30 minute read
Beyond Success — With Dan Clark
Dan Clark is a motivational speaker, leadership trainer and author of more than 20 books, including The Art of Significance: Achieving the Level Beyond Success, which focuses on his 12 Highest Universal Laws. He believes it is superficial to build careers and personal lives around amassing money, bigger houses and fancier job titles. He believes that many outwardly successful people feel empty without having a higher purpose and a path with more significance.
Clark is also a primary contributing author to the Chicken Soup for the Soul series of books. He has been the closing keynote speaker at the Million Dollar Round Table annual meeting, he has spoken at most of the major life insurance carriers’ events, and he was the keynote speaker for the third time at the National Association of Health Underwriters national convention in Austin, Texas, this year.
He accepted a scholarship in football and baseball to the University of Utah, where he majored in psychology. During a tackling drill, Clark cracked a vertebra in his neck and severed the axillary nerve in his right shoulder. He eventually recovered and was invited to speak to local high school kids about his recovery. Clark then was invited to speak for former first lady Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign, beginning his long career as a motivational speaker.
Clark has earned the highest Certified Speaking Professional designation in the National Speakers Association, was inducted into the Professional Speakers Hall of Fame, and has been named one of the Top 10 Motivational Speakers in the World. Dan discusses his links to the insurance industry and why he thinks it is a noble profession, his flight to the edge of space in a U2 reconnaissance aircraft, what lessons he’s learned from the adversity he has faced, and why he believes in service and living in the moment.
Paul Feldman: You have had an interesting experience with the insurance industry. Can you share that?
Dan Clark: My dad started and owned his own insurance company, and my older brother owns his own insurance company as well. When my dad died, I was there the day the death benefit check was delivered to my sweet mother. I love this industry. I honor it. There’s no more noble profession than insurance. I say that everywhere because I’ve seen both sides. I understand the magnitude of the products and the impact your industry makes in the lives of families that no products outside of insurance can do.
Feldman: What is the difference between success and significance?
Clark: Success is about focusing in on the moment, which is not to be discounted. We have to be successful.
Let me give you an NFL example about focusing in the moment. Last year, the last four divisional championship games played in the National Football League all came down to the final play.
There’s not an actuary on the planet who could have predicted that. In one specific game between the Kansas City
Chiefs and the Buffalo Bills, there were two amazing quarterbacks who have the ability to create that moment, which have that quiet mind that allows them to just focus in on what they can do right now: Patrick Mahomes for the Chiefs and Josh Allen for the Bills. Because of their ability to find that present moment and stay in that process, they collectively scored 25 points in the last two minutes of the game. Mind-boggling.
Bills go ahead. Chiefs go ahead. Bills go ahead. Chiefs go ahead. Bills go ahead. If you are living in the past, you’re never going to be able to rise to the occasion under the pressure.
You fall to the level of your training. If the quarterback is trying to focus on “I’ve got to score a touchdown! I’ve got to score
Feldman: Tell us how The Art of Significance impacts those in the insurance industry.
Clark: I’m a storyteller. I don’t believe we remember the facts and figures. We remember the interpretation of the facts and figures. So let me tell you a quick story. I played American football for 13 years. And my buddy was drafted into the National Football League in the second round by the Philadelphia Eagles. And after two years with the Eagles, he’s traded to my Oakland Raiders. And after four years in the league playing in a Pro Bowl, one day he walks out of practice — quits — never to play again. Why? He loved being a football player, but he hated playing football.
He loved the celebrity perks and the fame and fortune. But because his inner voice and true purpose in life were misaligned with what he was doing, he would never enjoy a life of significance and he would die with his music still in him.
We need to do something with our life that makes a difference. You need to focus on doing what you need to do so that you live a life of significance.
a touchdown!”, he’s never going to be able to execute.
If he’s living in the past, thinking “Oh no, I can’t do this. I don’t want to do this. Why did I pick the most stressful job on the planet?”, then he will fail.
But he lives in the moment.
