Balance the needs of business and employees

Welcome to the Talent Empowerment Podcast, where we lift people leaders so you can lift your organizations. I am your host, Tom Finn, and today we have Nigel Branker on the line. He is an innovative growth leader, an effective strategic thinker, and, quite frankly, a transformational change agent. I call him my friend. You can call him Nigel. Welcome to the show.

It's a pleasure to be here, Tom.

Well, Nigel, if You don't know him.

He is currently the CEO of Canadian Premier, leading all aspects of the company, including its strategic growth. He is responsible for fulfilling the company's purpose of helping families build secure tomorrows by providing insurance solutions that offer financial security and compassionate services. to millions of Canadians.

But he didn't start there; over the course of his career, he's held various leadership roles in pension and benefit businesses within Canadian and global firms. He spearheaded successful acquisitions and a go-to-market strategy. He's a consulting actuary by way of background, we'll get back to that, and it remains both The Society of Actuaries and the Canadian Institute of Actuaries Nigel is a progressive thought leader and an industry leader who focuses on emerging issues for organizations.

He has a passion for mental health and the future of work. I am so thrilled to chat with you today, Nigel, before we get to how an actuary becomes a CEO, which we will get to, before we get to how an actuary becomes a CEO, tell us a little bit about Securian and Canadian Premier and your role within those organizations.

Sure, well, as I said to Tom, it's great to be on the show, and it's been an interesting journey that's led me here. The Coles note I joined a little over 90 days ago as the CEO of Canadian Premier. Our parent company is Securian Financial. Securian Financial is the 9th largest insurer in the US. It's a Fortune 500 company worth $9 billion in gross premiums.

In 2017, Securian made the call to expand out of the US and into Canada. in the five years since they've had AUS executives oversee the operations in Canada, and when the time came to look for a Canadian CEO to really. Bringing the strategy together and integrating some of the acquisitions we're doing landed on me, so I've been in the role for 90 days, working closely with both my parent company and also getting to shape our strategy in Canada.

Well, that's terrific, and it's always important when organizations go global that they hire leadership at the local level because there are so many nuances even between, the United States and Canada. There are a lot of different nuances as to why you feel that you were a good fit for the role.

Well, I was a good fit. It certainly helped bring Canadian, but there are thirty million of us. So, beyond that, I would say that. Having the experience of working for global shops and growing up with global organizations, both from a professional services perspective and a well-being perspective, prepared me for the role, and being in it able to bridge that gap is, I think, some of the art of the role. You know where we have to be different, so some examples would be something like French and French language. It takes more than just translating to be infringed. There are certain laws around Bill 96, and so it is a different environment about what it means to be a national player in Canada.

But there are other aspects that I think we can leverage the US parents quite a lot. And I think you know it's a bit of a Tetris puzzle to navigate as a Canadian student of a US parent. You know, how do we carve out a niche in the market that's appropriate for our products and consistent with our values and vision?

So, I said I'd come back to it. I'm going to do it quickly. You're an actuary by trade. It's part of your DNA, and your makeup helps us understand how you go from being an early-stage actuary to becoming the CEO of an organization.

Well, it's been quite the journey, and in all honesty, I stumbled into being an actuary if that's possible. I immigrated to Canada when I was 17 years old with my family. I started to go to university at the University of Western Ontario. I am a Math Geek, so I did three years of pure math. And in my last year, being the sharp knife that I am, the light bulb went on and I realized that I was going to need to get a job, so someone told me about this profession called actuarial science, where you could get salary increases for passing exams, and I thought I was pretty good at passing exams. So, I started to write a few actuarial exams. I had applied for a job once and got a graduate job in a consulting firm, and that was it. I started my career as a consulting actuary.

Along the way, the grounding of the foundation was great because it taught me a lot about the actual part. The consulting part taught me a lot about measuring and managing risk a lot about building relationships, understanding stakeholder needs, thinking strategically, and so on set me up nicely for sort of the back half of my career when I moved from an individual, contributor role into more of a leadership role, and you know, looking back, I would say I started on that journey to become a transformer leader. And being a transformative leader is fun because you get to think about things differently, set a path, and, you know, create bigger visions. Some of the paths also mean that you are continually surrounded by people who are smarter than you because you often come into new spaces and new industries and bring a fresh perspective. But you have to work with your team, so over the years, I've led group benefits, practices, disability practices, digital mental health start-ups, and now leading an insurance company—a top 15 insurance company in Canada.

