How Startup Culture Transforms Legacy Thinking

Ben Micheel:
Hello and welcome back to another episode of Executive Insights with AWS. My name is Ben Micheel and I'm Principal for Innovation and Transformation Programs. Joining me today is Erin Culek from Guardian Life Insurance Company of America.

Erin, thanks for joining us today.

Erin Culek:
I'm really glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Ben Micheel:
First of all, I think some of our folks out there will know about Guardian, but can you tell us a little bit about what Guardian does, who you are?

Erin Culek:
Yeah. Great. So Guardian is a 165-year-old mutual insurance company. Our legacy is in life insurance and financial protection, but today we do financial protection, workplace benefits, and wealth management. 

Ben Micheel:
And could you tell us a little bit about your role at Guardian? And I know you've had several roles at Guardian and how that kind of came about.

Erin Culek:
Sure. So I've been a Guardian for about five years and most of my role has been in strategy and transformation. I was the chief strategy officer until recently and I'm excited that I've just stepped into a new role where I'm heading up our life insurance annuity and disability business for all of our individual customers.

Ben Micheel:
With that much heritage and history, you've had 165 years, how do you think about the moment that we're in right now with everything changing. How do you continue to lean into your heritage and what's worked for you, but also adopt new things at the same time?

Erin Culek:
Yeah, thanks for that question, Ben. It's been a really interesting journey. So I started, like I said, at Guardian about five years ago. And five years ago we had a new CEO step into the role. And his vision at that point in time, which we're really working on now, was to make Guardian the most contemporary life insurance company out there. So one of the things we did was really reset our purpose. And so when you look at what Guardian is, our purpose is to inspire well-being. And you might say, okay, well what does that mean? When you look at what we do? We provide protection, we provide financial support, we provide disability. We're touching what we like to talk about as the mind, the body, and the wallet, which are three components of what we view as well-being.

And so by resetting our purpose five years ago, what it's allowed us to do is really open the aperture strategically on how can serve our customers in the best way. And what we've done is we've pulled that purpose through our strategy, we've pulled it through how we recruit and retain and hire people. We've pulled it through end to end. And what it's allowed us to do is really think differently about where do we want to transform? What do we need to do to become that most contemporary company? And so we've got a lot of examples of the transformation that has come about because of that strategic enhancement that we made five years ago.

Ben Micheel:
That's certainly something that I've perceived in working with your leadership is that you're not afraid to sort of lean into the new and to the kind of unforeseen. You're an insurance company so it makes sense. You should be comfortable with risk and you are. Tell us how that works kind of culturally. Is that something that came easy to you all? Is that something you had to work on? How do you think about that?

Erin Culek:
So at Guardian, our culture has been evolving and it starts with the leadership team, but we really take this startup mentality and we're trying to infuse that throughout the organization. 

And so some of the behaviors that you'll see at Guardian are this test and learn culture and how do we fail fast? And that's something that I think we're infusing throughout, which is helping us increase our cycle time of decision making and move faster, especially in an environment like this where the world and the technology around us is changing so quickly. We have to operate like this if we're going to continue to serve our customers in the most effective way.

Ben Micheel:
Yeah, I think that's so important, especially in adopting new technology and thinking about things like AI is that you work backwards from a customer's needs, you recognize that AI is really, really big and it's going to continue to be really big, but just throwing tools at a problem doesn't work super well. You have to work backwards from your customers and also understand what you are good at and your purpose and your culture, which I think you guys have done a fantastic job at. Switching gears a little bit, you recently took on a new role at Guardian. You talked about it there briefly. Talk to me a little bit about that and what has been different and do you start over on day one? How do you think about approaching that role?

Erin Culek:
One of the things I've had to learn both in my prior role and in this role is in my prior role, one of the teams that I oversaw was our data science team. Now, I'm not a data scientist. In this role, what I'm learning how to do is I'm overseeing a team that has a lot of actuaries in it. And so both of those roles are very technical. And while I was an engineering major in undergrad, I don't know how to code unless you count MATLAB or Maple. I don't know if you remember those. That probably dates me a little bit, but I'm not technical and I'm not a coder. And so the approach I've taken as I've stepped into this role is really two big parts.

