sort of forging through, pushing through challenges, getting things done. And I think when you have those types of situations, it's really important to sit and reflect on them and say, what exactly about that got to me?
(15:56)
Because those emotional responses, which we all have by the way, are they're information and they're important information about something that's not lining up for you. And you got to get to the bottom of what it is and it's not going to be fun. It's not going to be comfortable, but you have to do it. The other thing I would say is ask for feedback. And if you're not given feedback, you should push for feedback. I've had plenty of jobs and I've had a lot of jobs with no feedback. And I do think it is our responsibility to ask. And I also think it's our responsibility to ask for it very specifically because if you just say, Hey, do you have any feedback for me? Somebody could say, well, I don't like your shoes, or I think you're sassy or whatever. But if you say, how did I show up in meeting X, Y, or Z? Or when we had this issue? So I do think it's important to ask for that feedback. You get to choose whether you're going to take it or not, but if you don't have it, you've got a blind spot about how other people are perceiving how you're showing up. So I think that's very important. Those would be my two big big ones.
Patricia L. Harman (17:01):
The last panel I talked about leadership skills that were important, but I'm wondering if there were certain life skills or experiences that you wished you had developed earlier in your career? I had heard another panel speak several years ago. Instructor, one old lady said, I wish had learned to play golf because so much business is conducted on the golf course. And after she said that, I had just started to take up golf. And so I started to pay more attention. And I will tell you so I can't explain, I can't hit the fall along for anything when I do, at least it stays on the fairway. But I worked on my short canyon, I'll tell you, there's none in Sweden, 15 foot cut, three men who were just standing there with their mouth hanging. So I'm wondering what life skills or experiences do you wish that you had developed? And we'll start with you.
Camila Serna (18:02):
I wish that I would have learned abstraction earlier in my career. Being a technical person by training, it took me longer than it should have to decide what is relevant to senior management, what are the things that need to be surfaced that are not necessarily getting caught in the weeds of the detail. So I would have liked to figure that much sooner. And then more on the life skills side. Also, how to configure my board of directors, if you will. So I follow some literature that suggests you should have a sponsor, an advocate, mentor, an ally. So different roles of people around you to help you in the room when you're not there. So I wish I would have figured out my board of directors sooner, but I have most of them now mine up.
Patricia L. Harman (19:08):
That's great. Kathy, any life skills you wish you'd develop maybe a little bit sooner?
Melissa Gutierrez (19:12):
So
Kathy Kranz (19:12):
It's actually the one that really touched on this morning is I am a mix of an introvert and an extrovert. I'm really good sitting down with people. I love to talk to people I already know. We're one-on-one conversations. My nightmare is walking into a big conference room full of people that I do not know and trying to strike up a conversation, especially at the happy hour where people are just mingling and there's no structure. I hate no structure. And really what I learned is that you just have to do it even though it's not comfortable, just make yourself go in there and do it. And so what s was saying about just making yourself talk to five people today, it's just practice. I'm never going to love it, but it's easier than it used to be.
Patricia L. Harman (19:51):
That's true. One of the things that we're trying that we're talking about today is success. And I'm wondering what success looks like for you today versus what you thought it looked like over your career? Because that's where we grow advisor, what we think we thought we knew or what we thought changes a little bit. So Melissa, I'm wondering what success look like to you today? How does that change maybe from what she thought earlier in her career?
Melissa Gutierrez (20:21):
Yeah, it's a great question and I think about it a lot. So I would say move mic. My mic died. I think my mic died. Oh, it's back.I would say, I think it's definitely, maybe I need to lean forward. Hello?
Patricia L. Harman (20:46):
Can you guys hear me? It's coming now. I'm coming. I have a bum knee so I can't run. Need to turn this off? Yeah, he'll turn it off. Yep. I'm going to make sure I don't fall down. Double blast.
Melissa Gutierrez (21:03):
How's that? What was the question? I'm kidding.
(21:08)
So what I was saying is I do think a lot about it at the stage of my career I'm at. And part of it for me is I left a company that I had been with for 33 years where I kind of had done almost every job there was and knew everyone there was to know. And I did it voluntarily and I moved into a new environment. And that's relevant because when I think about the transition and the mark I want to leave, it's very much about the people that are on the team and how I can equip them to accomplish their goals. I mean, I really find a whole lot of reward in that, and I am very excited about it. I would say early in my career, I sort of wore productivity like a badge, right? I mean, I am one of those people.
