Why Owning Your Power Can Help Make a Harmonious Environment

Joey Giangola: Margaret Resce Milkint, how are you doing today?

Margaret Resce Milkint: I am terrific, thank you. How are you?

Joey Giangola: Margaret, I'm doing great. I'm doing great. I want to know this before we get into anything too serious. Is there a, we'll say, pop culture event that you have for whatever reason neglected to participate in that you feel maybe ashamed to admit to the public?

Margaret Resce Milkint: A pop culture event.

Joey Giangola: Like a TV show or something that's cultural that everybody talks about that you just can't seem to care about, for whatever reason.

Margaret Resce Milkint: I'm going to be really honest. No, I feel like I've tried to have some fun with it. And I'll date myself, going from Friends to Big Bang Theory, to all the different events, I guess what my kids watch, Stranger Things, haven't done that yet, but who knows what's in my future.

Joey Giangola: Definitely would recommend the Stranger Things. I will say, that's definitely worth the time in my opinion. But for me, it's Game of Thrones. I could not bring myself to care about game of Thrones. Everybody talked about it, "Oh, you must see it." And I couldn't get there. It's not my thing. And it's one of those things you don't really lead conversations, but there's a few other ones that, maybe The Office, that I'm not going to say too loud because people get really offended that you have not taken the time. But Margaret, I guess the reason that I bring it up and kind of moving this over into the world of insurance, is that we're often, I guess, maybe accused of not participating in certain normal sort of circumstances of business and things, we might be a little behind. Is there something that stands out to you as maybe our omission to sort of paying attention to, we'll say, a popular trend that maybe consumers demand?

Margaret Resce Milkint: I think that there are some misconceptions about the insurance industry. And I've been a big believer of welcoming people in and kind of creating some positive disruption about what people think about insurance, what people think about people who work and serve the insurance industry. I would have said 10 years ago, even eight years ago, that the industry wasn't paying attention to diversity, equity, and inclusion. I really think that's changed. I think that the industry has really put a spotlight and put some attention on an issue that is not just an insurance issue, but it's a life issue, it's a world issue. And I think insurance has really stepped into it. I think we have a lot more work to do, but I think that's an area where I've seen some real energy and some growth and some change and some reason to celebrate.

Joey Giangola: Was there a moment, again, like you said, just even going back, not even quite a decade, to where you might have been a little less optimistic on that? Was there a moment where you kind of saw the tide changing a little bit to where people got a little more serious and it was becoming more of an issue?

Margaret Resce Milkint: Oh, absolutely. I'm a believer that optics matter. And I do remember when I was the only woman in the room. And other women, and women and men of color, would've said the same thing. I think that tide does change, and I think it has changed, but it hasn't been by accident. It's been intentional. It's by having that moment of, let's call it the moment of reckoning, when we said, "We can do better, we're better than this." And one thing that I've really seen happen and it's been fun to see is women lifting other women. That didn't happen earlier in my career. There were the women or the woman in the room, but she wasn't letting other women in. She wasn't sending that elevator down for them and saying, "Come on up and join this." Now, that's happening all the time. And that's where the change happens.

The other change that is so terrific is the male ally, male sponsorship, male mentorship, really the candid and courageous conversations that are existing. If you, as a woman, haven't had a male mentor or a male executive sponsor, make that a priority. It will change the game for you. It did for me.

Joey Giangola: Yeah. Those are both very interesting sort of statements because I guess a lot of them center around just sort of maybe the threat and the insecurity around what would happen if these people are let in. And just again, what do you think maybe, again, helped break down those barriers? Was there certain conversations? Again, you said it was just sort of the day of reckoning. Is there something that you think we can continue to do to build and grow on top of that now that sort of things have opened up a little bit?

Margaret Resce Milkint: Absolutely. I think that it doesn't happen by accident. It's not a movement. It really is holistic. It becomes a part of DNA. It's the small things that count as much as the big things. It's inviting someone to that meeting, inviting someone to that conference, bringing them along and taking that very natural opportunity to share and to have that mutual energy and synergy. I think reverse mentoring, it really works, different genders mentoring each other.

One of the things that I love to share is a moment I had with a mentor who gave me a really good life lesson. And he said to me, "Margaret, this is why you weren't selected to do this big CEO search where you were the most qualified person that we interviewed." And I said, "Well, tell me." He was kind enough to say, "It's because Margaret, you never said I once. You said we, we, we, we. You never said I." He said, "I know you, I know you're accountable. I know you're going to get the job done. But you never said I once."

So I've shared that lesson. And I wonder if another woman would've been able to give me that comment. But as a male, as a mentor, as someone who was at the table, he could see it in a very profound way. So now I tell every woman, "It is okay to say I. You can still say we, and I do, but I say I and we." There are times that I have to own it. And I have to feel really good about that. And that's a lesson that I pass on to women, women who are aspiring to get to the next level and women who are there, who need to say, "You know what? This is important that I show my strength, my courage, my accountability as I make that difference."

