Florida Blue's Inclusion and Diversity Strategy

[Music] We always are very clear. We're going to hire the best candidates for the job. And it's always been my contention that if you're looking in the right places with your eyes open, you will hire a diverse group of people. Hello and welcome to the Oliver Wyman Health Podcast. On this episode, Terry Stone from Oliver Wyman and Julie Merchancin from Health Evolution, interview Pat Garrity, CEO and President of Florida Blue. Pat offers a male perspective on Oliver Wyman's Women in Healthcare Leadership 2019 report, which examines why so few females in healthcare make it to the top. The Oliver Wyman Health Podcast is brought to you by the Global Management Consulting firm Oliver Wyman. Read our report at OliverWyman.com/womeninhealthcare And check out our online healthcare publication, Oliver Wyman Health at health.alloverwyman.com. We invite you to subscribe so you're notified whenever a new episode goes live. Thanks and enjoy today's show. Oliver Wyman has done some pretty incredible research into diversity and inclusion at the leadership level. And some of their initial findings were that females make up about 30% of healthcare see-sweet and 13% of healthcare CEOs. But when they looked at Kywell, Florida Blue, you're well above average with over 40% female see-sweet representation. So we would love to have you start off telling us a little bit about your journey, how you got there. And perhaps what the key really was in making that happen. Thank you. First of all, yeah, our representation of women in our leadership ranks is about 46%. And in the officer rank alone, it's 40%. So this is something that we were very purposeful about. So it sounds to me like this has been fairly intuitive for you personally and professionally along the way. Talk to me a little bit about the degree to which a specific strategy was put in place that the entire company rally behind or how you structured really pushing this through it all levels. Well, I think one of the things was really having a meeting of the minds among the leadership team that this was important. But let me step back and talk to you a bit about how we looked at our diversity program in the first place. When I arrived at Florida Blue, we had a diversity department, literally a dozen people who worked on diversity as a full-time activity. And in my view, they were good at securing for the organization recognitions, like some outside awards that had been displayed upon the organization for having a diversity department and for having programs. But when I looked at eight white males reporting to the CEO, my benchmarks always been about results and not about activity. So we fairly quickly went about the business of this, the diversity department. And I actually had some employees who were associated with that department question my commitment. And I was very clear with them, my commitment couldn't be at a higher level. Diversity was going to be managed by the executive management team. I was going to chair that activity and we would have regular discussions around diversity at my leadership team meeting as part of our regular agenda. It wasn't a side activity, it wasn't something that was compartmentalized, it was integrated into our business. It was serious, it was part of how we as a leadership team would address all issues. So not just gender diversity, but all of the diversity that we manage in our organization. And so that was a critical first step in putting it right on the leadership team agenda as a regular activity. Next I would say is we looked at what we called employee resource groups. And frankly most of them were doing things that I would say are sort of cultural awareness as opposed to anything else. And what we did there was look at the level of activity and acknowledge it as a good first step, but also endorse that we were going to go much further than that. And so what we've done with those groups is we've actually created a guide well communities. And in those communities we task them with bringing to the community they represent issues from the company perspective, but also bringing from that community to our company input guidance and direction. So we build product with input from guide well communities. We think about our advertising or any of the things we do in our business with input from the guide well communities and the guide well communities here represent everything from the Latino community to women's groups to military because we have very large number of military in our area to LBD community. We've got a number of different communities that are represented and we use that as a way to educate our organization and to communicate from our organization back out to our communities. So we did structure a pretty thorough governance if you will around diversity in a very broad sense and we made sure it was at the executive table and I think all of those moves demonstrated that we were very serious about diversity and how we would address the issue on an everyday basis through our leadership team. So Pat, when you think about the time frame it's taken from the day that that diversity group was shut down to when you felt like, OK, this is actually really working to now where you are. I'm not even sure if you feel like you would use your goals, but how long has that taken and some of those phases and give me an example of one of those times when you were just surprised by some unintended consequence or you were excited because you saw the glimmer and someone's eye who really sort of got the nuanced. Uh-huh around it. Well, frankly, it didn't take long at all to start to have impact. It certainly wasn't as mature as it is now and we've added better structure around it and more much more flow, but the aha moment for me came immediately, frankly, there was a young lady who was on our diversity team and she wrote me an immediate email with a tremendous amount of hootspa involved. And she challenged my decision and thought it was a complete turning of the back on diversity and I was so impressed with her email I immediately picked up the phone called her and invited her to my office. So I'm two, three days on the job and I had her come to my office and she was essentially wanting to tender her resignation and I explained to her what my bigger vision was around diversity. Not only did she turn the corner and actually become one of our best advocates in the organization, she got promoted multiple times here. She happens to be a young lady who was suffering from macular degeneration and was losing her eyesight. She became the lead person in our organization for