So what I've been telling everyone is I've been on a listening journey and then I've been on a learning journey. And so on my listening journey, I've been very intentional to say, hey, I want to talk to customers. I want to talk to external partners, and I want to get feedback on what's it like to work with Guardian? What's it like to work with my team? What are our opportunities? What can we do better? I've been listening to our colleagues, so I'm talking to all the folks on the team also saying, hey, what are the things that you think we can do better? What are the opportunities ahead of us? And so really taking that external perspective. And I'm also spending time with what I'm calling sort of those frontier leaders. And so spending time with some of the startup founders out there, because for me, I want to know where the frontier is in the life insurance industry. 

Now, I may not want to be on the frontier. That's a choice we can make. But I feel like if I don't know where the frontier is, then I don't know where the world's going. So I've been on this listening journey. And then the second thing I've done as I'm stepping into leading a more technical function is enlisting the team to say, hey, help me learn what I need to know to be the most effective leader of this team in this organization, and to unlock the power that we have to really serve our customers. And so I've been going business area by business area, really doing a deep dive and asking almost those 101-level basic questions to really enlist the team in helping me learn. So it's been listening and learning, and then I'm pretty close to leaning in. So we'll lean in and kind of figure out which of those opportunities are we going to really tackle?

Ben Micheel:
Have you found anything that's surprised you in this listening journey, either to the positive or maybe to the other side?

Erin Culek:
What I have really found refreshing is we have a lot of opportunities. So as I went through the list and through talking to folks, I see nothing but upside. I think the hard part is going to be how do we prioritize those? Because what I like to say to the team is we can do anything, but we can't do everything. And so of course that means we have to pick where's the best opportunity? What's going to make the most impact for our customers? Where do the financial returns make sense for our policyholders? But just really surprising the list and range of opportunities that organically the team and our customers and some of those startup founders have brought to us that we're putting in the pot as we figure out the go-forward strategy.

Ben Micheel:
We've talked a little bit about AI. I'm sure it'll come up a couple more times, but I think one other thing our company's have in common in the work that we've done, and you just talked about it there is our leadership principle of “learn and be curious” and also the customer obsession. I'd love to hear you just talk through a little bit about some of the things you've done with us and how that's gone.

Erin Culek:
Absolutely. So when I think about AI at Guardian, I put it in two different buckets. So I believe that AI is a tool that every single colleague is going to have to use to become more efficient, more effective at their role, and I think that's going to happen globally. And so I'm proud to say that at this point, every single Guardian colleague has access to at least one AI tool, whether it's search or coding or transcription or things of that nature. Every single Guardian colleague has access and we're going to expect them to use it and become more effective, take some of that drudgery out of their day to day so they can focus on the higher value work. So I think that's going to happen no matter what. But when I think about the transformation work, which is kind of the second pillar of where I see the AI strategy going, what was really great was our executive leadership team came out to Seattle and did a day with you all.

Really this executive visioning to think about when we look at the insurance industry, we're sitting on, at least at Guardian, 165 years of data. We're sitting on a bunch of manual processes and we are the ripest industry for AI to really come to life and transform the way we serve our customers and the experience that they have with us.  And so we left that day with two or three what I call transformational opportunities that we've then worked with Amazon to really help us flesh out and think through, how do we bring this to life in our business? What's been really helpful to us is some of the principles that you guys had, as you said Ben, I think that the working backwards from the customer is a muscle that I think the insurance industry generally and certainly Guardian can continue to get better at. It's something I'm focused on in my role. I think the other thing that really resonated with us was think big and start small.

And so for us really knowing, “Hey, here's where we want to go.” And if we're really delighting our customers through AI, here's what it's going to look like, but let's break it into chunks and start small as we get there. And then the third thing that we learned that I've really taken back into the team that you all talk a lot about is the two pizza team size of how to get work done. And so we went through this journey of everyone was excited about these AI initiatives, and so we'd end up with, I don't know, calls with like 60 people on them. I think you're laughing because you were probably part of that.

Ben Micheel:
Yes.

Erin Culek:
And so we had to literally retrain the team to say, listen, we're just not going to move fast enough if we're working with more than eight to 10 people in a room. We're such a collaborative and inclusive culture at Guardian, which is so great and it's one of the reasons I like working there, but we had to give some of our project managers permission to say, no, you can tell people they can't come to the meeting. It's okay to make it so you can't forward the invite. We'll inform the right people as we go. So I think that's been a journey and definitely one of the things culturally that we've had to take back as we think about how do we move faster in this space?

Ben Micheel:
That's a great story and I can relate to that because I lived part of it and I've seen it with other folks, but I think one thing you guys have done really well is to react fairly quickly. I can feel your cycles and decision-making getting faster, which means you get information about your customers faster, which means you can experiment more in the days of... And I get it. It comes from a good place, right? You have a really nice culture. So some people think that being nice means including every single person into a discussion. And I think for us, it's thinking about putting the customer at the center of it and the customer doesn't want 67 really talented people in a meeting, right?