Had Patrick Mahomes and his 10 teammates not been able to focus in on the present moment and been successful right now to get what they want, they would have never been able to enjoy the significance of the winning to advance in the playoffs.
So, what we must understand is that you first must be successful before you can be significant. We can enjoy and create significance in our life so that we don’t die with our music still in us.
Feldman: How did you come up with the 12 Laws of Significance?
Clark: The backstory is that on Oct. 23, 2010, I was invited to soar to the edge of space in a U2 reconnaissance aircraft. I’ve given more than 350 speeches to the United States military. I’ve been downrange eight times in Iraq and Afghanistan firing up our troops. I honor and love our military, and I support their families. I volunteer and donate my time, my speeches, my talents, whatever I have.
I’m a Pentagon appointee serving with the National Civic Leaders Board of the United States Air Force. I’m in the halls of the Pentagon, and I’m walking down the hall and I run into Gen. Paul McGillicuddy, who had been the commander at Maxwell Air Force Base, Montgomery, Alabama Air University.
He stops me. “Dan, I just got a new assignment. I’m the commander at Beale Air Force Base. Will you come and speak to our troops?” I said, “Absolutely. If you’ll give me a ride in a U2 reconnaissance aircraft.”
He says, “I can’t do that; you’re a civilian.” I said, “What?” He says, “Yeah. It will require a presidential signature.” I said, “OK, go get it.”
A couple of weeks later, he calls me and says, “I can’t believe we got [President] Obama to sign off on this.” So, for the next two months, I trained. I lost 37 pounds. I show up at Beale Air Force Base. I go through another full day of training.
So, I’m 70,000 feet above the Earth’s surface. You see two-thirds of the state of California; at 80,000 feet you see mapped outlines of America. And at 90,000 feet, you feel like you can reach out and touch the face of God. It was a spiritual experience I wish everyone could have.
And for five hours, I sat in the sounds of silence looking at the curvature of the Earth, gazing in the endless blackness of the universe pondering eternity and my place in it. I’m looking around thinking, “If we’re the only ones here, this sure is a lot of wasted space.”
In that environment, I became a curious student of astronomy. I became a curious student of how organized the Earth and the universe really are.
And when we landed, I started studying astrophysics. I interviewed astronomers. I read everything that I could get my hands on, including by Wernher von Braun, the father of NASA, and Leonhard
Euler, whose 18th-century theorem allowed us to successfully bring the astronauts and their space capsules back through the atmosphere.
Over the next year, I quantified that there are only 12 highest universal laws (Obedience, Perseverance, Stretching, Trust, Truth, Winning, Doing Right, Harmony, Acceptance, Being Needed, Covenants, Forgiveness).
The Twelve Laws of Significance
Law 1: Practice Obedience Instead of Free Will Agency Law 2: Exercise Perseverance Instead of Patience Law 3: Proactively Stretch Instead of Change Law 4: Trust Predictability Instead of Hope and Faith Law 5: Know the Whole Truth Instead of Believing What You Think Law 6: Focus on Winning Instead of Team Law 7: Do Right Instead of Seeking to Be Best Law 8: Experience Harmony Instead of Forcing Balance Law 9: Accept Others Instead of Judging Them Law 10: Love and Be Needed Instead of Romanced and Used Law 11: Establish Covenants Instead of Making Commitments Law 12: Forgive Instead of Apologize
Feldman: One of my favorite parts of your book — and I’ve never heard it said just like this — is your first law: “Practice obedience beyond free will agency.” Can you talk about that?
Clark: Law No. 1 is Focus on Obedience. It’s learning the laws of the universe and then putting them into play to make our sojourn here and mortality on our earthly experience the easiest, the most meaningful path that we can walk as we live life from birth until we take our last breath.
For example, if you don’t obey the law of gravity and step off a 20-story building, you will die. So, obedience is the highest law in the universe because all other laws are governed by it.
We must use our free will agency to choose to obey and walk on higher ground. Otherwise, we will suffer the specific consequence of disobedience.
