SPONSORED BY: Oracle
We all know that a team-centric approach, technology acumen and growth-oriented management skills make for an effective leader. But how does one get there? Be a part of a candid dialogue with your peers on what skills to prioritize and perfect and what additional tools you may need to drive the success of your teams and your company in this ever-evolving insurance space.
Ema Roloff, Co-Founder, Roloff Consulting (Moderator)
Catherine James, SVP, Retail Operations, F&G Annuities & Life
Saira Taneja, Chief Experience Officer, Cover Whale
Valerie Turpin, Chief Underwriting Officer Property, Arch Insurance Group
Kathy Hutson, Sr. Director Strategy & Business Transformation, Oracle
Transcription:
Meg McKeen (00:06):
Did y'all make your find friends?
(00:09)
Not yet. The day is young. You've got time. I didn't make mine either. I confess maybe a little uncomfortable for us to put ourselves out in new and different ways. I appreciate the challenge from several of us this morning to get a little bit uncomfortable, I wanted to extend a quick thank you to Arizent for their commitment to the research that they do in order to advance women in our industry. As we heard about in our last session, we're getting ready now to hear from a panel of really fascinating, fantastic wise and wonderful women. And Ema Roloff is going to lead that discussion as the moderator. Ema is a digital transformation and change management expert. She's the co-founder of Roll-Off Consulting, which is a consulting firm focused on helping sales teams to transform their processes. She hosts the series Leading Change and she's had over 300 conversations on that show.
(01:09)
It's really cool. Check it out. Ema has been recognized as one of LinkedIn's top Voices and digital transformation and sales. She is a Rise 35 under 35 award winner, and she's a Making Waves honoree by InsureTech Hartford. But Ema is the only reason that I would ever dare to go on TikTok. True story. She's an amazing content creator. She's adding a lens and a voice to our industry that is so needed and so relatable and we're really happy to have her here. With that, Ema, thanks for leading us in your time to thrive today's insurance leader.
Ema Roloff (01:47):
Well, it's very good news that Meg said she's ready to be in a TikTok. I took a video of her on stage that I was going to use as the backdrop for my video for today. But thank you everybody for joining us. I'm going to go through just a rapid fire introduction so that we can dig right into the conversation that we've got planned for you guys. So Saira Taneja is the Chief Executive Officer of Cover Whale. So oh, I'm sorry. Experience officer reading is a key skill. We've got Valerie Turpin, who is the Chief Underwriting Officer of Property for Arch Insurance, and then we've got Catherine James, who's the Senior Vice President of Retail Operations for Fidelity and Guaranty. Then last but not least, we've got Kathy Hutson here with me, who's the Senior Director of Strategy and Business Transformation for Oracle. Part of the reason that we're not going to dive super deep into introductions is because hopefully we'll be able to speak about all of your guys' experience as female leaders as we dive into the conversation today and homework for all of you guys as we get going, I've built time in for us to have questions.
(03:01)
So as we're going start thinking through questions that you might have. Otherwise, I'm going to pull teacher and start questioning you guys and asking where we might have opportunities to continue the discussion. So I just wanted to preface that before we get going. So Kathy, I'm going to start with you and while we were all kind of getting ready, there were a couple of questions that multiple people wanted to touch on. So this first one is talking about where you've gotten the best advice about becoming an effective leader, and I'd love for you to start the conversation by sharing that advice and why it feels so important to you.
Kathy Hutson (03:37):
Sure, sure. I'm going to go way back to my grad school years when I was seriously considering being a federal negotiator, I was taking a multi-party negotiation workshop at Harvard with one of my professors, and one of the things he said to the class, which has stuck with me since then was don't make anyone 10 feet tall. Meaning don't exaggerate anyone's importance or diminish your importance in what you bring to the table. And also as a leader, as you're working with teams, make sure to, for me, it means thinking about what each team member brings to the conversation or to the table, acknowledging their accomplishments and really being very practical in terms of how you assess the situation and assess the people that you're interacting with. And that's taken me, that advice has taken me throughout my career and it's something that I repeat almost every day. And I repeated it this morning before coming on the stage as well.