The customer wants the people in the meeting that can drive the most value and then you would be better serving that customer by using your unique talents in other places. It's a hard muscle to unlearn because some people view it as being exclusionary in some cases, but it's really not. It's more about having a clear focus, thinking big, starting small, and then allowing yourself to scale fast.

Ben Micheel:
So Erin, we've worked together on some really cool and transformational AI projects that are really going to change the customer experience for your customers. And I'd love to hear you talk a little bit about those and how we partnered together on those things.

Erin Culek:
We really worked back from the customer and you guys helped us work through that process and came out with two really interesting transformative ideas that we've been working on and are going live in our business. So one is around our workplace benefits business where really we took a blank sheet of paper and said, how could we best serve our customers if we wanted to decrease the cycle time from when they ask us for a quote until we get the quote back to them until they decide to become a Guardian customer? And we took a blank sheet of paper and said, what would that experience look like knowing the tools we have today that we didn't have even a year ago? And so what's been really fun as we've gone on that journey is it's actually been not one single tool. What we've actually done is string together a series of tools that are helping us really reimagine and rework that experience for our customers.

And those tools have ranged from generative AI tools to traditional AI tools, to machine learning models, to sometimes just changing the process to make it faster for our customers. And so we're going live with that process, and that's going to take something that in some cases took up to four weeks down to instant. That's our ambition and that's our goal. Now we're just testing this, we're piloting it, we're going to learn, but we're going to continue making this better for our customers. And the benefit is two things. They're really going to enjoy working with us when we can come back to them that quickly and meet their needs on quotes on how they might work with us. But we also think this is going to help us take up to 10 to 20% of costs out of the system, which is another big benefit for our policyholders.

Ben Micheel:
That's so important, and I love the way you said that and the way you've approached it. It's binary. It's this is a cost-cutting thing and this is this other thing. And it's like, no, you actually really can have your cake and eat it too. You can lower your costs, you can improve your customer experience. You can do things that are actually better for society. I have yet to see a company that is at this perfectly efficient frontier where they have to make a really hard trade off between those things. But just getting people to think differently and helping them to understand the power of the technologies when aimed in the right direction for the right reasons is really, really different. 

Erin Culek:
What's been really fascinating even in the five years that I've been at Guardian is the tools we have today are not the tools we had a year ago, and they're not the tools we had three years ago. So back to the point you made about this learning, being curious and learning, that's what we have to be doing right now because a year from now it's going to be different tools. And so I think as we reduce the decision-making cycle time and look at where the world's going, I think that's the really exciting opportunity ahead of us. 

Ben Micheel:
Yeah, I completely agree, and I think I'm going to paraphrase Jeff Bezos here. One of the things he says is the only sustainable competitive advantage is your ability to reinvent yourself. And I laugh sometimes when I think about AI in the context of a company with the heritage that your company has, that has been around for that long. I have to remind people sometimes, you all did this before without computers. This is not the first massive technology trend that you all have been able to harness and use to win in the marketplace. So sometimes that helps to settle people down a little.

Erin Culek:
I think the AI tools to make our colleagues more efficient and effective, and I was describing it to someone, it's like remember when we had to have training on Microsoft Excel or any of the productivity tools? We had to have training on any of the productivity tools that are out there and it was new for all of us and even email, I remember the days before people had email.

I think learning how to use the AI tools in your everyday job is going to be the new expectation. And so I think what we can do is make sure we're enabling that, teaching people how to use it and people's roles are going to change, but my hope is that they're changing for the better because we're taking out sort of the tedious grind work that people don't really enjoy doing and letting them really spend time on the places where they can add the most value for our customers. 

Ben Micheel:
A hundred percent. And that's the way we think about our business as well is where can we take out undifferentiated heavy lifting so that you all can focus on delighting your customers?

Ben Micheel:
So one of the things that I'm involved with often is conversations by well-meaning executive teams about the future of work. And I know in some pockets there's a bit of anxiety. I happen to be more in the camp of being excited to remove that undifferentiated heavy lifting, but we also have to recognize that some people are concerned about where this is going.

Now we're talking about AI and every day there's stories in the news and folks who maybe are looking at it purely as sort of a cost-cutting measure. How do you manage the kind of cultural transformation or how do you keep people excited and leaning into the art of the possible of this technology versus coming at it from a place of fear?