If we want to be the best version of ourselves personally, professionally we need to surround ourselves with people who choose to obey, who choose to be self-disciplined enough to wake up every morning with a routine focused in on service before self.
Some think “I can do whatever I want,” but, oh, no you can’t. We must choose to obey. We must use our free will agency to choose to obey and walk on higher ground. Otherwise, we will suffer the specific consequence of disobedience.
If I can take it one step further, to guarantee free will agency tests our obedience. To guarantee that we will always have a free will choice, the master organizer of the universe has given us an opposition in all things. We must have darkness to appreciate the light. We must have justice to appreciate mercy. We must have sickness to appreciate health.
We must have wisdom to appreciate knowledge because wisdom is the application, the practical application, of knowledge. We must have death to appreciate the sanctity of life.
And then because we’re human and we know we’re going to misuse our free will agency because of the opposition in all things, every person born into this world was born with an inherent ability to discern right from wrong, truth from error.
It will behoove us if we want to be the best version of ourselves personally, professionally to surround ourselves with people who choose to obey, who choose to step out of the crowd and walk on higher ground. People who choose to be self-disciplined enough to wake up every morning with a routine focused in on service before self.
Feldman: A big part of what you talk about in your book is how powerful having a true “why” drives a life of significance and success. Everyone thinks they have a why, but it’s usually not defined. What are some strategies to define your why, and how that should look?
Clark: What we have to do is simplify it. Make sure we can do it. The classic example is having a mission statement or a vision statement. Every company has one. The classic example of the simplified, straight-to-the-point purpose statement comes from The Walt Disney Company.
Their mission statement says, “Entertain, inform and inspire people,” essentially to make people happy. Bam. End of discussion. Let’s define what that means.
If you’re working at Disneyland or Disney World or an amusement park and your job is a groundskeeper, your job is to keep that amazing amusement park perfectly clean because it is the happiest place on Earth. And if you’re walking in the midst of trash, suddenly it’s no longer the happiest place on Earth.
Eliminate distractions. Why do you do what you do?
Let me share my own personal story. I played football for 13 years. One day in practice, the dream ended. We had a tackling drill. Coach blew the whistle. Two of us ran into each other at full speed. We slammed to the ground.
My right side was paralyzed, my arm dangled helplessly at my side. I couldn’t talk. Fast-forward: I recovered completely, but for 14 months I was paralyzed, physically and emotionally. When I was paralyzed, I lost my identity. I thought I was a football player when, in reality, football was just what I did. It’s not who I was as a man.
Every culture is created. Fortune 500 companies, family-owned business, an insurance agency — it does not matter. Every culture is created between the strongest belief — the highest expectation and the best behavior that the leader lives by — and the weakest belief — the lowest expectation and the worst behavior that the leader tolerates.
So, if you want to up level the culture in your organization, in your insurance agency, what we have to do is shrink the distance between the highest belief, highest expectation, best behavior and what we’re not willing to tolerate. And as we shrink that distance in our organizations, we create what I call a culture of significant partner leaders, where our “why” is bigger than our “why not” — where we hold ourselves accountable, where everybody leads, those with and without a title.
When I was paralyzed, I thought I hit rock bottom. But here’s what happens. Nobody ever hits rock bottom. We hit rock foundation. We hit rock belief. We hit the baseline core values on which we were raised. During COVID-19, what did we learn? Adversity introduces us to ourselves. No one will ever know how strong we are until being strong is our only choice. Is your current belief strong enough, deep enough, true enough to empower you to respond to rapid change? And if not, why not?
Feldman: What enabled you to deal with those challenges?
Clark: What took me so long to change? What took me so long to recover? What took me so long to recalibrate?
I was asking the wrong questions. I was asking the doctors how to get better when I should have been asking myself why I needed to get better. And once we answer why, figuring out the how to becomes clear and simple. We still have to do the hard things. We still must have the mindset on a daily basis to push ourselves intellectually, physically, emotionally, spiritually, financially to the next level.
We need to ask ourselves: Why do you do what you do? What is your true purpose?
