Welcome to Insider Insights, where we dive into hot topics facing the financial services industry. Today, Amy Ferrero, head of customer care centers, MassMutual Operations, and Carie Crane, vice president, professional development, LIMRA and LOMA, discuss the evolution of talent management, the impact of remote work, and the importance of developing transferable skills and business acumen for career growth.
Well, hi, Amy. It's great to see you today. Thanks for taking some time to chat with me.
Great to see you too, Carie.
So, to start off our conversation, you and I over the years have had a number of conversations about talent and the challenges in your role, but can you start by just sharing a little bit about your role at MassMutual and the kinds of teams that you're leading?
Sure. So, I head up the customer care centers at MassMutual as part of MassMutual Operations.
So, if you think about our contact centers, when a customer emails us or calls us or chats with us, for our annuity, our life, our disability, and pension risk transfer business, I oversee those contact centers.
And from a call center perspective, like most others in the industry, our talent is really early in career. The customer care center can be an entry point into MassMutual for a number of different roles or opportunities.
And I'm proud to say that many of our mid-level and executive level managers today are really proud to say they started in the customer care center, because of the breadth of knowledge, the process knowledge they needed to have, as well as the ability to interact directly with their advisors and their policyholders.
That's great. It's got to feel really rewarding, I'm guessing, to see people around the organization that you know, started their career as part of your team.
So, thinking about that and the number of people that you've had an opportunity to work with and develop, we hear a lot about how the workforce is changing and talent is changing. How have you seen that play out within your teams?
Well, first I think the big thing is we've had to go totally remote since the pandemic. We sort of attract and retain folks that are across the country. So that's a big change for us.
Changing the way folks learn and changing the folks the way they get up to speed in their job has become, you know, we've had to check and adjust on how we do certain things. And then when we talk about their longer-term career development or talent development, what we find with folks is it's not a linear path. I mean, I remember back when I started in the day, you know, it was all about maybe you stay within the job that you had, you try to deepen that discipline, maybe get some career advancement, and, you know, that was sort of the trajectory of your career. But today, it's very different — unless you're an underwriter or an actuary — you know where you may stay in that discipline.
Mostly folks are moving into a lot of different opportunities within the organization and within the industry. It can take a myriad of different paths, some expected and some not. So, it's important for our talent to understand the competencies and skills that they really need that are transferable role to role, right? They need to be strong communicators. They need to have strong written and verbal communication skills. They need to be able to influence others and lead others, partner and collaborate, and show a lot of agility and resilience. And then finally, building their business acumen, broadly is really important. Knowing about our industry, knowing about how our company works. So, as they grow within their career, they understand as they make those bigger decisions, how they impact multiple areas.
And then finally, I'd say more important than ever, it's really important, especially when you have remote associates who may not be in a home office interacting with a bunch of different folks. We really need to ask them and take the time to understand what they're personally passionate about, what motivates them to better perform in their role, and what kind of projects or, you know, things they would like to be engaged in and involved in. Do they know what their own competency strengths are? Do they know where they need to develop? And asking those questions around what motivates them.
Anytime you can align a person's personal strengths and motivations with their opportunity, you get those better business results. So, it starts with, you know, folks are remote, we need to spend more time with them, make sure that we're training them and upskilling them differently, but also spending a lot more time with them to understand what they're passionate about and how do we optimize that.
That covered a lot of a lot of great ground there, Amy. I love what you said about making sure you understand. Right? What is motivating an employee and when career development might look much less like a ladder than it does today and much more like a matrix — being able to understand where the employee wants to go is an important part of the things to think about. So, maybe following up on that, how do you think about professional development opportunities? If you're trying to build those skills, how do you think about the professional development opportunities you bring forward for those individuals?
Well, I think it starts with having a really strong development plan. At MassMutual, all employees have a development plan. I have a development plan. All my associates have a development plan. Roger Crandall, the CEO, has a development plan. It's an expectation and a key component of our check-in conversations with our associates, throughout the year. And in order to address the development opportunities of our associates, we need clarity around what their career aspirations are, and we need to give them a good indication of what they can aspire to be. So, we created this learning pathway within our customer care centers really to help guide our team members on how to develop those skills within all the different roles and accountabilities within our teams.
That way, regardless of role, whether they're a new hire, somebody maybe is a couple years into role, or maybe they're more seasoned consultants, this has something for everyone. So, what we do is we outline those skills and competencies that they need to be proficient in their existing role as well as what, they need for career advancement.
Leveraging that learning pathway, that allows the managers and the associates to have really robust discussions about their development. And it allows us to think about how we incorporate what I like to call — or what MassMutual calls — the three Es — experience, exposure, and education.
So, let's build on that experience, exposure, and education. I think that that sounds a lot like what organizations often are thinking about to bring different kinds of learning experiences together. Can you elaborate a little bit on how you guys think about that and use that as a tool in development planning?
Sure. So, if you have a road map, and a general understanding of where you want head, we can use those three E's as part of our, — we really use them as part of our development philosophy. So, if you think about experience, experience are those activities that generally occur while you're in the workplace or on the job. It can include things like a stretch assignment, maybe participating in a cross functional committee, participating in one of our MassMutual's business resource groups, maybe doing some job shadowing, just to name a few examples.
From an exposure perspective, those are really the learning activities that involve social interaction. Helping an associate develop, and building connections with other professionals and thought leaders. This could include networking, attending an industry conference, representing a manager at one of their team meetings.