Well, you know, not everybody thinks that insurance is sexy, Nigel, but I do.

That's why I like you.

For those of you that don't know Nigel and I have been friends for a couple of years and have gotten to know each other, and I can tell you that not only is he brilliant and kind and thoughtful about the way he approaches business, but he's also just a fun and great person. Um, to get to know So if you have a chance to interact with Nigel along your journey, I highly recommend it. You'll take a lot away from the relationship that you have. much like I have. So, there's just a little plug for Nigel.

Appreciate it.

So, let's get into career transitions a little bit. I mean, you started as an actuary, but it doesn't just go from college to "first job actuary." It goes through these different divisions and organizations, as you mentioned. How does one do that effectively? Not everybody is an extrovert. Nigel, a lot of us are introverts and are doing our best to muddle through our careers. How would you advise somebody who's sort of at the beginning of their career to get to be a CEO a few years later?

Well, I think you’re banging on.

I mean, I'm certainly a very deep introvert as well, and I would say that probably what's served me well in my journey is having intellectual curiosity and being a lifelong learner. And if I look at the early part of my career, there certainly wasn't a master plan to become a CEO. So, I liked to be challenged, and I liked to jump into new things and stretch myself. And, you know, I'd say that the early part of my career was a bit of putting my hand up for new experiences and maybe backing myself to learn a new product, a new industry, or a new regulation I learn about a new client, and I look back, and at that point, I still wouldn't think of myself as a CEO having the career path to be CEO, but I think that idea of always being open to not playing it safe but exposing yourself to new things started to build up my skill set.

I would say as I got more mature and gained more experience, I started to realize that part of my skill set was being a teacher. I am good at solving problems, and the more complex the problem, the better I am at getting people to buy into a solution. And at the end of the day, as a leader, not just the CEO but any leader, you're tasked with setting a course, setting a strategy, setting a direction, and bringing others along for the journey while creating value for your clients, employees, and shareholders.

Yeah, and one of the things I know about you is that you are very passionate about the culture within an organization. And you're very passionate about people, about treating them right, and about creating the right environment for an organization. I've always tended to think that that starts with leadership, but very quickly it trickles down into those middle management roles. So how do you see the world in terms of building the right culture from top to bottom in an organization today?

I'll let you know, maybe with the caveat that I recognize that you have a broad following and that there are many industries and many realities in terms of geography, so it's hard to come up with that one size fits. Certainly, a professional law firm is different from a manufacturing firm or a pharmaceutical firm.

But for me, I always viewed your talent, strategy, and people as assets. As a key pillar in delivering on your business strategy, it starts with the business strategy. You know where we want to play. Where do we want to grow? How do we want to grow? How are we going to beat our competition? And then you quickly get to, well, what role does talent play in that strategy? And I've always worked in very talented heavy industries, whether it's professional services or disability case managers now in the insurance sector, looking at my frontline operations roles, our call centers, claims teams, or actuarial teams so I've always worked in businesses where people are a pretty key part of the equation of the business strategy.

From there, you know, I think what's topical and certainly, something I spend a lot of time thinking about it, the relationship we have as employers with our employees. There's a reason it's called an employment relationship, and I spend a lot of time thinking about that word, relationship. I mean, there are lots of really big people who have lots of relationships. Our parents are our spouses, our kids, our friends, and our colleagues. There are many types of relationships. Some relationships are more transactional in nature; others go deeper.

And so, I think a lot about that as an employer. What type of relationship do I want to build with our employees, and what will be the impact? employee value proposition. There are many terms that you can use, but it boils down to, well, how do you want to relate to your employees? And again, I think there's a spectrum, and so we see this, you know, as we go through different economic cycles. Whether it's the war on talent or whether we're getting into risk, Employers have more or less power over their employees, but as with any relationship, as with any power dynamic, it's well, what do you? What do you? Do with that right? How do you do it? How do you leverage it?

And I have always I've always taken the view that I see it as a relationship of equals between the employer and the employee, and I view middle management as really being the linchpin or the ambassador. It's better for you to own that relationship and empower yourself by either reflecting the needs of the business or the needs of the employee so that certainly governs a lot of what I do.