people with physical challenges and also a spokesperson across that community helped us win numerous awards for legitimately accommodating people with vision challenges and other challenges and she was so good at what she did. That our company was recognized by the US business leadership group as the winner nationally for companies under 100,000 for the way we deal with people with physical challenges and the bitter sweet side of that story is that after taking us to those heights Amazon hired her away to run that activity for them globally. Good for her with thrilled she's a wonderful person but it all came out of this original challenge that we had and I saw as someone who was young and passionate and was willing to challenge the CEO in his first week on the job and I thought that's great. And I wanted to amplify that because it sent multiple cultural messages here about the openness we have to challenging and not accepting and learning and you know at all sides can modify their position based on information and it was you know a great success story in the end game. Yeah, and the perceptions are our sometimes different than you might think. That's a great story. Part of what Olive Wymons report uncovered were some of the pieces of substance that don't get talked about very often. And one of those pieces that I think has been coined affinity in some places in a report, but it's really about the hidden influences and implicit assumptions. In a general kind of lack of awareness among both women and men about trust and how trust is formed and how relationships need to evolve to really create the kind of trust where one gets thought of for a senior role, whether in the sea, sweet, or another senior position. So I think they looked at just the perceptions across men and women in terms of what men and women think good leaders are and found that these perceptions are so different. And it's because of perhaps a lack of connection and connection in ways that it go beyond just a professional connection. So I'd be curious to have you talk a little bit about the degree to which you saw that kind of camaraderie, or perhaps even the connection that gets built outside of the workplace, really playing a role in either what you want into in Florida blue or what you built in Florida blue. And what do you chose to bring some of these to the fore around talking about how important relationships are in this, or is that not something that you focused on, but you recognized implicitly in terms of driving more diversity? Well, I would say this. I'd worked in environments before where golf, as an example, was a big, important cultural ethic. And the CEO that I worked for played golf in a business setting, and it was sort of important to play golf with that individual. And I think it was clearly stilted that guys felt like that was the thing they could do with the boss, and it was a shared experience, and it gave them some inside time, if you will, and women in the organization definitely felt excluded as a result. And so I will tell you, first of all, I enjoy the game of golf. But my team would tell you that in the seven years that I've been in Florida, I've not played a round of business golf other than with a customer or client on occasion. But I've never done anything that involves here, including guys and excluding women. And so I've been very purposeful about our gatherings need to be things that are shared, that they need to be activities that everybody is comfortable in. And therefore, I explicitly have eliminated it from the culture as a thing that we do to include versus exclude others. And I think it's important to be sensitized to activities that involve everyone, so that everyone feels like they're getting equal access. - Proud of you for hearing that, for sure, for doing that. When you think about though this issue of relationships, and is that important? Is that something that companies should be thinking about how to engender more connection, or should it not be part of the process? I can't speak for everybody. For me, it is not particularly relevant, because I think I've somewhat isolated it. What's more significant, I'm gonna sort of head in a direction of one of your other questions, if you don't mind, that brings this in for me. What I think is more relevant is the experience initially of a leader, and then the things a leader exposes them to later. So I come from a family where my mother and father both worked, at least my mother worked initially outside of the home, and was very clear with us about what she faced in the workplace. She managed men in the 1950s. She was in the actuarial department of Metropolitan Life, and she very clearly said, "When I was supervising men, I got that job and was told you will not be paid what your predecessor was paid because he had a family." My brother and I heard that early on. I had three sisters. Jobs at our home were gender neutral. Everybody did everything that was on the tour list, and we're accountable for that. So I vacuumed and did dishes and folded laundry, and all of those kinds of things that a lot of guys I knew didn't have those kinds of tasks. Those are gender neutral in our family, and my father was fully supportive of that. He was way ahead of his time, integrated the sports program in our town so that it was young women as well as young guys, and so started softball basketball soccer leagues so that it wasn't just sports for guys, and he was way ahead of Title IX. And so I grew up in a family environment where community service and all of those kinds of things in the home and in the activities were all viewed as gender neutral and that everybody had access to. So I think that's an important place at the start, but I think it's also important never to feel arrogant or feel like you've made it everywhere you wanted to go. When I was in New Jersey, I was on the board of the American Council on Diversity, and one of the things we did was we had regular training sessions that addressed some of those unseen biases that we all have, and that we had sensitivity training on a regular basis so that you would think and question yourself about what your in-bred biases are. And I would say having a base background that gives you the right set of frameworks is really important. And so I try when I interview people to get into how they grew up and what their backgrounds were and what they were exposed to. And then also understand what other trainings they may have availed themselves of and where their thinking has evolved. That's kind of how I think about this space. - But what kind of reaction did you get when you were sharing some of