Deanna Mulligan: The Higher Ambition Imperative For Reskilling Talent
Organizations are facing seismic shifts in the skills their employees need to drive business performance. Digital skills have become a requirement in nearly every job function in every industry. Leading organizations recognize that they must reskill their existing workforce to keep pace with the accelerated changes.
Reskilling helps organizations meet their own demand for tech-savvy talent and drive innovation. It also helps their people pivot to new ways of working and ensures that employees stay current and in-demand throughout their careers.
That’s what we heard from Deanna Mulligan, former Chair and CEO of Guardian Life Insurance Company of America, in a recent webinar with the Higher Ambition Leadership Alliance community members. She shared stories and practices companies can learn from, many featured in her book, Hire Purpose: How Smart Companies Can Close the Skills Gap (Columbia University Press, 2020).
Here are some of the key things we learned.
A strong strategy focuses on both technology and people
Superstorm Sandy, in 2012, spurred Guardian to overhaul its entire system for predicting and preparing for disasters, which included systems and procedures for taking care of its people. In the nearly 10 years since the company has continued to balance its investments in infrastructure and technology with investments in employee and workforce development. The results? Guardian has seen dramatic growth and made record financial gains. Employee satisfaction is high, and turnover is low.
Those outcomes do not happen by chance. Guardian’s leadership team and board are united around core values that haven’t changed in more than 150 years: “we do the right thing, people count, and we hold ourselves to very high standards.” Those three values infused everything the company did in terms of reskilling and running the company in a higher-purpose way.
“We managed by our values, using that to guide our infrastructure build-out and ways of working.”
Learning cultures create value for individuals and organizations
Guardian was committed to being a learning organization. From the leadership team to the business partners and the HR organization, Guardian expected its employees to continually learn and grow and gave them opportunities to do so. When it came to retraining, the focus was on helping employees become more valuable, rather than being concerned that they would leave the company.
“We didn’t really worry that we were making our people more marketable. We were hoping that they would be marketable because we didn’t want to have a whole team that no one else wanted but for us. That would imply that there was something wrong with our strategy.”
“You really have to count on your culture and your way of doing business. ”
Leaning into the changing nature of work
Guardian’s wide-ranging reskilling efforts reached all levels in the organization, from highly skilled specialists to frontline employees. Here are a few of the company’s retraining initiatives:
Guardian’s actuaries—the indispensable backbone of every insurance company—went through a one-year retraining program that taught them to analyze financial risk through data analytics instead of actuarial science and statistics.
Frontline customer service call center representatives engaged in a pilot program to learn how to code. With a new skill set, these reps are better equipped to move into other, higher-paying jobs with more upward mobility.
Guardian taught the entire company how to use the agile method of project management. With this new approach, everyone learned to speak the same language, whether their job was greatly impacted by the shift to agile or not. Additional courses on digitalization helped all employees understand what digital was and how it would impact their jobs.
After the experience of 2012, Guardian trained its managers and leaders how to manage and lead when people are working remotely. With this preparation, the company was able to quickly pivot to a work from home strategy early in the COVID-19 pandemic with a high level of connection to employees and minimal disruption to serving customers.
Leading with a growth mindset
When purpose and values sit at the center of a strategy, companies and leaders do the right thing. And yet it can be a challenge to stay on top of all the change. Leaders need to think about what is likely to happen in their industry and plan to prepare employees for that future. Higher Ambition organizations cultivate a growth mindset across the individuals in all roles and levels, encouraging them to take on new challenges and build new capabilities.
“Leaders have to be cheerleaders for the people on the front line, telling them, you can change, you can grow, let us help you think more broadly about your career and about and the skills you have about the future.”
Reskilling requires a sustained focus and involvement from leaders across the organization. How are your leaders modeling a growth mindset for the rest of the organization?