And once you, you know, have that in mind, it guides a lot of situations, so I think you know one of the hot topics that they recognize again, every market is different. Every geography is a little different, but I think about, you know when we talk about hybrid work and remote work, and that's a pretty hot topic. You know my view is in our space, as you know, I grew up in a professional services consulting firm where it was not uncommon to say, "Hey, I'm going to grab dinner." for a couple of hours, I'll put the kids to bed, and then I'll be back on e-mail at 8:00 p.m. And that was part of the relationship, and that was, you know, sort of what was expected in the role.

So, in today's reality, I feel the pendulum has swung a little bit, and as an employer, certainly, I am perfectly fine if someone needs to work out in the middle of the day. We take their dog for a walk and pick up their kids, because for a long time, as employers, we've asked for extras, and I think this idea of just helping our people integrate life and work is something we can do to make a difference.

Of course, there are parameters. If you're running a call center and all calls, come in between, nine and four. We sort of expect our call center people to pick up the phone, sure. If you're a developer, When I'm writing code, I don't think it matters whether the code is written at 2:00 in the afternoon or 9 at night, so I think having that flexibility in that mindset is important, and I always try to anchor that with our teams in terms of, like, how do we want to relate to our people and how do we want our people to relate to us? And that's my ethos. It probably doesn't work for everything, but it does give me if you can pull it off, that relationship of equals I mean, that's where we talk about engagement and unlocking discretionary effort. It's a very different dynamic if you have a very policy-driven approach. and that's fine too. You could empower your middle managers to enforce policies more effectively, but certainly, I try to empower our middle managers to help strike that balance between the needs of the business and the needs of the individuals.

Well, you talk about this balance between the employer and the employee, which I think most listeners and most humans would say. Well, that's just terrific. If I'm an employee, I want to hear that we're on an equal footing and that you're supporting me when I need to take my dog for a walk or pick up my kids. I think all of that makes sense in today's business environment, and it's nice and refreshing. to see that in business. The fear that we hear, and we hear this from large-scale business leaders that have large Twitter followings, It's that at times they're worried that you know that employee is going to be taking a nap from 12 to 3 and they're not going to get back on their computer at 5 or 8 or whatever the time is, and they're not going to be productive in a remote setting, and there is fear from certain leaders around the world that that is taking place.

What's your take on this?

I follow some of those Twitter feeds, so I certainly hear the narrative, and I would agree that it's maybe a little easier for me as a midsized employer, but I think the principles hold, so let's play that through.

Let's say you do have an employee who takes a nap in the afternoon and does not get back to work. Cool, I can force that employee to be at work, and instead, they'll go for a coffee or surf the net or shop, or so you know.

I learned this early in my career. One of the first roles I took on I took over from someone who had a very different leadership style from me and one of my team members. One of my employees came to me and said, "Hey, you know I need to take the afternoon off for a doctor's appointment, and I'll make up the time next Tuesday." I'll work two hours extra, and next Wednesday I'll work two hours extra, and I just sort of looked at them and said I don't care. When you take it, have your doctor's appointment, and I just trust you're going to make up the time, but it does get to that fundamental question of how you want to run your business.

So, I think door number one is that you empower your people and treat them as grown-ups. The dark side of that is, yes, you then have to hold people accountable, right? So then, if someone abuses the system or it's not delivering on their productivity, you need to empower your managers. You need to back them up, and you need to be able to manage performance.

The flip side is that you can be much more policy-driven, which leads to fewer cases of abuse in the system. But I find it very discouraging for high performance. You disempower your hyper-performers, and so the math for me as an actuary has always been I'm OK with taking the downside risks to empower the high performers, given the industries I've worked in and my philosophy on talent and the nature of the work, which may not be the same for everyone, but I think that's the fundamental decision of how you want to run your business. And what is the mix of high performers to average performers or low performers? And how do you lean towards managing a talent portfolio? But I would say if you're really competing for talent and treating high-performing talent as a premium, you probably want to err on the side of empowerment and treat your people like Grown-ups.

Well, this is the Talent Empowerment podcast, so you know where I'm going to go with that.

I noticed.

It's very important to empower people to do their best work, not only from a business perspective but also as humans, to support the various needs of various populations within an organization, etc. I am all for the new model of work. The future of work whatever you might want to call it at this intersection in time because really, it's gone back to being more human.