Ema Roloff (04:40):
I feel like that's almost like the inverse of a person as a person, no matter how small and just that recognition that no matter the role, the experience or anything that any of us have, at the end of the day, we are all just people. And when you can bring it back to humanizing, it's a lot easier to have relationships and kind of drive meaningful connection and progress.
Kathy Hutson (05:03):
Yes, absolutely. Absolutely.
Ema Roloff (05:05):
All right, Saira I'm going to come to you with the same question. I spoiled it for everybody that we all had some advice that we wanted to share. So can you share yours as well?
Saira Taneja (05:14):
Yeah. Absolutely. Can everybody hear me okay? Yeah. Okay, great. It's simple, but practical advice that I received earlier on in my career of be yourself. And I wish I heard this in my first job out of grad school where I felt I needed to be super buttoned up and very corporate and professional with what I thought it was to be a business person. And I wasn't engaged. I wasn't myself. I didn't bring my personality to the table and I didn't see sort of the results that I wanted. And so when I took a step back after that experience and I said, I'm going to be 100% myself in every interaction I have, whether it be with family, whether it be at work, whether it be in meetings, whether it be with colleagues, I'm just going to be me. And that's sort of the best advice that I received and that now I give because it will just open up your world.
(06:08)
The universe starts kind of coming towards you. The energy sort of just gets more positive and you don't have to second guess it. If you said it, own it, it's you. I think one other thing I wanted to share, Ema, was stop the negative self-talk, right? This is something I don't know as women, I've been through a few different mentorship programs. I'm a part of them now sort of supporting as well. We all have it sometimes all day every day on bad days. Stop it, I'll share it. One former mentor of mine put it this way and it's just a really easy way to remember what it is. It's the shitty committee. We all have it in our minds, turn it off. It does not do anything for you. It doesn't do anything for your career and it doesn't progress any of us. So that's some advice that I received that I wanted to share.
Ema Roloff (07:00):
I think that's a really great way of one, just recognizing that we need to be who we are. And I was actually just having a conversation with Deb Smallwood and Meg about that exact idea that once you get to the point where you can become yourself, doors start opening and opportunities start coming towards you. But the other way that I like to think of that is I tell people all the time, talk to yourself like you would talk to your best friend because you will be honest with your best friend. You will say things that your best friend needs to hear, but you'll also be their biggest cheerleader and their biggest advocate. And once I started thinking of it that way, it got a lot easier to be kind to myself. I love that. So I want to switch gears a little, and Valerie, I'm going to come to you for this one. And now this is our other kind of popular conversation that we all wanted to touch on and is talking through. What are the skills that you found have been incredibly valuable for you as a leader in really stepping into that role now?
Valerie Turpin (07:56):
Thank you. Can you hear me well? Yeah. As a leader, you'll never succeed alone. You succeed because you have people will follow you. You have a team, customers, providers, and other people in the corporation that follow you. You never succeed alone. So there are three things that really you need to do is that you need to have the support of the team and you need to support the team to be successful. So the first point is you need to articulate the vision. If you want to have followers, the team needs to understand what you want to achieve and need to embrace what you want to achieve. So it's very important to communicate very efficiently your vision, but also to tell stories so everybody can understand what this vision is. When I joined art five years ago, I bring all the team together and I told them, yes, I have a French accent.
(08:52)
Two, we're going to be a billion dollar operation three, we're going to put the name of art on the map of the industry. It was not sufficient, but it was a starter. And what I've done in there is to communicate all the time what we're doing, what is the North Pole, where are we going? It's very important to have this ability to articulate 360, what is the vision? What is, why are we doing that? Very, very important. Many people just brush on it and go too fast on it, but retelling the story on a regular basis is very important. The second piece is that once the team follow you, you need to empower the team. You need to let them do the work. You need to delegate. It's awful, isn't it? You really need to let them to do what they're good at because you can't do everything.
(09:46)
You need to trust the team and you need to let them doing what they are good at. That's why they are part of the team, but also because hopefully they have been inspired by your vision and what you try to do. So you need to let them do the job, but on the same time, you need also to remove the roadblocks. So for that, you need to develop your solution finding type of mindset and skills. The three skills that I talked to you about, the storytelling, be a solution finder and delegate. There are plenty of books available. I mean for us to better understand what it means, how to do that and to practice it. But for me, there had been the cornerstones about moving the team into the right direction.