Joey Giangola: Yeah. And that's even a subtle thing that most people would maybe kind of just look right over. How much more of that do you think is kind of happening that we're not even necessarily aware of? Is there other examples where you've heard from people that have gotten maybe little feedback tidbits like that? Because that's very actionable, that's very specific. What other sort of little cues and things like that do you think could help create a better sort of two way communication?

Margaret Resce Milkint: I think another thing that I talk to women about is using their voice and finding their voice, whether it's on the screen, whether it's in the board room, whether it's at a meeting, at a dinner table or a lunch table, but using your voice. A lot of times, kind of going back historically on how women were raised, think about the little girls in the classroom. I was one of them. I knew the answers. But I didn't want to be wrong, and I didn't raise my hand. So this goes back to raise your hand. The little boys in the room, they didn't know if they knew the answer, but they just wanted to be heard. So I think the lesson here is be heard. What you say has meaning and impact. And lean into it. And it does take courage. And I think it takes practice. Again, I think that's actionable.

But don't go to a meeting without having your voice be heard. You could be working really hard, putting your head down, but if you're not sharing your ideas with confidence, with courage, with a bit of boldness, you might be wrong, but so what? That's how we learn and that's how we grow.

Joey Giangola: I'm kind of curious again, in terms of the spectrum of people in the workforce where we've got a generation coming in that has maybe had a very different experience than what people that have sort of been in the industry for a while, and they might not have certain expectations, or maybe even sort of, we'll say, social check marks or sort of holding themselves back. How do we sort of leverage their momentum in terms of their expectations for our workforce and sort of help maybe let it feed up to where we maybe hope the industry might be?

Margaret Resce Milkint: What that makes me think of is belonging. When we started on this DEI journey, and we've added that B, that really important B is belonging, and that's culture, that's welcome, that's psychological safety in the workforce. It's creating that place where we can all feel comfortable learning, growing, exploring, making a mistake. I think that's one of the great lessons that we can learn. And maybe we weren't ready before to be focused on the B, but boy do I think we're ready now to focus on the B, to focus on the welcome, to focus on the safety, to focus on the human elements, and in all of their fashions, not just the serious ones, but to have fun, to show your sense of humor, to be fully human. We're not robotic.

I think if there is a silver lesson that I learned from this pandemic is that is there a place for humanness in the workplace? Absolutely. So fun to see the kids and the dogs and the cats walking all over the screen and the normal things that happen. So many people, I'm sitting here in my green room, and people say, "You're in your green room." And I'd say, "Yes, isn't that perfectly appropriate for what we're doing?" It has the most light in the house. I never sat in this room until the pandemic. And here I am. I've sat more in this living room the last two years than I have in the last 10. So these are moments. You might even get a sneak peek of my COVID puppies as we go forward. But that human touch, that human element, it does make all the difference. And you know what, we're talking about kindness, we're talking about sense of humor, we're talking about dogs and cats. That is really great. That's an evolution that I think was really lacking and missing. And now that we've experienced it, we're not going to give it back. No one wants to go back to where we were. I know I don't.

Joey Giangola: Well, you say green room and I'm expecting you to have a stage somewhere leading out to one of those doors. Do you do little like open mic nights on Tuesdays and Thursdays potentially? It's interesting. I guess in your experience, what do you think... Because again, we have this thought that, "Oh, I can't possibly do the same thing as somebody else." We feel like what we do is not unique. And what is it about sort of allowing people to sort of get to the realization that, yeah, this is something that we all sort of deal with and sort of accept that there are these things that aren't that big of a deal. It's not threatening in really any manner, but just being comfortable with, again, who you are in sort of that full environment in which I guess we all work in now.

Margaret Resce Milkint: I think I'm going to go back to two themes that are, I think, really core to how I'm feeling and how I'm thinking right now. Because we're all in this ecosystem together, and we're all interconnected. Your strengths and your power and your failings, your weaknesses, those are mine too. So we feed on each other, we grow with each other, and we're going to go forward together. We're not going to be able to do it alone. And that's the fully human aspect of this. That's the moment that we're living in. I think it's a moment, I said reckoning, maybe that sounds dramatic, but there's some power in that. We have an ownership and an accountability, and yes, a right to live and work the way that we want to work to find that place, to find our own harmony. Because it's not balance, it's harmony. What works for me may not work for you or work for anybody else. It's my harmony. And I think there's an honor to that as we go forward. And just being honest about that is something that's so simple, but it really does make a difference. I think the honesty, the courage, a bit of that candidness that does really make everything real. I think we're living in a time where we demand that and it's important.

