Leading with integrity: An alum's impact at a Fortune 500 company

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Deanna Mulligan's (New York, 92-00) transformative ten-year leadership at Guardian Life is a testament to the power of aligning corporate values with innovative strategies. As CEO, she steered the company through significant technological upgrades, setting a precedent for remote operations that proved crucial during the pandemic. Her focus on efficiency and employee empowerment not only enhanced Guardian's operational capabilities but also solidified its reputation as a purpose-driven company.

In this Q&A with McKinsey Senior Partner Vik Malhotra, Deanna discusses her tenure at Guardian and shares lessons for future leaders in adapting to dynamic business environments.

Vik Malhotra: Deanna, you were CEO of Guardian Life for a decade, from 2011 through the end of 2020 – more than double the length of a typical CEO tenure. Talk a little bit about how you thought about your vision and strategy for the company, and what it was like when you joined.

Deanna Mulligan: Going back to my McKinsey days, we always used to say, 'The solution to the problem is somewhere within the client.' And over time I found that to be true – that the seeds of the answer were there, and it was our job to put knowledge and hypotheses the client had together with our experience and our knowledge to structure the answer.

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I would say I did the same thing when I arrived at Guardian Life: I decided that I needed to spend a lot of time walking and talking with people. I spent two years running the life and disability businesses before I became COO in 2010, then moved to the CEO role the following year.

The thing that really struck me about Guardian was the culture and the fact that the people who worked there really believed in the three values of the company: doing the right thing, knowing that people count, and holding themselves to very high standards.

In terms of changes that needed to be made, there was a lot of investment needed to really light a fire under all our colleagues. The way to do that, and to attract new people, was by accentuating our values as a purpose-driven organization. That wasn't as much of a concept in the broader business world in 2011.

Financial strength was also really a part of our history and one that I wanted to build on. When Guardian was founded in the 1860s, it was founded with twice the required equity capital of an insurance company, which was unusual at that time. Our founder said, ‘A life insurance company should live forever,’ meaning as long as you're selling a life insurance policy you have to be around to pay it off.

Using the founder's words and the founder's language made me – and all of us at Guardian – feel like we were part of a continuum that was 165 years long and counting, which was very motivating.

Vik: You also found ways to drive a lot of growth and innovation. The company grew significantly under your leadership. What are the areas of change and impact that you're the proudest of as you look back?

Deanna: One of the impactful things we did came as a result of Hurricane Sandy, which hit New York in 2012. We ended up with five feet of water in our headquarters lobby. This inspired a huge investment in IT. We restructured our technology and were one of the first big insurance companies to move into the cloud. That was scary for our board because the cloud wasn't very well known then, but it became obvious to me that if we were going to be location-independent, that’s where we needed to be.

Then when the pandemic hit, we were able to go 100% remote with one day's notice because we had learned the lesson from the hurricane. We had indeed become location-independent, not just with our technology, but with the way we ran the company. We had given years of training to teach people how to manage remotely, and we had flexible location policies even before the pandemic. We took something that was initially shocking and turned it into a strength.

We also gained a tremendous amount of efficiency in everything that we did. By the time I left we had a 'no paper' rule. I worked to help people understand that efficiency and high performance are also a part of caring for our own people and caring for policyholders, who put enormous trust in us. In addition to being a life insurance and annuity company, Guardian is still a group insurance carrier, so we have a lot of people with dental insurance and group life insurance, as well as disability insurance.

Being in the insurance business means being with people at the worst times of their lives: when they are sick or disabled, when they lose their jobs and need to tap into their insurance, or when someone has died. And we had a responsibility to do that in the best way possible.

So before major storms we would call on the phone all the people in its path who were still receiving their payments from us through the mail service, and help them switch to electronic deposit so they didn’t have to worry about not receiving it. And in some cases, we would speed up the benefit payments to make sure they would get to the recipients. That's an example of an innovation that came from caring for and listening to clients.

Vik: You touched upon shaping the culture earlier. It sounds like you did an amazing job bringing further to life the purpose and values that had been key to the institution for years.