Ema Roloff (10:34):
Going back to that idea of books, oh, did you want to say something, Catherine? Oh, okay. Going back to the idea of books, I was listening to 10 X is easier than 2 X in the car on the way here yesterday. And that idea of handing, delegating and truly allowing people to complete what you've handed to them and how that plays into the 80 20 mentality came up in the book. And they talked about the idea that to grow, it's who not how you bring in and how you give up the work to them as opposed to trying to micromanage what that looks like. And when you can truly let go of that, they'll take the 80% of the stuff that's not adding value and you can focus on your 20%. So I think that's really great that that came up. It feels like a little full circle moment for me. Catherine, can you share what your must haves are from a skills perspective in terms of gaining for leadership?
Catherine James (11:29):
Yeah. Absolutely. And I was sharing before the panel, I was like, I feel like everything I'm going to say, I'm going to be validating the first two speakers, but the first for me is same with you, Valerie was having a clear focus, vision and purpose. The second is communication through great listening. And the third one is ensuring that you are being curious all the time. So let me go back through those. So having that purpose and that vision really gives you that why. And you talked about the why with your team, that gives yourself the why of why are you getting up every day, why are you doing the things you're doing every day? And then you can really impart that onto your organization of what are they doing, what are they getting up to do every day? And then that focus is the what and the what is so important because it helps you to know what you're going to do and what you're not going to do.
(12:25)
And I think the knots are more important sometimes than the what, and it really helps give that clarity to the organization and to you every day. Every day I have to think what's my what and what am I going to do today or what are the things that I can put aside or empower. The second on the good communication, to me it's really about being the great listener and the speakers before talked a lot about inclusivity, so I know when I get communicated to, I don't like to be told and I don't think anyone else likes to be told either, but we like to be connected to and I really try to understand where people, what their purposes are, what their whys are, what are the things they're really concerned about, and then just what are they bringing to life every day because we all come here with something different every day. If you drove in today or you flew in yesterday or whatever, you brought some circumstances with you and understanding those and then having a conversation and being able to communicate through that, then finally is that curiosity and it's having that learning mindset. Oriah had said before was that growth mindset. So it's always wanting to come to learn. Every conversation I'm in, I feel like I can learn something, but in order to do that, I have to humble myself and to be in that mindset of I'm going to learn.
Ema Roloff (13:42):
Great, thank you. Saira, I want to kind of pull some of these learnings that they just talked about and these skill sets that are critical for leadership and have you maybe tell us a story or share how you've used those skills to really exceed expectations as a leader.
Saira Taneja (13:58):
Thanks, Ema. It really feels like a little bit of a humble brag, but I'm going to share.
Catherine James (14:04):
Humble brag. Do it.
Saira Taneja (14:05):
I'm going to share this story as I was thinking about it. So I've been with my current organization for two years about, but I was approached by the CEO and President two years ago at an interesting time in my life and career. I had just been promoted. I had been with Blue Cross for 10 years, ascending, moving sideways the corporate ladder to get to where I wanted to go. And I wasn't sure it was an interesting role. It wasn't where I ultimately landed. It was more junior. Junior and I really compelled by them and the vision and what they had built already in a year. The company was founded in 2019 and I asked a lot of questions and I did my homework and I was pushing them on their purpose, their mission, their strategy, where are they going? And the role really grew. And so what ended up happening was they said to me, so I live in Boston with my family and they're in New York City.
(15:10)
And they said, come to New York, we want to meet you. This was during Covid. And so what I didn't share was the punchline. I was six months pregnant and was not really interested in sort of switching a stable career where I knew what I was doing. I knew where I was going, had never had a baby before. And so I stuffed myself into a work dress that was somewhat loose fitting, showed up in New York City and I'm like, for sure they're going to see it. They're going to say, get out of here. We're not interested. They couldn't tell, I think, and still started progressing through the conversations with them, brought myself brought what it is that Catherine was describing, just the curiosity and really wasn't trying to parlay it into anything more than What are you doing? How are you thinking about this? You should be thinking about it bigger.
