Culture as a Strategic Tool | Clint Tripodi | 530

And welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I'm the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage, and you're joining us on the podcast today, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today my guest is Klim Tripodi, and he has an interesting career. We're gonna have a cool conversation today. He's a very well-seasoned human resource, uh, executive. He's got an MBA in human resources. Uh, he's more than a consultant. He's authored over 25 leadership development programs. And he is a senior vice president of National Human Capital Management Practice at Liberty Insurance Brokers. So welcome, Clint. How are you?

Yeah, I'm doing really good. Peter, thanks for carving out time today. I'm looking forward to this conversation.

Great. So here's where I, where I wanna start. So insurance, with all due respect, like the ultimate in commodity, the ultimate in boring, but a huge business, right? So one of the challenges for anybody in that space is How do I stand out from competition? How do I engage clients in a market that's gone largely online, et cetera? And the way that you and Liberty have largely answered that is vis-à-vis thought leadership, right? So do you want to talk about that? Because I love the approach.

Yeah, you're right. Most people look at insurance as being mundane or at best a necessary evil, right? And a lot try to connect it to risk mitigation, which is But at the Liberty Company Insurance Brokers, what we're trying to do is shift the paradigm that insurance actually impacts workplace culture. And by doing that upstream intervention, you can actually mitigate downstream risks. And I think this is really thought-provoking for a lot of insurance buyers because I've been on both sides of the table. I've bought P&C for large companies.

Sure, sure.

On the broker side as well. So it's just a different way of looking at it.

Got it. So how have you at Liberty— so you've got the methodologies, the thought leadership, et cetera, and then there's pieces of it that you, let's say, give that away to prospects and clients to differentiate yourself, attract them into conversations. But then there's a part of that that has evolved into a consulting business inside of an insurance brokerage, which I love that as well. So unpack that a little bit.

Yeah. Okay. So this is really cool. So, so most insurance companies and brokers, they view insurance as a transactional commodity. Yep. Once when they sell, we see that in the year when it comes to renewal, and then you have an increase in claims, right? And so the broker goes out, changes markets, or Right. The employer gets all upset and fires the broker and try to find someone with a better, with a better solution. Well, we data analytics, right? We see where the claims have the impact and then we go upstream to identify the root cause of the problem. And with that, we provide solutions. So someone with my type of background can go in and say, hey, listen, the emperor's got no clothes. You guys have a culture problem. The culture problem is a lack of leadership. Now, Employers don't want to hear this, right? But if you think about it, if your leadership culture is draconian, employees are not committed to the organization. So if there's a workforce injury, hey man, I'm the first one out on a workers' comp claim and I'm going to stretch it out as long as I can, right? Employers constantly complaining about— let's say I'm just using workers' comp as an example— bogus workers' comp issues. Right. Well, why are they bogus? Let's go back upstream and take a look at to what extent have you put in the right safety protocols? To what extent have you developed your leaders? I had a conversation.

Okay, so that— so stay there a minute though. So I've bought insurance for 30 years and never once as a commercial insurance broker talked about the impact of my leadership abilities or lack thereof or the organization's culture. And A, its impact on the business, but B, directly its impact on potential insurance claims. So I would imagine if I was in the market for insurance and I, I do the typical, well, bring me 3 brokers and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, that in and of itself is going to get me to scratch my head and go, there's something different about the way these folks think, right? It's not just about price and it's not just about coverage, and it's— they really want to understand how I operate and what I'm struggling with. Because nobody wants to buy insurance. Nobody wakes up and say, I'm so happy today, I get to buy buy workers' comp, right? Like, nobody— that doesn't happen.

Yeah, I had an incident recently, it was pretty interesting, that CEO of a very large company was complaining because he has an increase in what's called EPLI claims, right, employee liability, because they've had a couple of wrongful termination cases filed against them. So I started talking to him about that, you know, why are they filing these claims? And then I asked them, to what extent do you have a formalized leadership development program? He goes, well, we've never done that before. I go, so your leaders don't know right from wrong. So let's again go upstream. Let's start implementing some leadership development programs to mitigate downstream risks, right? So it's the old thing, Peter, you know, for 100 men hacking away at the branches of the diseased tree, only one will stop to inspect the roots. That's what the Liberty Insurance Brokerage Company does. We inspect the root causes of the risks, and then we provide solutions in-house, right, to get it back on track.