And here’s how that happens. You have to understand the significance of making sure our own personal why aligns with the why of our agency, the why of our profession. And therefore, our why has to be bigger than our why not.
Feldman: I want to circle back on your family’s experience with life insurance, because it’s touching.
Clark: My dad owned an insurance company, and he died in 1990. Because of the financial advisor my dad had in his company, an insurance agent showed up at my mother’s doorstep after my dad’s death. The agent couldn’t fix the fact that my dad died. He couldn’t have taken away my dad’s six-and-a-half-year battle with cancer. But he could make sure that my mother could sustain her lifestyle, that she’s still would have enough money to stay in her home and invite her grandchildren, that she could keep my dad’s legacy of love and leadership alive.
To create an environment where she and my siblings and I could continue to tell the stories of my dad, my hero — horseman, legislator, Air Force officer, orator and extraordinary human being. That’s what this amazing insurance and financial advisory industry does for the world.
Consumer confidence drop hints at recession risk
Consumer expectations have been driven to the lowest point in nearly a decade, dragged down by fears of inflation, particularly in oil and gas prices, according to the latest Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index.
“Expectations have now fallen well below a reading of 80, suggesting weaker growth in the second half of 2022 as well as growing risk of recession by year-end,” said Lynn Franco, senior director of economic indicators at The Conference Board.
The Expectations Index, which is based on consumers’ short-term outlook for income, business and labor market conditions, decreased sharply to 66.4 in June from 73.7 in May and is at its lowest level since March 2013.
Fewer people expect business conditions to improve, with only 14.7% expecting improvement, down from 16.4%. Three out of 10 consumers think business conditions will worsen, with 29.5% expecting deterioration, up from
26.4%. And although the labor market has been strong, consumers were a little more pessimistic about it, with 16.3% expecting more jobs to be available, down from 17.5%, and 22% expecting fewer jobs to be available, up from 19.5%.
PANDEMIC CRACKED MANY RETIREMENT EGGS
The pandemic has shifted retirement planning for Americans, with many dipping into retirement savings and extending their employment, according to the 22nd Annual Transamerica Retirement Survey.
The good news is that most Americans are saving for retirement, but the notso-good news is that more than a third have had to dip into that money, the survey found.
Thirty-five percent of workers have taken a loan or an early withdrawal from their retirement accounts. Employed workers (39%) are more likely to have ever dipped into retirement savings, with 39% doing so, compared with 22% of self-employed and 21% of unemployed workers.
FED: INFLATION WON’T FALL TO 2% FOR 2 YEARS
Cleveland Federal Reserve Bank President Loretta Mester said it will take two years for inflation to fall to the central bank’s 2% target. Mester added that inflation will be “moving down” gradually from the current level. However, she said she was not predicting a recession despite slowing growth.
A surge in inflation, which is at its highest level in 40 years, led the central bank to announce its biggest rate increase in more than a quarter of a century.
“We do have growth slowing to a little bit below-trend growth, and we do have
QUOTABLE
I would be surprised if there were a recession without much job loss.
— Gregory Mankiw, a Harvard
University economics professor.
the unemployment rate moving up a little bit. And that is OK — we want to see some slowing in demand to get it in line with supply,” Mester said.
DESPITE RECESSION FEAR, THE GREAT RESIGNATION CONTINUES
The Great Resignation is still in full swing, according to economists, although there are some signs of a slight slowdown. Job openings and voluntary departures remain extremely high, while layoffs are near record lows — conditions that are favorable to workers. But it’s unclear how long it will remain a job seeker’s market, given the Federal Reserve’s move to raise borrowing costs and fears of a looming U.S. recession. U.S. Department of Labor data shows that the Great Resignation is still going strong as the labor market remains hot. And where are those resigning workers going? For the most part,
workers are shifting to better jobs, lured by factors like higher pay, according to economists. Wages in May jumped by 6.1% versus a year earlier, the biggest annual increase in more
than 25 years, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta reported.
DID YOU KNOW ?
36% of U.S. employees with salaries of $100,000 or more
are living paycheck to paycheck.