The management team, the middle managers, and the agents were culture carriers as well, so it certainly wasn't all me. But what I did personally is to start every single meeting with our three values. I'm sure people got tired of it. However, we did frequent surveys of our people to ask what our values were, and people could recite them.

I also tried to think about my personal values. We're all human, but I tried to exemplify the values wherever I went. One thing I used to do is that if I heard about the death of a family member of one of our associates, I would send them a hand-written sympathy card, and I would often send them a personal check if I could find out their preferred charity.

Sometimes we paid for funerals of family members of Guardian employees when there was a lot of distress because we thought it was the right thing to do. We didn't do it because we wanted to advertise it. We did it because we thought it was the right thing.

Vik: You're the author of the best-selling book "Hire Purpose," obviously playing on the word “higher,” which talks about closing the skill gap and upskilling talent. Talk a little bit about your views on the importance of talent in organizations.

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Like all companies, we needed talent, and we thought that there were probably pools of talent we were missing because of the way we'd always thought about our recruiting, for example. Many of the jobs that we had believed in the past required a college degree probably didn’t. We wanted to rethink that and bring in more diverse talent from more diverse sources – people who may not have gone to college, but who we could train.

We started to find fabulous people in places where we hadn't been looking. I came to believe passionately that not only was it a great thing to do for the company – bringing us new talent and skills – but it was just the right thing to do, period. In all the advantages and success that we'd had as a company, our way of giving back was to reach out to people who needed just a little bit of help to get to the next step in the education ladder and the employment ladder.

Around the time I was working on the book, I served on a Presidential Advisory Council that was formed to help people think about how to get through school financially. I thought that all the Council members needed to hear from students, so we brought some of our community college interns to one of these meetings. They brought a really different perspective.

Vik: Pivoting to your time at the Firm, what are some of the lessons and experiences that you took away from your time at McKinsey that have helped you in your overall leadership journey?

Deanna: Values alignment is really important, and I definitely learned that at McKinsey. I also learned that, as a CEO, giving people on the frontlines the opportunity to dissent is really important.

I learned a lot about how to look at a page full of numbers and figure out which one is wrong. It's a good skill to have in a CEO, and in my case it was honed by spending years as a McKinsey associate looking at spreadsheets. Being facile with numbers is important to a CEO. And stress testing is a good skill.

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Vik: You’ve been very passionate about pro bono activities. You're on the board of New York Presbyterian and have served on and continue to serve in many capacities on the Partnership for New York City. Why are these organizations important to you?

Deanna: I lived and worked in New York City for more than 30 years. I've been a huge booster of the city and continue to be. I'm a total convert, and there's no energy like convert energy.

And New York Presbyterian Hospital is a fantastic organization that helps people all around the world. For example, we have the biggest transplant program of any hospital in the world. How could one not be engaged with helping with health if you're involved with life insurance and health insurance? I always receive much more from those activities than I give.

Vik: You've gone on to your post-CEO chapter. What's exciting you now, both from a professional and personal point of view?

Deanna: I finally live on a farm and have my horses at home, and they're amazing. Horses are my personal passion, and I have been a rider since I was five years old, so that's been a joy.

I've also spent a lot of time helping and being an advisor to start-ups, and it's been my great joy to do some volunteer activity at my alma mater, Stanford Business School. I have spent a lot of time thinking about how to use cloud-native new technology to rethink the ecosystem in insurance. That has been really engaging, and it's exciting and fun to help young CEOs to build and grow their companies and help them think through their leadership style and presence and their leadership values.

Vik: One last question. Having been through this amazing professional journey, what advice do you have for aspiring CEOs, or aspiring business leaders?

Deanna: You really have to know who you are, and what you absolutely love doing. You have to know what you do better than anybody else. You need to understand all along the way what your superpowers are along with what you are bad at. All through your career you should make sure that you can leverage your superpowers as much as you can and surround yourself with people who are good at the things you're bad at.

There's not enough time in life to coach yourself into being good at things you don’t do well. It's easier to start with the things you're great at, spend as much time as possible doing those, and build a team of other people to do the things you don’t do well. This is good advice for everyone, but if you're a CEO there's no other way to do that job.