(21:56)
I'm an introvert. I'm an analytical, I love to just sit at my desk and crank out work, and I feel really awesome about it, but other people don't necessarily feel awesome about it. So I really do think for me now, I think about who's my successor? How are the people on my team set up to succeed? And I was at a leadership training just a few weeks ago, and we actually had this retired lieutenant colonel from the Army speak to us, and she said something that I thought was really powerful. She said that hard conversations are an act of caring and they're one of the most caring things you can do. And I say that because when I think about how I can set the people on my team or the people I work with up for success, a lot of it is about somebody having that hard conversation with them that needs to be had. And usually, I mean, if it's not me, especially if they're on my team, who's it going to be? Right? So that's really my answer. And that was sort of my call to action.
Patricia L. Harman (23:02):
Kathy, success versus what you earlier in your career?
Kathy Kranz (23:09):
Sure. I'm pretty positive. Early in my career I said I was never wanted to be a CFO. So here we go. One of the main lessons I learned is never say never, but really Melissa and I are both number one learners on the strength finder scale. So what I also have discovered about myself is that the most important thing for me is having new challenges every day, learning new things every day. I don't care much about titles. I have a nice title now. I don't care much about it, but my role has changed a lot over nine years because I would've been bored otherwise and I would've left. And that is what is important to me, is always having those new challenges. If I never get another promotion, as long as I'm still doing other things, it's really kind of been moving sideways as I've gone on. And I love that. I love rounding out my experiences.
Patricia L. Harman (24:00):
That's a great way to phrase, because success, it looks different for everybody. And so knowing what that looks like for you is going to be really important. And one of the things that's really important for all of you being here today is the fact that we're trying to help give you the tools and the insights g, to grow your career as I'm wondering what you are doing to help other women grow their careers and experience move up in the industry. And then how are your organizations creating leadership opportunities for the next generation? I'll start with you now.
Camila Serna (24:36):
Yeah. Over the years at Chubb, I've had the opportunity to serve as the co-chair of our Latino employee network of our multicultural ERG. So I started by engaging with the employee resource groups. Then that grew into becoming an application reader for the Hispanic Scholarship Fund. And during the Black Life Matters protest in 2020, I gathered feedback from my team of what we could do differently for the entire global risk analytics and digital organizations within Chubb. And that led to working with the Chubb Foundation to establish the Robert M. Hernandez scholarship at Georgia State University and to starting apprenticeships in data fellowships with an EdTech company named Multiverse. And so we've had apprenticeship graduates. And then also you mentioned during the introduction that I did the Jump Studio Hackathon, it was called Innovation Challenge due to compliance, but it was literally a global virtual hackathon to entice more developers and tech people to take an interest into insurance, and particularly Shop Studio, which is the platform that we're using to integrate affinity distribution through digital means. So I see myself very responsible to pay it forward, and you see some examples of different ways in which we're going about it.
Patricia L. Harman (26:20):
Camila was a lot of fun too.
Camila Serna (26:24):
A lot of effort to coordinate because it was global and we had to promote it. We had to do explanations on how our APIs work, et cetera, to get meaningful submissions.
Patricia L. Harman (26:39):
So Melissa, how are you helping women grow in their careers and experience? And is your organization anything to really inspire, encourage leadership there too?
Melissa Gutierrez (26:54):
I'll start with my organization because I've been really lucky to work for two really outstanding companies, both having the ERG system in place, what I've seen with my current organization. So the agency that I lead is owned, wholly owned by a bank called Synchrony Financial, but is actually a credit company. And one of the thing that they've done with the ERGs, the Women's network in particular, is rather than just having sort of our larger events, which we have once a year, they've really done a very good job of breaking the group into small pods and connecting, for example, a senior VP with VPs, VPs with AVPs, for example, through the organization in groups of four or five where you're kind of getting to know those people and they were very programmatic about it and put the groups together. So I have found that to be really empowering because it's a very small group kind of structure where you just pick a topic.
(28:01)
Sometimes it's resilience or when I get to pick the topic and they get to pick the topic, sometimes it is being outcomes based. So they sort of put us together in small groups and have us talk about things relevant to business, but to form and forge relationships across the organization. And I think the small forum works really effectively. Personally, I'm also working on a curriculum for sort of a, I guess you could call it an overview of p and l leadership and just the different pieces of the p and l that I can use with frontline associates to get them more knowledgeable and comfortable with the dynamics on how do you manage a p and l, what are the skills you need to have? How do you bring what you know into play? And that's something that I'm doing particularly with our Latino Latina ERG, so that work is underway.