(15:59)
And I got an offer. And then just pulling them on sort of the authenticity theme of today that's coming up again and again. I googled the heck out of what to do in this situation. There were not a lot of positive stories of pregnant women taking roles and in senior leadership positions and then taking a full maternity leave, which is what I wanted to do. I wanted to be able to lean in to my daughter when she was here, but I wanted this job too. And so I decided that I was going to put it all out there. So I got the offer, I invited them to a Zoom and I said, thank you so much. Throw everything HR, legal out the window. If this does not work for you human to human, I'm okay. That's fine. I will have my opportunity in the future and we'll figure it out.
(16:51)
We can stay in touch. And all I got was a smile and they said, is it a boy or a girl? And of course we'll wave the maternity, the benefit period for you to be able to take benefits. So I joined Cover Will. I was there for two months, soaked up as much as I could in 30 days, and we moved fast, really started putting out there where I thought we needed to go, and then disconnected for three and a half months to be with my child, which was admittedly harder than the job and then came back to it. And my responsibility has grown in that time. I was just sharing earlier in the break that I had a really rough day emotionally yesterday and this morning I flew in to Chicago by 1230 last night. My daughter started daycare at 16 months yesterday. And so I'm watching her on video and I'm like, oh my God, they're not engaging with her and she's crying. But it's a balance and it's hard, but if you bring yourself and you employ the skills that we just heard, you can do it. But don't put too much pressure on yourself. It's not going to be perfect in every way at every point. Just show up and do your best.
Ema Roloff (18:03):
Okay, I want everybody in the room to give her a round of applause for being here the second day after her kids in daycare.
Saira Taneja (18:10):
Thank you.
Ema Roloff (18:12):
Even with my second, I was in the parking lot crying, even though my daughter, my first daughter had been there for years.
Saira Taneja (18:18):
I told myself I couldn't cry after I put the makeup on. So now after the break.
Ema Roloff (18:23):
My husband is a very caring man, but he did take the opportunity to tease me because I was like, I got to make it to the parking lot. I'm not crying in the building. That was my role for myself. So now Kathy, I want to come to you. We've been talking a lot about, and we are just pretty vulnerable, but also kind of opening it up. We've been talking a lot about success and skills to get there, but can you share with us maybe what you wish you'd learned earlier and possibly the story that goes along with why you wish you had learned it earlier?
Kathy Hutson (18:59):
Sure. How much time do we have?
(19:02)
I think throughout my career there are lots of lessons, lessons learned from successes and lessons learned from failure. And one of a few things that I've learned, one being titles don't mean leadership, right? There's a difference between authority and leadership or management and leadership, which sort of goes back to my original thought around not making people 10 feet tall, but there's also around really meeting people as individuals. So I'll share a story when I was a chief of staff at the insurance department in New York State, and I was managing not only the superintendent's office, but a number of different departments, and I was very young. I was in my sort of mid twenties with that sort of role. And I remember the PR person came in and she was about to go on vacation, and we were also about to launch some major legislation in the state.
(20:00)
So my initial question to her was, okay, who's covering your role when you're gone? Because we have to press release, we have to get the governor to approve it, things like that. And then she just started to cry and me, I didn't know what was happening. And her response was she wanted me to really talk at least understand a little bit more, ask her more about where she was going, her vacation, get to that sort of connection first before diving into, okay, well we have this big thing that we have to deal with. And that to me goes along with a lot of things that have been said in terms of really understanding that connection, understanding that person comes in as themselves. There are things that are important, and once you connect with them in that way, then things get done, things get done in a much better place.
(20:53)
But I also wanted to share another lesson that I learned. I follow someone who to me is one of the hands downs, most successful sales technology salesperson. And he writes a lot about leadership. And as I was preparing for this panel, I looked at something that he posted on LinkedIn that talked about, as a leader, you have to roll up your sleeves, get dirty, get in the trenches, especially as a salesperson. And it made me think about what does that look like for women, right? Because I think it's a little bit of the opposite for women in terms of how we show up. And I think about some of my colleagues as they were getting into leadership positions, they struggle really about letting go like Vale said, and letting the team do the work versus them feeling like they have to do the work always.