Sure. So speak for a little bit about how the thought leadership that you've got maps out across the sales cycle from the marketing side to the qualification side to— are there tools and such that the agents have to use at their disposal during conversations? Like, where would you— if, you know, if you were to just sort of map out against the touchpoints in the sales process?

Yeah, well, first of all, it starts with the producer sales education to really understand the prospect's business, right? The business versus the insurance solution, because you have to position yourself as a business partner, not an insurance solution provider. So it's education, understanding the link between culture and insurance. That's number one. Number two, they've got to be able to identify root cause problems. And number three, they got to be able to match a solution with subject matter expertise. And our company will develop specific specialty practices, whether it's safety, human resources, human capital management, that can go in at the solution level. Now, that comes—

that's— wait, let me, let me just ask you this. So that level of capabilities development, the education at the broker level, at the agent level, is on top of, not in place of the table stakes of— obviously they need to know insurance and how it works and what's appropriate and all that sort of stuff. So there's an extra educational— I'm going to call it a burden, but there's a little bit more to do in order to differentiate. It doesn't come easy.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think the driving philosophy at our firm is we want to differentiate ourselves from the other insurance solution providers. We want to differentiate ourselves to be viewed as a trusted business partner. Okay, trusted business partner means you understand their business and you provide solutions for them to optimize your business through the insurance offerings. Okay, so it's one thing to get licensed, it's another thing to sell insurance, it's a whole nother area to really understand the client's business and map those solutions together, right? And everything should be equated to the client's bottom line. That's the big piece.

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So speak for a moment about sort of the formats and the modality that, that thought leadership could, could live. So for example, we are on a podcast today. This is one place where the ideas, the models, the methods, the frameworks that you, you have and you use for the business, we're having a conversation. This is a use of thought leadership. Where else and what other formats are you comfortable— or, and when I say you, I mean organizationally— are you creating and deploying thought leadership?

Oh, I think we're deploying it in the healthcare industry, right? I think we're making major inroads. Workers' compensation as well. The cannabis industry has its own unique set of challenges that—

I'm talking about the formats though, meaning written word, video. Research reports. I'm talking about the, the where it lives.

Yeah, where, where it lives. Uh, white papers. We routinely produce white papers. We routinely produce blogs. We do speaking engagements. We do podcasts like we're doing here, right? We get in front of different insurance associations to get the word out because the more you get the word out, the more it drives prospects over to Liberty Company because it is a differentiator. So we're using a multipaceted approach because very few insurance companies are talking along these lines, right? When we start talking along these lines, also employers, they understand. They go, oh, so culture is a strategic tool and insurance can help me drive that strategy to mitigate risks and be more productive. Tell me more, Clint. Right.

So what I love about this is that there are, I don't know, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of folks that are licensed to sell insurance. I would argue there's less than 1% of them that have made the investments that you all have made and, and differentiated yourself through thought leadership. So they're working the sales side of this really, really, really hard.

Right.

And, you know, by definition, when you put yourself in a position to be commoditized, the only thing that really matters is price.

Right.

Right. When you have a commodity buyer, when you have a strategic business partner and you sort of hook them, if you will, through thought leadership, that's different. I wanna touch on what you mentioned in terms of all the, you know, you're doing everything from white papers to speaking at conferences and publishing things and, and, and podcasts and such. What are the metrics that you look at to say, aha, this is working? So ultimately, you know that when Client X came in and I met you, said, I met you at this conference, or I heard you at that blog. Awesome. You could track that. But part of the difficulty from an organizational perspective with thought leadership is it's not so easy to track everything to the 11th decimal like we'd like to with, or like to think we can with many other things. So can you speak to that for a moment, Clint?