(28:49)
And then I would also say you take the opportunities where you can. So for me, I was chair of the board for the university that I graduated from undergrad, and that engagement just ended. But as part of that, one of the things I really spent time on was how do we look at gender and ethnic diversity for our trustees? And it's really funny because you don't always think that you're going to be in a position to be able to make a difference. But when I was in that position and we started looking at our trustee classes and that we had some elections and we needed to bring new trustees in, for me it was let's make a concerted effort to improve the diversity of this board. I wouldn't say I planned it, it was just more like when the opportunity came, it was clear and it was the right thing to do. So I think part of it is just kind of being aware of when can you make that difference?
Patricia L. Harman (29:51):
That's such an important thing. It's interesting. One of the things that we hear a lot, we talk about a lot is work-life balance and what that looks like. And I think just like how success we measure success looks different for all of us, I think how we manage the work-life balance at a different stage, whether you have young children, whether you have kids that are teenagers and everybody's going five different places at night before dinner or something like that. So there are a lot. And then there are people who are taking care of new parents or someone in the family who sits. So all of those different factors affect how we manage our lives, what we do, what the priorities are. And I'm wondering what recommendations do you all have in terms of what work-life balance looks like for you? And then what recommendations do you have for others who are trying to manage all of these different responsibilities in terms of what community development and involvement? I mean, there's just so many different ways that this can go. So Kathy, I'll start with you first.
Kathy Kranz (31:04):
Sure. So I actually adopted my son who's now 15 as a single mom. So I've been a single parent to his entire life. And at the beginning, my family wasn't there. It was definitely a juggling act. I found that just being honest, I need to go to daycare pickup, I've got to leave this meeting early, was very effective in the company I am in. I'm not sure every company would've dealt with it nearly as well as my company did. But the thing I try to model is transparency about it, because I think that sets a good example for the people coming up behind me that they don't have to create excuses. You don't have to try to hide what you're doing, let everybody jump in and help. It's a very caring organization. People are going to try to jump in and help. From my own perspective, the other thing I've had to really get comfortable with is perfection absolutely should not be the goal.
(31:59)
I don't like perfection, honestly. I think if something is perfect, someone spent too much time on it, there's other things you could be doing with your time. I am far from a perfect parent. I am far from a perfect leader. I think I do pretty decent at both of them, and that is what I aspire to. Pretty decent. Well said. Yeah. Saying no. Yeah, saying no is important. I've said no to things my son wants to do. I say no to things that people at work want me to do, and I just try to balance it between the two. I am also a big believer in I have one life and therefore I have one calendar and everything is on that calendar. And everybody can see that I left early on Thursday to go to my son's cross country meet. And they also will sometimes get emails from me in the evening or on the weekend. And I don't try to have my work life in one box and my life in another box. I just do what needs to be done, when it needs to be done.
Patricia L. Harman (32:53):
Wow. I wish I had learned that.
Patricia L. Harman (32:58):
Aspect a whole lot sooner, would've made my life and my family lives so much easier. My father was a physician and he expect because he couldn't make mistakes in his profession that carried all of us. And it really is a very high bar to try and hit it. It creates a lot of unnecessary stress. Camilla, how do you manage work life balance with all that you're doing?
Camila Serna (33:26):
Ditto, a lot of what Kathy said, in addition to what she said, funny to mention this at a digital insurance conference, but I take analog non-digital or digital detox breaks. And so we take the family to a getaway. The getaway has a log box and we do no email, don't do it very often every year. But it's about being present, being there with the kids, with my husband, with the dog, and then also letting work know I won't be reachable because everything will be on a lockbox. Likewise, I've built some of my personal brand on reliability. So when they're deadlines that cannot move for business. I have to leverage all my support network in order to be sure that the deadline is met, even though life at home happens. I'm fortunate to have enough of a support network to make things work. And then lastly, I'm not too harsh on myself to echo Kathy's point, there's no perfection. There are times that I wish I would have had more life balance or times that I wish I could do more at work. But it is a work in progress. And so don't be too harsh on yourselves.
Patricia L. Harman (34:49):
I think that is just really excellent advice for sure. So I want to end with the last question and that is, what's one of the most important takeaways about leadership that you would like to do with our audience? Kathy, I'll start with you.
Kathy Kranz (35:06):
Yeah. I think it goes back to the perfection thing to some extent, but not being too hard on either yourself or the people around you when they make mistakes or have failures. I think we learn way more from our mistakes and our failures than we do from our successes. And if you're too hard on yourself and you back away because of a failure or somebody that reports to you, you're really hard on them and they might decide to leave the company, you've just lost that learning. Someone else is going to benefit from it, not you. And so really instead, doubling down on helping yourself or others understand what lessons you can take from the experience and then moving on and just letting it go. If someone's making the same mistake over and over, that's a little different. But as long as it's a one-time thing, I think that's the best learning experience there is. And spending the time to talk about it, not just sort of sweeping it under the rug and really taking those lessons is one of the things that I think makes people really successful.