Along-standing joke among women in the financial services industry is that there’s never a line to enter the women’s restroom at an industry event.
The industry has recognized that there is a lack of diversity among the advisor force and is taking steps to bring in more women and minorities to the business. But are those efforts paying off? What progress is being made to increase diversity, equity and inclusion? Several industry leaders who are on the front lines of the fight to improve DEI told InsuranceNewsNet there are hopeful signs that financial services is moving toward becoming more inclusive.
More resources going toward DEI
More money and resources are going toward DEI initiatives, and that’s driving an effort to encourage a more diverse population to consider a financial services career.
That’s the observation from Chris Gandy, president and founder of Midwest Legacy Group in Chicago. As co-chair of the National Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors DEI Council, Gandy has been an advocate for ensuring that Americans have a choice of advisors with whom they can relate.
Gandy pointed to The American College’s HBCU Student Scholarship Program, which was established in 2020, and offers students from historically Black colleges and universities the ability to learn about the financial services profession and get a head start in their careers. Students who have completed their sophomore year and are enrolled and in good academic standing at any four-year, bachelor’s degree-granting HBCU are eligible to apply for an HBCU Scholarship. Full tuition scholarships are available for the Retirement Income Certified Professional designation, the Chartered Financial Consultant designation and the Certified Financial Planner certification education program.
In addition, The NAIFA Foundation for Financial Security announced in May that it is launching a program to promote and support the recruitment of diverse advisors to the industry. The foundation will award diversity scholarships to current or recently graduated college students who are members of under-represented populations in the industry. The diversity scholarship is a two-year program that will provide support and training to help launch the careers of these prospective advisors.
“We’re seeing marketing dollars that traditionally don’t go to DEI initiatives now moving to that arena,” he said. “We’re starting to see a concerted effort on the part of top-line managers and owners, the insurance companies and the investors.” But whether these efforts bring results remains to be seen, Gandy said. “Is it going to be, ‘Hey, we’re going to throw some money at [DEI] and see what happens’ or will it be a focused and intentional effort?” he asked. “So we’re waiting to see what that’s going to look like.” Some hopeful signs that Gandy said he sees are the efforts to increase the number of diverse candidates in the advisor pipeline and greater awareness around DEI.
“Just acknowledging that we need to do things in the DEI space is a big step,” he said.
In addition to making strides to increase DEI among the advisor force, Gandy said the industry is making progress in serving a more diverse consumer audience, although, he added, more work needs to be done.
“The companies that are going to win this game are the companies that embrace DEI and start tapping into those markets that traditionally have not been tested,” he said. “Every company wants to know how they can add revenue. They reduce expenses and grow profitability. But one of the ways to add revenue is to direct some of the assets they are already spending and use them to tap into new markets.”
Gandy
Companies are doing more than paying lip service to increasing DEI — they are actively seeking diverse talent and supporting the diverse employees they already have, according to Angela White.
White is northern complex recruit-
ing director for Equitable and is based in Indianapolis. In her position, she works with 40 hiring managers to assess the company’s current recruiting strategy. She also creates training and support for recruiting diverse talent. Along with Gandy, she is co-chair of NAIFA’s DEI Council.
When it comes to finding diverse talent, “All you have to do is open your eyes and look. Diverse talent is everywhere,” she said. “Ask yourself where you would want to go to find a certain type of candidate and that’s where you go.”
As an example, she cited an organization in Indianapolis called Inclusive Network. The group holds a Women’s Equity Brunch to bring together women and discuss issues that impact women.
“It’s a lot of women sticking together, helping each other rise to the top and supporting each other,” she said.
White said she got one of Equitable’s vice presidents involved with the organization. “So now we have a presence, we’re talking about our commitment to DEI at these events, and we’re engaging in meaningful conversations with the participants,” she said.
White
She also became involved with the Indy Rainbow Chamber of Commerce, an LGBTQ business organization serving the Indianapolis area. “It’s all about getting company executives active and engaged in their communities, and actively seeking organizations where diverse talent can be found,” she said.