(21:37)
And that reminded me, there's a school of leadership call adaptive leadership, and there's a concept around being on the dance floor or being on the balcony. And I think for women, we're always on the dance floor, meaning we're always doing the work, we're always getting our hands dirty, we're always in the mix. And sometimes it's good to just, as they say, get on the balcony, observe and see what needs to be changed, see what needs to sort of be modified or are we going in the right directions and taking that time back to really assess the situation and either continue on in that path or maybe step back and change or pivot a little bit. So those are some of the lessons I learned, I've learned, and I continue to use that sort of dance store balcony concept a lot in what I do, which has helped me expand into new markets and looking at patterns and things that not necessarily are seen right away. So yeah, that's what I would share in terms of those things that I've learned so far, I'm still learning. Like Sia said, I did take an improv class, believe it or not as well. So yeah, those are the things that I would share with the audience today.
Ema Roloff (22:49):
I think it's a really interesting point that you just brought up. The differences, again, we've been talking about leadership in the context of being at a Women in leadership conference, but this is the first time that the difference between male and female leadership has really come up directly. Some of it happened while we were getting and talking about some of those challenges as women, but I could write a dissertation I think on female sales versus male sales approaches. So anyone who wants to hear that come talk to me afterward. But I think that that's a really, even just leadership and how we lead has to be different. And again, as you're leading female sales reps or male sales reps, that might look different too as you're helping them. One of the biggest things that my manager had to do for me when I started was teach me confidence. Teach me confidence to go sit in a room with a male CIO who was twice my age and had children older than me and feel confident at that table. That might not be the case with a 40-year-old male who's been in sales for 20 years. That's a different leadership that's needed. And to your point, you're not going to recognize that if you're always on the floor. You have to take that step up to the balcony to really be able to see some of those trends, I think.
Catherine James (24:03):
Absolutely.
Ema Roloff (24:05):
So Catherine, I'm going to come back to you. Keep on this theme of vulnerability a little bit and ask you to share maybe a mistake that you've had more directly and what lesson that taught you along the way.
Catherine James (24:18):
Yeah, this happened daily, but I was thinking about one that had multiple learnings in it to talk about. So earlier in my career when I was just getting into operations management, I was asked by my leader to take a new role and that new role was to be a liaison to another part of the operation in our company. That other part of the operation didn't report up to him, didn't report to me. It also was in a different city than we were located in and I was to fix it. So I would say the first thing in that all lesson for me to learn, because you can imagine it didn't go all well, right? Was that when you look at your next role and your next opportunity, the biggest lesson I learned out of the initial part was does the role have the support across the organization?
(25:12)
Is it just within your leadership vertical that the support is or is it truly across that really has the support of the organization? And I quickly learned that it didn't. The second was, is the role set up for success? So if you're being told to go fix something, obviously it's not something that's set up for success. So think about are the right attributes in that role to set you up for success? And the third one for me was it wasn't in my personality to do that, right? I am an engineer by degree, and so we do like to fix things as engineers, but it's not my personality. Go tell somebody to do something different. So then I get into this role, right? I'm going to go fix them. And I quickly learned quickly that that part of the operation has different goals than our part of the operation does.
(26:01)
And so you can really start to see really quickly what the mismatch is starting to be, what they're reporting up, what they had to do versus what we had to do was vastly different. And an incident happened that jarred me, that really jarred me that this is not my personality to do. And I took a step back and I decided I'm going to be curious, like we talked about a lot earlier, I'm going to be curious and one, I'm going to start to get to know them as individuals. So I took the time to really get to know them as individuals, that team and I can say now we are friends. And secondly then it was okay, now I understand them as individuals. They were going to open up more and tell me what their goals were, tell me what their concerns were. I talked about that with the why's, the purposes, the concerns or circumstances.
(26:47)
So I could get all of that and really understand what was going on in that part of the organization. And then I had that from my own leadership so we could start to see what's the cross section, where do we match? And we were able to do some really cool things after that. And I knew my goal was to make sure that this role never existed again. And that was my goal. Getting out of this was in the end fixed them and per se, but we did some great things in making the operation better and bringing new technology, the operation, and we service the customer way better than when we started. So that was the most important thing out of it.