That's a good point because we're talking here about culture, right? Culture is a feeling. If you take a look at the Latin root of culture, it means carry. How do you measure that, right? What are the metrics? From an insurance perspective, we have data analytics. Okay, so we take a new client that has an extremely high modification rate on their workers' comp. Okay, we isolate where the problem is, we go in, we intervene, and then a year later we can take a look at the claims data as a base point of measurement to make that happen. Employee benefits, employee benefits at the end of the day, what do they drive? Employee attraction and retention. To what extent are you able to curtail and change your attrition rate? All of that equates to the bottom line on the AV side as well as workers' comp side. So there are ways to put in metrics to track the efficacy of the work that we're doing. Got it.

And where— how would I put it? Well, I'll take it back to culture. There are times where culturally I would say you're actually taking a risk from a marketing standpoint only by definition of it's, it's, it, you know, you're not, it's not a bet the house rich risk, but it's not traditional. It's not typical. How did you go about sort of selling this internally? You didn't just come to work one day and say, I'm gonna do all this stuff, you know, trust me. How did this come to be? 'Cause I think a lot of people sort of get it, but they don't know how to sort of sell it internally to their boss, to the powers that be to get some budget allocated. How did you navigate those waters?

And while I was really fortunate, our chairman of the board, the founder is Bill Johnson, and he is very values-driven individual. He really stands behind the culture at the company. We have 8 values statements that we stand behind. He was looking for ways to connect the Liberty Insurance culture with the client's culture, which is really based around wellness, right? And so my methodology to come in at a business angle supplemented with insurance From his perspective, it's like, number one is we're propagating the philosophy, and number two, Clint, you're maybe the secret sauce to take the average lifespan of an insurance client from 3 to 5 years to 7 to 10 years because you're developing the business relationship on top of the insurance relationship. And then I also want to talk a little bit, Peter Winick, about what you said earlier. A risk manager or a broker when they're looking at data analytics, they need to possess 3 mindsets, right? Number 1, curiosity. What is going on with our client that's driving costs up? Number 2, make the correct choices. And number 3, Peter Winick, the courage, right? The courage for me to look at one of our clients to say the root cause of your claims increases is a lack of leadership. Wow. Right? Yeah. Put yourself out.

Ouch. Ouch.

Yeah. But, but I've had to have that conversation because as a consultant, I need to be honest about it. I can't just ignore what the root cause is. If not, then we're just hacking.

But it's, but it's not the answer they're expecting. It also takes courage as a consultant. It's easy as a consultant to say the problem is over there. Those people aren't doing what they need to do and therefore But in essence, what you're doing is holding up a mirror and saying, I found the root cause of the problem. Here's the mirror. And they go, oh, geez. Like, nope. Like, you know.

And we have a solution because you can't—

Well, more importantly, right.

You can't peel back the onion to say, you know, the problem is the leader at the top of the organization sets the tone of the organization. The CEO is draconian. Right? Right. You're not going to remove the CEO, but you got to have a solution.

Right, right. Thanks. The door is that way.

Appreciate it.

Right.

No, you have to have a solution that says we're going to come in, we're going to do strategy. We're going to do some work to shift to a more people-centric culture, and we're going to do leadership development, training, coaching, all blocking and tackling it. And the healing's in the awareness, Peter. If that client recognizes that they have a leadership problem and they take the steps, right, to improve it, then the measurement is downstream risk mitigation as seen through insurance analytics. We have that data. You just gotta take it back.

Yeah.

You gotta take it all the way back upstream. Great.

Well, I appreciate your time, Clint. This has been awesome. A little bit different than, than where we usually go. A little, little more in, into the weeds on insurance. But the, but the takeaway here for the listeners is really thinking about where your business could benefit from the development, from the deployment, from the curation, from the investments in thought leadership to attract customers, to fight the commoditization that's happening in every business or service, whether it's product, service, etcetera. So appreciate your time and your insights today.

Klint. Okay, sounds good, Peter. Thank you very much.

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