White said she sees more companies forming employee resource groups, or ERGs, which are voluntary, employee-led groups whose aim is to foster a diverse, inclusive workplace aligned with the organizations they serve.
At Equitable, she said, the company developed metrics around hiring diverse talent.
“Around 2020, we decided that DEI is more of who we are and that we really want to represent the markets that we serve,” she said. “And so we put together different DEI initiatives on attracting and recruiting diverse talent. Then we put different metrics in place. Each one of our managers has recruiting goals that they have to hit every year. But we also track all of our diversity hires as well, because we want to make sure that not only are we having conversations and actively pursuing diverse talent, but we’re getting that diverse talent into our organization, and through our selection process.”
White said that Handshake, an online platform aimed at helping college students find jobs, is a popular place to recruit diverse talent. She also created a virtual recruiting event for Pride Month in June, titled “How To Be Equitable,” which is a play off the company’s name and in which she talked to LGBTQ members in the industry about how they started their careers and what their community means to them.
“It’s about more than posting jobs on job boards, but actively going out to find diverse talent,” she said. “We do a lot of training and a lot of development around how to find that diverse talent and how to have effective conversations with those folks.”
In her volunteer role with NAIFA, White said she is seeing more financial services organizations working toward increasing DEI.
“Everybody understands why bringing diversity in your organization makes sense — from a monetary standpoint, from a diversity of thought standpoint,” she said. “I think we’re rounding that corner of understanding why diversity is important. And I’m excited to see so many organizations putting together ERGs and different types of support for their diverse advisors.”
It started with a pledge
If a diverse workforce feels included in the organization, the organization will be more successful. That ideal is what led Ameritas CEO Bill Lester to sign a DEI pledge in 2020, said Lined Mason, Ameritas vice president, policy services. Mason has been at the forefront of Ameritas’ diversity efforts over the past two years.
Ameritas developed a strategy to support a diverse workforce and that strategy began with creating an Inclusion and Diversity Leadership Council, Mason said.
The council is made up of senior leaders at Ameritas. “I am one of the members on the council and I made this commitment because I want to make a change,” Mason said. “Our job is to counsel the senior leadership on DEI issues. Those issues can be anything from facilitating training, working with marketing on our branding and public image, working with human resources and with recruiting and hiring.”
Mason said Ameritas surveyed its employees and associates to determine which areas of diversity were most important. From there, four associate resource groups formed, and some of them have included the word “bison” in their group names, to reflect the bison image that is part of Ameritas’ branding.
Bison Pride is the group representing Ameritas associates from the LGBTQ community. “This group is all about creating a welcoming and safe environment and helping to facilitate a network of allies while supporting the community,” Mason said.
Bison Strong represents Black associates. This group’s activities include recording a series of “fireside chats,” where members can speak about issues such as building a personal brand and developing their individual strengths.
Ameritas associates who have disabilities are represented by their own group, People with Disabilities. Mason said this group is aimed at raising awareness of disabilities while focusing on learning and advocacy.
NextGen Bison is the group representing young associates or associates who are new to the company. “They’re trying to figure out things like: Is this a company for me? Is the role that I’m in one that I want to be in forever? What does my future look like at Ameritas?” Mason said. “It’s a place for them to mentor each other and share experiences.”
Ameritas also launched a group for its female financial professionals called Ameritas Women Elevated, or AWE. “It’s a place for empowering and mentoring women in this profession — a place where they can thrive, help each other out, explore ways to attract and retain women in the profession,” Mason said.
Another group within Ameritas is Ameritas Growth Leaders, financial professionals who have been in the industry for 10 years or less. “They meet a couple of times a year,” Mason said. “They get mentored by field advisors who have been in the industry longer and can show them ways to be successful in this industry.”
Now that these groups have been established, Mason said, the next step is to measure whether the DEI efforts are resulting in more diverse employees and advisors joining the company. Mason said that information is incomplete but that Ameritas’ female advisor force currently makes up about 19% of its total advisor headcount. “Back when I started 30 years ago, women made up about 2% of the advisor force,” she said. “So we are making some progress. But now we can see whether we can make that percentage go higher.”