Ema Roloff (27:25):
Being able to foster that connection to actually make the meaningful jump to driving operational change. Correct. So Valerie, I want to come to you. We've talked about mentorship a little bit in this, but you mentioned while we were prepping for this session that that's something you're really passionate about and do a lot of. So can you share some advice like if every one of these ladies and men in the room was one of your mentees?
Valerie Turpin (27:50):
No, absolutely. I got the questions, how can I get to the next level? How can I get to the next level is the number one question. Every time that I start a mentoring session, I always ask the person, what do you want to work on? And the question is, how can I get to the next level? So my answer always depends on at what stage the person is in the carrier, and based on my experience, I would say if you are at the beginning of your carrier, which can be five to 10 years, what is important is you build your skills and your expertise, you learn how to do well, the industry where you want to have a carry on. So it's the time to move jobs, is the time to be curious, is the time to go around and experiment a little bit the different type of jobs.
(28:49)
So you have a good three 6,000 standing about what the industry is about, what the type of jobs exist, and also figure out where you will enjoy it and be good at. So it's really the time to be curious, but also to move around and might not be very popular sometime with my employers, but I said, yeah, you can move jobs, you can experiment, you can go somewhere else and to build your stuff. But what is really important is you build your expertise and your knowledge and on the same time you can practice your leadership more into thought leadership, starting to bounce ideas. But you are at the beginning of your career, so be patient afterwards when you've got a clear understanding about what you want to do. What I told them is about you have to tell your boss what you want to do because your boss is not a mind reader.
(29:53)
You won't be able to know what you want to do. So you have to say it exactly what you want and it's okay, for example, to name a person who has a job you want to do. That's actually an advice that I had from one of my mentor. And it's okay to say the job that Mike has, I really like to do something like that. You're not pushing Mike out of a job, but it's a very clear visual about what you want to be. And as a manager, I love that because it's so easy. As soon as the person said, I want to be this type of role, then you can build the training, it can build the mentoring, you can build a carrier to be there. So articulate to your direct management what you want to be. And it's okay to make examples about, I want this type of job, but to be efficient, to find this type of job, you need to embrace sponsorship.
(30:57)
So I'm pretty sure that many people into this room understand the difference between a mentor and a sponsor. But I will dig a little bit into it. So who is the sponsor? A sponsor is not necessarily someone who is in your direct chain of management. A sports store is someone in your company or in another company or if you're an insurer, sorry, at the broker house is someone who is extremely well connected, someone who has a very large connection, so very large networks and has also the type of connection with the people that they are trust for recommendation. They are people that if I want to recruit someone, I will go to this type of person to say, Hey, I would like to have someone a little bit different than what I normally recruit in my team. What do you suggest? So they are advisors, not advisors, not because of their job titles, but because of their network and because of their understanding about what's going on.
(32:06)
So you want to find these people, and I'm sure there are plenty of them in the room, so take exchange cards even if we don't have cards anymore. But exchange details for that. And the sponsor would like to know, you would like to know who you are, but not necessarily know what you do. Not necessarily know your expertise, but know what your aspiration are, what you're passionate about, what your flexibility is, and when the time will come, someone will say, Hey, I'm looking for someone for this position who you recommend. They will give your name. I'm a perfect example of that. I was in France working for an American company in France, and the company at the time thought that as a French person, I wanted to stay in France. And I was perfectly content with that until I meet someone who was visiting from the United States from a totally different type of position or department.
(33:10)
And we went together to a conference like this one. And during the conference I told her, I said, I dream to go to Singapore. I've been trying to get this job in Singapore. I want to go to Singapore. So she totally understood one piece is that I was mobile flexible and I wanted to go abroad. So someone in New York talked to her and said, I need to recruit someone. I would like to recruit someone internally. It's easier than to find someone externally. I don't know where to look at. And she said, have you thought about very, she wants to go to Singapore, but New York is almost the same. She might be okay with that. And that's how I'm here 13 years later. So build this network of sponsorship because you don't know who's going to give your name at some point, but if you give enough information and you don't have to say, I'm super good into combine ratio and I know everything about a bit, but just about what you want and your personality, they will be great sponsors to you.