those examples of what are common practices that I think the typical male isn't even aware is happening? - The discussion after giving that example, I think became more meaningful with people saying, oh wait, I'm not gonna just discard that discussion. I do need to think about it. - Pat, that totally sounds consistent with some of the things we see at clients and other instances. In fact, I myself sometimes look at my executive committee colleagues and I'm like, you just did it again. But can we go back to that notion of affinity? Because I think there has been some tension in the last whatever five years. There is unconscious bias that we have to be aware of and try and root out or ensure it doesn't occur. Now one of the things we started to realize though is that there is this real push as if all bias will simply be eliminated if people are aware of it. And that's where that idea of a lot of promotions or other things are based on trust. You're trusting someone to take a job and do something that's pretty high stakes to higher up you go in the organization with the magnitude of responsibility and they probably haven't done it before. Different from maybe when you hire someone over from another company, but often they haven't done it. And I'm curious what your reaction to that is and what your thoughts are with regard to, we positive things in the research about how you might overcome it, etc. So I'm curious if you recall that part in the work or what your reaction is to that notion of how affinity is kind of human. - Yeah. - What you do about it. - What I would say to you there is we try and put our leadership group in a variety of settings where they interact with each other. We just had a lunch today where a whole leadership team was there, we won't talk about why. But we were all there together at lunch. - I know you run a leadership program or you do a lot of leadership work for your internal folks. What extent does that carry over into that leadership work? Because those are the people who are rising through the ranks that are highly higher level of money. - Big time, yeah. So we have the guy well leadership academy. We select our high potential individuals. We put them in integrated test course teams so that they're meeting people from all across the organization. Those groups are diverse by design. All different kinds of diversity in mind there when those teams come together. They work on a project which is affiliated with a real life issue in the organization. They spend multiple sessions together working through that. They come together as an overall team multiple times. And then they present to leadership at the end of this forum. It's very clear when we come together to do that, that these folks have had a lot of intense time together but they've also had a lot of fun. They built camaraderie, they built relationships across the organization. They always do a really nice job of presenting to leadership. And we interact with them and challenge them on some of their process, some of their conclusions, et cetera. But it's a good experience for all involved. And it is certainly part of that process is to build that level of respect, trust, and knowledge of each other across the organization. - To what extent has your diversity inclusion program or activities or work been quoted based versus not? What's the philosophy for a blue eye? So, never been quota-based. Never. We always are very clear. We're going to hire the best candidate for the job. And it's always been my contention that if you're looking in the right places with your eyes open, you will hire a diverse group of people, and that we've got an extraordinarily diverse state. And part of that is making sure we're on the right campuses, we're in the right work settings, and that we as a leadership team are making sure that we always source a diverse pool of candidate. But at the end of the day, we say, pick the best candidate for the job. Did you ever even set targets at all pot, or was that met with like the perception that it was like a quota? Never set a target. Just said this is our ambition, and then you as the leader just kind of kept it front and center. Yep. I talk about regularly that our organization at all levels should reflect the people we serve, and we hammer that message, but we never set a target. So, Pat, and all the work you've done to get where you are today, and you're pretty far along. I know you well, I'm sure you're not done. What would you have done differently? You say, cookie cut, what I did, or there are a few things you might change. So an interesting question. You know, I think every situation is a little bit different, depending upon the organization you land in, its history, the community that surrounds it, etc. So I'm not sure I would tell anybody to cookie cut what we've done. But I do think it's important that the leader have a set of circumstances that they either come from, or have been able to educate themselves and get themselves exposed to, that gives them broad thinking around how they view diversity and how they're going to drive it. It is very difficult, in my view, it would be extraordinarily difficult to have what we have here, if you weren't leading with that mindset, because you then pick somebody for human resources, who is going to be somebody who's got that comprehensive sense of the organization, and where you're trying to go. And so having an Amy be my partner in this is absolutely critical. And that comes from your mindset around what you're trying to create. And, you know, I guess I would look at organizations that don't have that kind of a mix of diversity in their leadership ranks, and say you got to start by changing the person at the top's perception of what the issues are, what the value is, what's the payoff for doing otherwise. Do you see it in Fielat? Do you believe the organization sees it in terms of nimbleness, adaptiveness, like bringing better products to market? Can you see and feel a difference? Because I think you guys have even taken a step further. Like, do you have any examples you might share, Pat? Because I think that's a great example of bringing it in the core of the business, and it's one of the things healthcare needs so much. Right? Healthcare is constantly accused of not being customer-centric, etc. And one of the challenges is if your team's making decision aren't able to harness that or happen to some of the diversity more broadly, you won't get there. So any great stories from that or something that would kind of bring home why that was so powerful? It's happened in a thousand different ways, but I would tell you one of the