Joey Giangola: So, we've had a lot of conversations around obviously the industry's progress, I guess, to date. But is there any sort of benchmark to sort of say exactly how well we're doing, what that is actually looking like, and I guess maybe looking at where we ultimately want to go?

Margaret Resce Milkint: It's a great point. And I'm a believer that we all have to be data storytellers, but we can't tell the story without that data. One of the things that I've been involved with is Million Women Mentors STEM Connector. In 2019, we did an inaugural data study where we wanted to do some benchmarking about where women are in the insurance workplace today. So we did that groundbreaking study. And now we're doing it again. So it's 2022, pandemic behind us, crossing fingers, and we're saying, "Where are we now?" So it's not just the big global studies, but what does this mean for insurance?

Our study is called The Driving Change study. It is open. It is free. It is being led by [inaudible] Risk, who are our trusted data partners. Data is collected in a safe and confidential manner. There is anonymity with this study and the results are going to be shared in October. Welcome all of you to join us, because we want to hear, small, medium, large insure tech, every sector of insurance, we want to know what's really happening. We don't want to guess at it. We know that women have longevity in the workplace, probably more so than any other industry. We learned that from 2019. You know what? We would've guessed that, but we validated it. We also found that women and men stay on a pretty equal playing field in terms of pay equity until they get to the first level of management. So up until the supervisory level, women and men are right on par with each other. But when we move to manager who manages managers, manager of manager, the men go up, the women stay down. We want to see what happened between 2019 and now. Did we do any better? Have we made some changes?

So you're absolutely right. We need this data. We're hungry for it. And then once we have it, we're going to slice it. We're going to dice it. And we're going to come together in national working groups to be actionable about the data. Because it's all about action. We can talk and talk, we can have the best data in the world. But if we don't do anything with it, shame on us. So we've got a lot of work to do, but it's good work.

Joey Giangola: This is probably an unfair question, Margaret, but I'm going to just go ahead and do it. What's your one thing that you hope comes out of sort of more information like this? Because again, this is not an easy thing to quantify and it's something that doesn't happen too often. If you had sort of a note that you pinned up on a board saying that if I could have one thing happen from this, what is that thing?

Margaret Resce Milkint: I think my wish, and it's hard for me to just come up with one, but if this study can make a difference for the next generation of women so they can experience the kind of leadership, the kind of growth that's important to them, and we can stop talking about it, we can stop talking about we need more women in the boardroom, we need more women in the C-suite. When I started at this over 30 years ago, I will tell you honestly, I never thought we would be still talking about this. I didn't. So this is a time to accelerate because we don't have another 30 years. I don't have another 30 years. I want to see the change now. I want to see it happen now. So, that's my hope is that we won't be talking about women and we won't be talking about white women. We've done better for white women. We need to do better for women of color. We need to do better for men of color. We have the opportunity and we've got to seize it. We've got to do it now.

Joey Giangola: All right, Margaret, I've got three more questions for you. And the first one is, very simply, what is one thing you hope you never forget?

Margaret Resce Milkint: I hope I never forget to be grateful. I think that gratitude is so core and so central to who I am. So grateful to so many people, probably starting with my parents and my grandparents, my family, then my family of the heart, and the community. But so blessed and so grateful. So I never want to forget to say thank you and to remember those who maybe sacrificed for me and who cared about me and nurtured me and maybe kicked me in the pants when I needed to be kicked.

Joey Giangola: Now on the other side of that Margaret, what's one thing you still have yet to learn?

Margaret Resce Milkint: I think I've yet to learn that I can do it. I'm a really positive person, but like many people, I have doubts. I have doubts. I have to have that voice in my head that says, "Yes, Margaret, you can do it. Yes, Margaret, you are good enough. Yes, Margaret, it's your time." I work on that every day, like so many people, not just women. Some people call it imposter syndrome. I don't know if it's imposter syndrome as much as just having that self-courage, that self-confidence to step into your power. I say that all the time. I learned that from a brilliant female CEO long ago, Sandy Callahan. And she always said, "Step into your power." I say it like a mantra. I say it like a prayer. It really makes a difference, but I have to say it.

Joey Giangola: All right, Margaret, last question to you. If I were to hand you a magic wand of sorts to reshape, change, alter, speed up really any part of insurance, we might have already touched on it, but what is that thing? Where is it going? And what's it doing?

Margaret Resce Milkint: So, with that magic wand, probably go out there and sprinkle a lot more kindness and a lot more courage out into the industry. I think it's the combination. It's the heart and head approach, but we got to do it with kindness, we've got to do it with joy, we've got to do it with empathy and a bit of fun. And I think we have to do it with some bold courage. This isn't easy. We are going to make mistakes. But let's try and let's try harder and let's try faster.

Joey Giangola: Margaret, this has been fantastic. I'm going to leave it right there.

Margaret Resce Milkint: Thank you so much.