Ema Roloff (34:20):
I love that. And I also reminds me, of course when I'm asking the questions, I think about what my responses would be. And the best advice I got is actually not business advice. It was from my sassy little five foot two Irish Catholic grandma when I was growing up. And her advice to me was always, no one knows what's going through your mind, and if you don't say it out loud, the only person you have to blame is yourself. And so I think that was part of what led to her sassiness and might be part of mine and my seven year-old's problem. But it's such an important piece to just be able to speak freely about what you're looking for and what your desires are because if you don't ever say them out loud, the chances of them coming to fruition are very low. I want to, we've got about 15 minutes left. I have a rapid fire question for everybody at the end, but I thought that that would be good for us to save to the very end to leave as our parting thought. So I wanted to open it up to the homework that I had for you guys in terms of questions that you have for the panel. So I see Heather already mobilizing with the microphone. Oh, got one question over here. Oh, we're running.
Audience Member 1 (35:35):
Hello? Can you hear me?
Ema Roloff (35:36):
Yes.
Audience Member 1 (35:37):
Okay. Valerie talked about delegation. Love it. Think we all need to learn from it. I would really find it interesting if you could maybe share one of your delegation wins when you finally accepted that I need to delegate and what win look like to encourage us all to delegate.
Valerie Turpin (35:59):
You want me to take it? I'm bad at it. I'm definitely bad at it, but it's very important. So in my current role, I'm working on aggregation, technical pricing and all the like, and it started to be very sophisticated and you have lengthy conversation with actuaries and cat analyst and all that. It's pretty complicated. And I was really into it and at some point I said, I can't do that. It's very intense. It's take a lot of hours. So I really, really actually to give that rule to the people who are actually going to use it because I'm not using it every day. So I delegated it and I made a mistake because I told the person it's going to be a transition, so I'm going to be in the same meeting with you for the first couple of months to make sure that you understand everything we have done before. And I was talking all the time. So after two months, and he's such a sweet man, I call him and I said, I think I need to stop going to these meetings. And he said, yeah, absolutely, yeah, can't talk. You talk all the time and all that. You have to stop going to this meeting. And I did. And of course sir is doing fantastically better than I would've done. But you have to push yourself.
Ema Roloff (37:42):
Go ahead. Yep. There's another question right here.
Audience Member 2 (37:48):
Realized randomly on my way here on my flight, I listen to a podcast of a hundred women in insurance and I listened to episode where you were interviewed and it was a wonderful, wonderful episode.
Ema Roloff (38:00):
Well, thank you. I think I actually brought up that quote from my grandma on that podcast too. So sorry, you've heard it twice.
Audience Member 2 (38:10):
My question for the mail, there's nothing 50% of our industry is set to retire in the next 10 years. We talked about sponsorship, membership, things like that. Are there things that your organizations that you work for that are duty to help develop women in leadership positions? And if so are able to talk about some of those?
Valerie Turpin (38:40):
I can go very quickly on that. Many companies now have programs that are either early carrier or associate programs where we bring people directly from college. We started by summer internship and after that, during one or two years, we developed and train a core to go to the next level into the industry. I think there's a fantastic, however, what I noticed, I'm the sponsor of the early career of my company is that usually for summer internship, a lot of companies in the past have worked by recommendation, Hey, this is the son of the daughter of a broker, of a client, of colleagues and everything. And that's fine. But what we made as a conscious decision is that we are going to limit the percentage of the people who come from that because we want to open and we support the Spencer Foundation, we support San John University, we support inroads because we need to bring to the industry people with other type of backgrounds.
(39:57)
And to be able to do that, you have to be intentional, which means that I basically tell everybody you need to have at least 50% of the people coming from those association. You have to be intentional. It's not natural. You have to push it. And those programs are great. So you will tell me, yeah, but it's only the first level. But we have also to start with that because there's not enough people, there are some other initiatives, I mean to push people to the next level women, other people from minorities to the next level of training and of responsibility. And then every time that I wanted to have a new job, I was offered a mentor and a training and I said, I think I've got that. I just want the job. So all of that is at the end of the day, we need to be intentional. We have to say, I'm going to push to get this diversity group in my company.