examples is just the way we now approach advertising and communicating in our communities. It used to be the people with Hispanic background felt like they were pulling us to do things in Spanish. Everything now is designed with the Hispanic community very early in the design process of product, of advertising, of communicating, of our retail centers. I mean, sort of integrated through the organization is that mindset. And I think that was brought to us by having the Hispanic guide well community really emphasize the need to have that front and center. It's funny how the small changes though make the big difference. Right? It's like everybody worries about the all-finging, all-dancing, all-programmatic, higher-the-people, win the awards. But at the end of the day, it's lots of small things day-to-day that add up. And communicated by your people as opposed to the formal rollout message. Higher article. It's so much more powerful. Yeah, it seems like dispelling some of the hierarchy and some of the rules have gone a long way for you in this figure. Yeah. As you know, distinctive to our plan is the fact that we now have 26 retail centers across our state. And in those retail centers, when we open them, we open them with a bit of fanfare each time. We'll invite the mayor, city officials. We'll invite people from education, from health care, from community leaders, all kinds of folks, to the opening of these retail centers. In every case, we ask that local community, how would you like the center to be used? So, we've got sort of a blueprint of how we've used it other places. But we always tailor additional things that are sensitive to that community. What do they want this center used for? I've been in retail centers where we've had yoga classes going on. 65 seniors doing yoga when we walked in the front door. Very impressive. Then in retail centers where we've had school kids with their parents and their teachers. And we've had reading programs going on where we're handing out backpacks with books. And kids are reading with players from the team in that community like the Miami Heat in the Miami marketplace or the lightning in the Tampa Bay marketplace. So that we're getting that whole literacy and health status linked early on in a setting where we're trying to build that around the diversity of that community. Making sure we're tapped into what matters in that community and how we make sure that we're part of moving that community forward. And so we'll build those kinds of programs with our team as a promotion. We'll build that with our foundation which grants money and works with all of these communities across the state. This year we'll give out $28 million from our foundation across our state. That will make significant impact touching on all levels of diversity inside of our communities. So here in Jacksonville we'll do numerous things with the veteran community here or those who are actively deployed. So there really are all levels of diversity that we are contemplating when we're when we're taking action. And we look at that across every different way you can imagine how we build our product what we're doing in our retail center what we're doing in a community activity which boards our leaders are sitting on every one of our leaders are sitting on at least one if not to community boards across the state. So when you start to talk about us having 50 officers having between one and two board assignments across the state we're wired into all the different charitable organizations that you can imagine. So we look at this in a very, very comprehensive way. And so it sounds like the notion of inclusivity is very heavily at the core. It could like when I think of you talking about how you go but even launching the retail centers it enables you to take advantage of diversity but really you're taking a very inclusive approach to we don't have all the answers we want this thing to work so how do we design with them in mind how do we think about it which I think is really important to some of us. No, absolutely and the other thing related to our particular topic here is there's a women's conference that happens annually here in Jacksonville the generation W conference where one of the principal sponsors we've been involved in that I've spoken at that conference virtually every year. Our organization is sort of held out as a role model organization in that event we're in women's conferences in Tampa or land oh Miami all over the state we are sponsoring those events were actively involved the women in our organization feel empowered because we have them participate in those events they're there to learn they're there to share their Florida blue experience they're there to push us. To make sure we're thinking broadly about what's new and interesting and latest topic that we should be aware of as an organization so what we've tried to create is a ultimately learning organization that never sits back and says we've reached. Success that we're challenging ourselves to learn in the push limits at all opportunities. I love it and Terry what I have heard through the last five into this is the prominent. role of inclusion, ensuring diversity and the relationship between the two. You know, it was important as people talk about this work. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It's a different, at least I know our philosophy at Oliver Wyman is, diversity is an outcome that you can strive for. Inclusion and an inclusive culture is the critical kind of element that enables it and makes it work. And in fact, it's part of what winds up enabling you that if you can achieve inclusivity in the culture, you can actually, you don't wind up having to talk about each different cohort or separate group of people. If you will, like, oh, what are we doing for LGBTQ? What are we doing for women? What are we doing for minorities for different racial and ethnic groups? What winds up happening is instead the culture becomes inclusive and other centered. And it results in just a better environment where the things that get in the way of minorities, in this case, I mean, literally like the sub-scale groups, they start to go away because it's just part of the way everybody thinks. I don't know if that resonates with both of you, but that's at least part of what we've found. Boredness, we're on our own journey, like trying to make sure we are getting at 10 out of 10 all the time, but I definitely think that notion of inclusivity is a key piece. Thank you Pat. Our pleasure. Very good. We'll see you soon. Bye now. Bye. Bye. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next time. (gentle music)