And then finally, education are really those activities that we think about in the context of learning. They have a defined beginning, they have a defined end, and they can be tracked. So, for example, maybe a virtual instructor-led training class, maybe some self-paced learning, maybe even formal education, things like getting a bachelor's or a master's degree.
So, depending on the associate's development aspirations, as managers, we can really participate in helping them find and select those activities for their development plan that are best suited to achieve their career goals by combining those three Es to build a really robust development plan that gets them closer to their goals.
I love that. It really does take a blend of all kinds of different experiences and exposure and learning to help people get the right mix of development to make those activities stick for the long term.
And it's different for everyone. Right?
It is different for everyone, right. And you mentioned kind of making sure you had those conversations with employees, so you are building the right combination of activities based on the individual and their desires to grow.
Exactly.
So, thinking — maybe a little bit more personally — as you think about developing talent, what do you think are the most important things a leader can do to help an employee's professional development and growth?
So, if the development plan is really at the heart of the employee's professional development, my view is that your career progress is only as good as the strength of the goals that you create. Right? No matter what your current role is or, how you define future success, really creating a strong development plan is probably the most effective way we as managers can help our associates achieve their career goals and really perform at their best. So, the practice of collaborating with the leader and giving and having the associate sit down and help them write out what those goals are, allows the associate to hold themselves more accountable for the objectives and it sort of gives them that — again — customized roadmap to guide them on their career journey.
And it's impactful really for the manager because then they can know exactly what excites the associate and provide them with the opportunity to support them through coaching and feedback and connecting them with those experience, exposure, and education components we talked about earlier. We think — or I think — really, of the area where we see associates maybe fall short in the creation of their development plans — and this is really where managers can help them the most — is ensuring their goals are SMART, and we use SMART as an acronym. The goals are specific, they're measurable, they're actionable, they're realistic, and they're time bound. If the development goal has those elements, it's much more likely to be achieved and it's easy to determine if the goal has been accomplished.
It's interesting. Last week, one of my senior leaders met with our team and really took them through what it means to create a SMART, development goal. And he even created a cool Mad Lib for the managers as a check and balance to measure the strength and the effectiveness of their development goals.
That's fantastic.
Yeah. It was fun.
I think we consider those SMART goals as we're thinking about our business objectives. Right? And sometimes professional development and our own development planning can go by the wayside. I love the idea of applying that SMART concept to development planning. It definitely puts some more focus to it, which I think is important for employees to keep at it throughout the course of a year.
Absolutely.
So, what advice would you have for organizations that are exploring how to make the most of professional development opportunities as part of their talent development strategy?
Well, my personal view is really it starts with the relationship of the manager and the associate. Right? You know, having a really strong foundation, really taking the time to know your associate, what motivates them, what excites them about their current role, what are their strengths, what are their opportunities, what they aspire to do. Knowing those things and being able to establish that foundation of trust that you're there as a coach to help and guide them through that process is sort of fundamental. Right?
Second, our associates on our teams, they don't always know the tools or the resources that are at their disposal. So as a manager, it's really your job to help them get to those resources and understand what's accessible to them. They may lack the understanding of where they can take their career. They may not even understand fully the opportunities that are available to them.
And they also need to understand that their path isn't always linear. It's a culmination as we talked about earlier. I like to think about it almost as a tapestry of experiences and roles and education that becomes uniquely theirs. So, helping them understand that they can get where they want to go, but their path may not look exactly like their peer and that it's going be as unique as they are.
Thirdly, in this complex industry we work in, learning is continuous. I think we have to reinforce that with our associates, ensuring that they know that there's no specific destination, learning is a journey and development isn't something that just stops based on, oh, when I get to this role, I don't have to develop anymore because I've reached that, you know, optimum place.
I'll give you an example. Personally, I just attended the LOMA Finance for Insurance Leaders. It was a training that, folks came on-site to MassMutual to provide to several senior leaders at MassMutual. It was a two-day sort of immersive experience in building our financial acumen and literacy while really developing and understanding the unique challenges that face insurance companies when it comes to their finances and their profitability. So, I'll tell you this is probably one of the best courses I have ever taken. It was awesome. So, at even this stage in my career, it's critical that I develop, I continue to grow as a leader and stay relevant.
And then we there's I think there's some value to just-in-time learning. It can be extraordinarily powerful in today's environment — especially in today's learning environment — and compounded by the fact that we have so many remote associates. Scarcity of time can really scare our team members from taking a lengthy course possibly, or a certification. So, giving them those opportunities to have digestible learning experiences helps with their development.
An example, we found LOMA's Industry Advantage to be a really powerful tool to enable our associates to maybe take a half hour break or, even meet as part of a team to invest in their own learning.
You covered some good ground there. As I think about what you just shared, there are a couple of things that jump out to me. One, that whole idea that we have a pathway of development, right? Everybody has their learning path to go through. And the leaders’ role is often really to be that guide. How do you coach along the way? How do you know what to be able to offer? And I think we have an opportunity as leaders to think about ourselves in that way is really having the chance to guide someone in the way that they want go, right? And I think that that's a fun part of what we get to do as leaders in an organization.
And then the second part is, as leaders, we're also learners, right? I love your experience with the finance course. And we never stop learning, hopefully, in our entire lives. And part of what we need to think about, for ourselves and with our leaders as well is how do we continue to grow too? And I love that you're continuing to make that a part of what you do in modeling it for others in your organization as well.
Thank you.
Thank you, Amy. This has been a great conversation. I've enjoyed our time to catch up today.
Carrie, thank you so much. It was a pleasure being here and development and learning is a passion, so I was happy to talk about it.
Fantastic. Have a great day.
You too.
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