Mason
Singing with many voices
The industry field force is not the only place that has lacked diversity. Look at any industry conference agenda. Where are the
women? Where are the people of color? Why are their voices not being heard from the conference stage?
Earlier this year, Sonya Dreizler and Liv Gagnon launched Choir, a diversity certification program for financial services conferences. Dreizler has spent 20 years in the industry, including serving as a broker-dealer and RIA executive. She has been a longtime advocate for greater racial and gender equity in the industry. Gagnon is a media relations specialist who focuses on social values.
Choir’s mission is to make industry events more representative of the U.S. population, Gagnon told InsuranceNewsNet. Choir’s proprietary algorithm uses hundreds of data points to assess the prominence and visibility of women, nonbinary people, and people of color on conference stages — setting the first industry benchmark for conference diversity, the Choir Certification. Choir then uses this data to provide leadership teams and event organizers with actionable guidance to maintain diverse and increasingly representative speaker lineups year over year.
Choir conducts an assessment of an organization’s most recent conference and calculates a score based on how well that conference represents women and people of color — and specifically women of color — on stage in comparison to their representation in the U.S. population.
In addition, event sponsors, attendees and speakers can go to the Choir website and sign the pledge to attend only conferences that meet the following standards:
1. At least one of every three keynote speakers is a woman or person of color. includes at least one woman or person of color as a non-moderator expert.
3. Women of color are represented throughout the agenda in expert sessions, not only sessions about diversity, equity and inclusion.
4. There is an enforced policy against harassment of all kinds.
“It has been lovely to work with conferences that are trying to acknowledge how important representation on stage is, and are looking for more resources, and are actively working on that,” Dreizler said. “And then reviewing those conferences after they’re completed to see how they’ve done and give feedback on opportunities for increasing representation the next year. And to know where they’ve done well — all of this has been great and successful.”
The next step, which will launch later this year, is Choir Voices. This will be a listing of diverse speakers who are available to present at conferences, so that conference organizers can find them and learn about their areas of expertise.
“We wanted to create a place to remove the excuse of ‘I can’t find anyone diverse to speak at my conference,’” Gagnon said. “We want to connect with organizers and speakers at all levels to bring them into Voices.”
The next step: accountability
More people in the industry are aware of DEI but the next step in the journey is accountability, said the founder of a community made up of women in financial services as well as the male allies who support their efforts.
Sheryl Hickerson is CEO of Females and Finance, which was founded in 2018 with the goal of providing a support network to hire, mentor, train and advance 100,000 women in the profession by Jan. 1, 2025.
“I think the awareness part [of DEI] is there,” she said. “And I do think the next step is the accountability part of it, where people are starting to stress themselves against diversity, equity and inclusion metrics.”
Diversity is about more than race or gender, Hickerson said. “Diversity is about all the other little subtleties as well: where someone comes from, the specific talent that they have, their education, what specialty market they work in. Diversity tends to be something that people tend to silo into things that are so obvious, like skin color and such. But there is such a wide array of being diverse.”
During the time of unrest following the death of George Floyd in 2020, Females and Finance sponsored a number of online talks focusing on economic and social issues facing the Black community and what those in the finance industry needed to understand.
“This was a chance to offer more opportunities for people to actually learn human skills, language skills — you know, understand those kinds of soft skill things because they really do matter,” Hickerson said.
DEI efforts are ongoing, Hickerson said, adding, “I think all of us are still learning. We need to get into spaces that feel inviting because everybody needs an invitation to the party. And they need to be invited to dance. It’s not just the invitation to show up; it’s the invitation to participate.”
Hickerson
Susan Rupe is managing editor for InsuranceNewsNet. She formerly served as communications director for an insurance agents’ association and was an award-winning newspaper reporter and editor. Contact her at Susan.Rupe@ innfeedback.com. Follow her on Twitter @INNsusan.