Patricia L. Harman (36:07):
Melissa, did you want to share any last thoughts from that? Everybody?
Melissa Gutierrez (36:11):
Sure. On that topic? Sure. Yeah. I think for me it would be know thyself. I think it's really important to be self-aware, to think about how you're showing up, why you're showing up the way you're showing up, what you're good at, what you're not as good at, and finding a way to own that and be effective through it.
Patricia L. Harman (36:35):
Camila, in terms of which you want to get the audience to take away from today.
Camila Serna (36:41):
Alright. Well, displaying both strategic mindset, but marrying it up with being a solid operator. I mean, it takes different shapes at different organizations, but you cannot do one well without the other if you're not measuring what is the business impact of your strategy and be able to deliver on it. So that has been a hallmark of how I try to stand the digital acceleration office and would be the good takeaway. And again, to the point of not being too harsh, you also have to be your best advocate and not be too apologetic because women tend to be more apologetic. And so I'll leave you with that.
Patricia L. Harman (37:36):
That's great. Alright, so we have a little bit of time for questions from the audience if anybody has any questions for our panelists. Sorry, I'm sorry I can't see it all.
Audience Member 1 (38:00):
What are some skills that consistently stand out when it comes out to when you catch the very people who manage?
Patricia L. Harman (38:08):
I'm sorry. What are some of the skills that consistently stand out when it comes out to when you catch the very people who manage? Oh, people who manage. Okay.
Kathy Kranz (38:21):
I actually am an excellent delegator. I think that comes from being a learner. I always want to move on to the next thing I can learn. And so therefore I delegate really, really easily. And what I find stands out the most is people that are willing to want to jump in and accept responsibility, but they also ask good questions and sort of keep you informed as things are going so that you can sort of see when they're getting off track. If someone just wants to take it, do it in a vacuum. They might bring you back something completely different than what you're expecting or looking for. And so I think that combination of being excited for the challenge but also staying close and checking in is really I think somebody that gets delegated to, that's the best way to handle it.
Melissa Gutierrez (39:06):
And I would say related to that, some of the best advice I ever got early in my career was manage expectations. So I would say to Kathy's point, if you're that person who is delegated to or if you're a person who's given a lot of autonomy and there are times when you think, wow, I hope my boss is okay with what I'm doing, what I was always told was, Hey, pick up the phone, leave a voicemail and just say, listen, I've got this situation, here's what I'm going to do about it. If I don't hear from you, I'm going to assume it's okay, but I'm going to keep running depending on the culture of the organization you're in. But I do think making sure that your boss isn't surprised is always really important.
Audience Member 2 (39:50):
I have a question. So, so one of the things about being an effective leader is being able to deliver difficult conversations, having crucial conversations. Can anyone on the panel share your techniques and delivering crucially and having crucial and happy with conversations with direct reports?
Kathy Kranz (40:16):
I can. Again, I think one of the things we talk about is my organization is known for being nice. I don't think nice helps anybody being kind is telling somebody what they need to do to move ahead. And that is the way I try to frame those crucial conversations. We don't sweep things under the rug. I want you to be successful and to be successful, you've got to work on this. And I think the more you can frame it in a caring way that I'm sharing this with you because I care about you and don't overwhelm, you never go into a conversation where you're giving somebody five things to work on. You got to make it really specific so that they can hear it and actually take away from it.
Melissa Gutierrez (41:00):
Yeah, I mean honestly I would say ditto. I think caring is very important and if you genuinely care people know. The other thing I would say is if you need to have a difficult conversation, don't beat around the bush. Do your prep work. Know what you're going to say. Be caring, but be clear so that there is no misunderstanding when they leave the room of the conversation that just took place. I think many of us are trained to do the sandwich like, oh I love this about you. Oh, here's what you need to work on. Oh I love this about you. And the person leaves and they're like, what just happened? And I think it's very important and you got to be really clear and you've got to work on how can you be caring and clear at the same time. And I think it's very possible.
Camila Serna (41:46):
And I would add in this day and age, if you can have it in person rather than on a WebEx, that's much better. And just like others were saying, it's just limited to three things or two things and rehearse what they are ahead of time and put yourself in their shoes to see how will it be received and then prepare for the reception.
Patricia L. Harman (42:13):
I'll add to that, don't wait too long. If there's an issue, we need to address it sooner rather than, so don't wait until it's review time or new evaluation, that sort of thing. It's much more effective and kinder and just creates more respect if you're able to do it time than as opposed to six months after something has happened. Any other questions? No. Alright then. Well thank you very much ladies for sharing your insights and relax.