And for me, that's important: that we're treating each other well, and we're understanding that it's not about work-life balance anymore. I don't believe in that. I believe in work-life integration, and there has to be an integration between your role that you're passionate about and your family life, and your non-work life. And I think that's critical, and the fact that employers are having this conversation now is uplifting for so many of us because we get to be ourselves a little bit more.

Great, now I do, and I do set up a lot of management committees, so in the spirit of Balance is what I would say is needed. But we're balancing the needs of the individual with the needs of the business, so some of the needs of the business are less about KPs and productivity to me. I think you can take a call from home as easily as you can take a call from the office.

But there are some softer business needs around building relationships with colleagues and collaborating, and you know I'm part of the generation where we kind of do that. I got that for free. We would have lunch together if we were expected or forced to be in the office. We would go for coffee together. You might go for drinks. After work, it builds some of those personal relationships that serve you well in the business.

So, I think the real challenge for employers is that the playbook has changed, and so, you know, I just wanted to caveat that. I'm sure I certainly believe there is value in personal relationships at work and some of those human connections. I just think the old playbook of forcing people to be in, with the hope of building incidental relationships is probably flawed. And that we should be very intentional about coolness. If I have a mostly remote workforce, am I asking people to be in one day a week? Am I asking him to be one day or one month, and it gets back to your point about middle managers?

You know those moments that matter needs to matter, so you know it's not that I want everyone on the days they're at their desk operating the same. If they were working from home, those are the places I think you use your time for team meetings for collaboration in problem-solving, events, and celebrations. So you don't, need to, and none of us have it right. So, I did. I did want to just be balanced and say that I think there is value in meeting in person, but I do not believe that we should force people to do so during moments that matter.

We have to be quite intentional about how we create moments that matter at the right frequency and at the right cadence that works for your workforce. So that is the case. I think that's the fun part of being a leader today—the people that we're operating with. I believe we're operating with no playbook as the world changes. I think we can choose to rely on the playbook of, you know, yesteryear, but it's much more fun to think about well, how do we shape the right playbook for the new realities? Because we've heard, you know, from people loud and clear, and we've seen the world evolve, certainly through the pandemic. You know what digital is much more common and much more accepted. I look back at some of the business trips I would take, and you know I would schlep 5 hours to give the introduction to a meeting.

Business travel is not all that fun these days, so I think those days are behind us. So now, what is the new reality?

Yeah, I think you said it beautifully. It's going to be different for every organization, and you're going to have to each other. Maybe it's by department, division function, or by management layer? Yeah, how do we get people together so that they still feel— connected not just to the organization? isn't as important as the people that are within the organization. So how do we connect those folks so that they feel good and function well at work and home? And create long-lasting relationships in that new employee-employer relationship. There's a lot of thought that went into this space, and I appreciate your opinions on it. But I think what I'm sort of double-clicking on here is this role of middle management, and you talked a little bit about it in your opening here. How do you create courage in middle management? How do you empower this group of folks, who are so important to organizations, to do the right thing?

Well, sort of building on the business strategy and your view on talent and the employment relationship. You want to have I think one of the tools we picked up through COVID, through adapting to remote work, it's just how important it is for us as leaders to be really clear and articulate and to help prioritize, right?

So, I think we have to define it for your point, what does “good” look like? As a middle manager, you know some of the expectations when we work, whether we're working remotely or in person. You know this. In the new reality, I expect middle managers too. play a role in their colleagues and their team's well-being. So, that doesn't mean that they need to be experts on mental health. Of course not.

But if you know if you have someone who's big on personality and is always cracking jokes, and in the last couple of meetings you've seen them, they've been distant and not themselves, you know, That's a clue. to say, "Hey, Nigel, I notice you haven't been yourself." Is everything OK? I'm always here to talk, as a reminder. We have an AP, and there are some really basic things that you can model and do. That's clear. Part of the role of a middle manager is to facilitate communication. There's a cause. I think we are always overweight on the productivity KPI part of it, which is what the business needs. What do we need? How many widgets do we need to build? But I think really good role modeling What's our approach to learning and development, and what's our approach to talent development?