Erin Culek:
Yeah. So I would say two angles on that. One is I think the more you make it real, people start to see the benefits. So in one of the pilots that we did that we're now scaling in our underwriting team, they got to use the tool that helped make their job more efficient, more effective, take some of the drudgery out of summarizing medical records and things of that nature. And so we started that with a small group and we had the whole team clamoring for when am I going to get it? How do I get to use it? And so I think people start to use it and make it real and they see like, oh, I can see a world where this is going to make my job better. The other thing that I think we can continue to do is ask people to use it in their real lives.

I think every person ought to be using whatever their favorite tool is in their real lives because that's when you start to think differently and you start to see those opportunities like, oh, I used it to create a birthday card for my daughter or to plan this trip for me in Paris, how could I use that at work? So I think those are two ways that you just make it real and people take a little bit of the fear away. But I do think roles are going to change and there are going to be some places where we probably just need fewer people doing some of those tasks.

So I do think you're starting to see executives start to talk about the realities of that as well. And so I think the onus is on us then to say, okay, how do we rescale? How do we train in a way that's going to continue to add value in our company and for our customers? So I do think there's two sides to it, make it real, but then we really have to face the fact that jobs are going to change. I don't know if that's one year, three years or five years from now. So I think we owe it to folks to be having both of those conversations.

Ben Micheel:
I totally agree. And these kind of things tend not to, with all due respect to elevator operators, they don't tend to wipe out jobs in that way, but they tend to change jobs significantly. So getting folks to really fall in love with delighting their customer and being less stuck on the details of how exactly they do that I think is a big part of that. One other piece of it though is especially folks who are entering the workforce right now, they're going to demand that the companies they work for have access to these tools, that they give them this access. And companies that don't do that are going to get adversely selected against for talent.

Ben Micheel:
I wanted to talk a little bit more about your career and lessons learned. I think people would love to hear from you and what you've taken away from this point. And we were talking earlier and you said you've worked everywhere twice, which I thought was amazing. I'd love to hear you tell that story.

Erin Culek:
Yeah, if you ever look at my resume, it's like this loop-de-loop, crazy cycle. How I would describe it is I started in consulting. And so for me right out of undergrad, that was a fantastic way to learn different industries, see what I liked doing, see what I didn't like doing, learn different bosses, learn different styles. And so that was one way where I got actually introduced to the insurance industry through one of my clients. And what was really great about that was I started to see the really noble purpose that I think the insurance industry has. When you look at protecting people's lives, helping people be secure in retirement, I really got excited about what that can do, what our industry provides to customers.

So I started in consulting and then I went over to an insurance company after that. And then I went back to business school. I was in business school in the financial crisis and thought it was an interesting world we were living in and decided to go back to consulting. So that's cycle number one. And then for me, I am someone that I like doing the strategic thinking, but I really, really get excited about taking that strategy and bringing it to life. And so I knew that I always would go back into industry somewhere. And so when I left consulting the second time, I went back to that same insurance company because for me, one of the other learnings I have is when I think about where I want to spend my time and where I want to work, I'm focused on three things.

And one is I want to work with people that I enjoy working with. And that doesn't mean we have to be best friends, but it's people that I respect, people that I can learn from, people that share my same values. Number two is I want to have a role where I have impact, and so what I'm doing matters. And then the third thing is I want to make sure that as a team, the way we work, we can look back together and be like, hey, we did that thing together. That mattered and we did it together. So as I have gone through this cycle of working everywhere twice, I've found people that I like working with that share those values and things that matter. And so they've brought me back. 

So I think the big lesson I would just take from that is the way that you leave a company is so critical and so important. I can tell you anytime I've left a company, I've probably worked harder than any of the other times that I've been at the company because I really wanted to leave the right way. This industry becomes very small. Relationships matter. And so just being very thoughtful about how you leave is equally as important as how you start somewhere is a lesson that I've taken throughout my career.

Ben Micheel:
Awesome. I think that's a beautiful place to stop. I could talk to you about this all day. Thank you for the time today. I really learned a lot, and I know the folks are going to love hearing from you and I look forward to all the great work we're going to continue to do together. This space is changing so quickly. I was joking with you earlier that I got asked to deliver a Keynote on a Agentic AI in two months, and I told them I'll do it, but I'll have to write it a week before. So we live in interesting times and I look forward to seeing where we are together a year from now.

Erin Culek:
Yeah. Thanks Ben. Nice to spend time with you.

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