Catherine James (41:00):
I was going to say, it's all about intentionality. So it's making sure from an intentionality perspective, what you're doing as a leader day in and day out. The company I'm at, I'm the sponsor of the women's ERG program and we are intentional. We're sort of a youngish company, but not really, but that we just started our ERGs in the past year or so. And so we are now a big sponsor of Women Lead Change, which is an Iowa based program, but making sure that our women leaders are getting exposed to that. But it's about being intentional at every level. And that's one thing that we are doing at F&G is being intentional at every level.
Ema Roloff (41:34):
There's also another group called ISC that I'm actually moderating a session for next week. They're based out of the UK, but they're a global organization and they have both a track for younger professionals or folks that are looking to move into the executive positions to gather community sponsorship, mentorship and the skills that are needed to move into those roles. And then they also have an executive track for networking and that community sense, again for folks that are already in executive positions. So that's another thing to check out. Before we get to our final question, I want to see is there any other questions? Otherwise I've got my rapid fire for everybody. Okay. So can each of you, and we'll start down at the end, can each of you guys share in 60 seconds how you measure your success as a leader?
Saira Taneja (42:32):
It's interesting. This was brought to me a few years ago and I've really tried to embed it in everything that I do every day. But the idea was that good leaders run high performing teams while they're present. Great leaders run high performing teams while they may not be. And right now with my, there was a question on delegation. You can't be everywhere at once and there's a lot happening at our organization. So you need to empower people. You need to create a psychological safety net for people to be able to take risk and potentially fail and you'll make progress. It may not be as perfect as if when you're involved, but it will be progress. And so that's really the barometer. I hold myself to.
Catherine James (43:19):
Great.
Ema Roloff (43:20):
Valerie.
Valerie Turpin (43:21):
So I relate to what Soya said earlier, and I'm also an engineer, so I like spreadsheets, so I like numbers and metrics. It has to be quantifiable. So for me, my success is I measure my success by the number of promotions of the people I helped and I support along the way. I tracked everybody I work with, especially when they start at the beginning of their career on LinkedIn. And every time I see I celebrated, I just start a new job and a new position. I said, what point.
Ema Roloff (43:54):
So you're being watched if you've ever worked with Valerie. Totally. Catherine.
Catherine James (43:58):
Yeah. It's going off what Valerie said. It's all about having the people that are in your organization, the people that you influence, be their best self. And it's always looking at that. It could be that those people want to be promoted, they could want to stay in the skill sets. They are. I've actually worked with people who wanted to even get out of the insurance industry and had other goals outside of that and making sure that they got the right opportunities and the jobs that were within my organization to make sure that they could and being their best self. That would be it.
Ema Roloff (44:26):
Great. Kathy.
Kathy Hutson (44:28):
I would echo a lot of what was said, but I also say to my teams, it's not coming from sales is of course about the results, but how did you go about getting those results, right? It's not just about meeting those results, but how did you go about doing it? And also another part of how I measure my successes was I authentic in and how I inspire and empower people and being authentic. There's a lot of pressure to conform or a lot of pressure to not go against the grain, even if you feel like it's the right thing to do, you have to be comfortable with being uncomfortable in sort of going to the path. Maybe that's least travel. And to me, that's part of being authentic and not just conforming. So that's how I measure my success.
Ema Roloff (45:12):
I don't have a big team, it's just me and my husband and my cats in our basement for our company. But I think for me, thinking about this question and going back to that eulogy conversation during the keynote is how do you leave people when you walk out of a room, what do people say when you leave? And that thought process and always living towards making sure that that description that follows you everywhere you go is something that you'd be proud of is kind of like for me, whether it's podcasts or conversations like this or directly working with our clients, making sure that I leave that authentic impression of what I would hope is left behind me. So with that, we've got just a minute, so if there's one last question, we can take it. Otherwise, I'd love you guys to please give a round of applause and thank you very much ladies.