What's our approach to well-being You know, I try to be clear and use examples as role models with my leadership team so they can cascade down like at the end of the book. You want your manager to make calls consistent with that. The values of the organization and I kind of would say and what would you do? What would I do?

If I were in that role, and I knew the CEO or the CVO couldn't be in every meeting in every room for every discussion, what would I do? But I think we want to, you know, permeate our values throughout the culture, so middle management knows what we stand for, and you know that we would support them. Have their backs known that it's safe to bring issues to us, so I think it's, back to culture, right? And you're being very intentional about the type of culture you want to build.

You mentioned KPIs there and not leaning too hard into productivity KPIs because of that. can maybe be adverse long-term, but what did you mean by KPIs? and understanding how to utilize those effectively.

well, I should clarify. It's not that I was saying we shouldn't lean too heavily on KPs; I was just saying that the business being what it is, they get a lot of attention already, so whether it's a sales target, whether it's the percentage of calls answered, whether it's client retention.

There are not a lot of environments where the business KPIs are on top of mine. I think the challenge is: how do you balance them out with other KPIs? Or you know soft skills or metrics that look at the well-being of employees, right? like days last time off. There are other metrics you can build in.

I'm saying, though, that of course, we're still in business to run a business, and we all have businesses. Uhm, I just don't think that we're under-read on those. I think they tend to exist already in the infrastructure, which is great. That's a great core. We've reflected on the needs of the organization. How do we build around that to ensure we have some nuggets that reflect the needs of the individual?

Well said, and it is a balancing act. As you said before, we're balancing that new employer and employee relationship. We're trying to make sure that a modern workforce has the tools that they need to be successful today and, in the future, as well.

Well, and you know, in thinking about a modern workforce, what we tend to find is that our workforce is more diverse than ever in terms of background, language, and thought. We have so many different schools of education or are self-taught.

We are such an interesting populace around the world. How do you focus within an organization to make sure that you're meeting the needs of all employee groups across this diverse world in which we live?

Well, first of all, as you mentioned, it's a very passionate topic for me. It's also, sadly, at times a polarizing topic in our environment today.

You know what I would say as someone very passionate about and champions D, which, you know, I'm back to. Is it a real business priority? And if it is a real business priority, how do you embed it? You know, if expense management was a business priority, I don't think I would meet with my direct reports and say, "Hey. Folks should keep an eye on expenses and, if possible, just be, you know, trying to do the right thing.” I'd probably be pretty disciplined at looking at each business unit, and each functional area, and setting some targets or setting goals around what's expected.

And I think, you know when I think about it, I think we're still together in this transitory phase. Most employers certainly agree with the value, whether it's from a client- or market-facing perspective, whether it's from a communal perspective, or whether it's from a talent perspective. Whether it's from an innovation perspective, so I think we're starting to realize that, you know, diversity is good, but to get there we haven't kind of gone from general accountability to specific accountability.

So, hey, what do we expect from the leader of the call center? What do we expect? I mean, we're going through this now with our external board. And you know, one of the metrics It's really big in Canada for both management teams and boards. Is it 50/30, so can you get to gender parity and 30% diversity? People of color are more visible minorities, and you know, I'd say we're almost there from a management team perspective; we probably have some work to do from a board perspective, but I am OK having that conversation. I'm OK with using that as a goal to keep us honest.

As we look at potential board members and potential management team members, I feel that does need to permeate throughout the organization, it is tough work because what you would do with a call center would be very different from maybe an IT team, which might be very different from an actuary team. Also, we have a business cycle when it comes to talent, so it does take time to sort out the data at key points. So, hey, are we hiring diverse talent at the entry-level, and does it take time to look at that? And if we're not, what are we? going to do.

If we are hiring diverse talent, we need to get better at hiring diverse talent, but when we look at the top of the House, with its diverse talent, we don't see the same level of diversity in our leadership team. Then you have to think about your promotion process. Review your merit and promotion or your mid-career hire, so I think there's such a complex ecosystem, and I think it can seem overwhelming at times.

So, then the other part, you know, when I sit on panel discussions and talk to other business leaders, I believe in having priorities. So, what are the one or two things you would like? What should the organization do in the upcoming fiscal year? And how do you cascade that appropriately to teams, so they have specific objectives versus more general ones?

I think you know that the more general objectives are great, but at some point, to put them into action as a business, you'll need to add some accountability. I often quote Mike Tyson when I talk about the diversity of all people. Had this quote where he'd say you know everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. And that's what I feel with a lot of diversity plans. You know, I think everyone has a plan until you have someone at the call center who is verbally abused because of their accent. Or do you have a high-performing salesperson who is racist and sexist? Or you have a client who has asked that you have no people of color in any PowerPoint presentations; like these are when these examples come up in business. Like, how do we deal with it right?

And that's back to this idea of, like, how do we make the transition from general motherhood accountability to very specific accountability and very specific values on what we stand for

You know that those examples that you gave are real ones that can come up in organizations, and I think just hearing you say it is sort of, "Oh my gosh," it's a little cringeworthy, and we hope that we're past some of that in human behavior, but perhaps we're not.

And we've still got a long, long way to go in organizations, when you think about how to take that incremental step, Nigel, what is something that our people listening could do to take that first step to be more inclusive and support diversity in their organization?

Yeah, I mean, there's so much, and again, it depends on where you are in the business cycle and how diversity shows up for you. Whether it's in talent, whether it's in the markets that you serve, or whether it's with your clients.

I can think of some squares from a hiring perspective. Certainly, as you get to more senior roles, having criteria around hiring becomes more important panels and having a slate of diverse candidates When I think about promotion discussions, you know, they're empowering. having an independent challenger in those meetings, and I've played that role before.

You know you'll sit in on meetings sometimes. You might have a strong female candidate, and the narrative can sometimes take place as well. You know when she's a little difficult to work with. And she has sharp elbows, you know, we hear that a lot, and I just think having a challenge goes to say, well, we just talked about Tom, and Tom is even more difficult to work with. But we didn't mention that Tom's difficult to work with, right? So just so you know, I think taking the commitment to add an independent perspective to some of your key processes is something fairly straightforward.

And again, I'm not talking about the big employer that has well-thought-out and well-established programs. But for midsize employers like me, that feels like some steps you can take and some early easy wins you can take.

Well said, and I think this topic is very important to you and a lot of our listeners. It's certainly important to me as well.

Nigel, what does the next year look like for you and your business? You've been here for ninety-one hundred days. What does it look like for you over the next 12 months or so?

Well, there's a lot to do, but it's really exciting.

I mean, part of what attracted me about the role was as a strategic leader, and I saw we had this rich history in Canada, and we had the investment from a parent company starting in 2017, and then at the end of last year, we announced that we're buying a significant block of business from  Sun Life is one of the large Canadian insurers here, and that acquisition effectively triples our business and doubles our workforce, and we need to set up offices in new centers.

So, those are rare opportunities in leadership where you have a chance to shine. You know, map the vision, map the strategy for the next, you know, 5 to 10 years. So, the next year is very foundation-building for me. It's a lot of, you know, putting in the organization's design to help support growth and the evolution of the new entity.

It's a lot about the culture and building one culture between the two. Do you know what I'd like to avoid? Having legacy Canadian Premier employees and legacy Sun Life employees, like us, just need to have, you know, one culture for our new collective team. So, we're working a lot on that or design culture. I think about strategy, and you know the brand we want to build in the market as this new top 12 to top 15 life and health company player in Canada.

It gives us a lot of scales, and so it is. It's a fun opportunity to think about the brand we want to build. What do we want to stand for both with our clients and with our communities and as an employer, what type of employer do we want to be so, you know, I think a year from now there will be an awful lot. It's a lot of you know that that gas brake is kind of like keeping the teams engaged and focusing on the right things.

But also, being cognizant that we have a lot to do and playing the long game

Well, you've got an incredible amount of work ahead of you over the next year.

I wish you and the organization much success. It sounds like a very exciting time to be a part of your organization, and I can't wait to hear from you over the next year as you bring the organization together and build that culture and that strategy that you've talked so deeply about today.

Well, it's been a pleasure to be on, and I'd love to be back on in six months, or nine months a year, and I can give you an update on how we're doing.

Well, I appreciate that, Nigel. We'll have you back on the show. It was great to have you on today. Thank you so much for joining.

And thank you for joining the Talent Empowerment Podcast. I hope this conversation lifted you so you can lift your teams and your organizations. My friends. Let's get back to people and culture together. We'll see it in the next episode. Take care, everybody.

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