What Erie Insurance does to develop transformational talent

Here, Partha Srinivasa, CIO of the Pennsylvania-based property and casualty insurance provider, discusses his approach to building up change-forward employees.

When the leadership team at Erie Insurance planned a large-scale transformation, they knew it couldn’t be an IT-only effort. The themes of the transformation — modernization, best-in-class agent experience, multi-channel customer experience, product excellence, and innovation — are so business centric that they could only be achieved with an enterprise-wide effort.

When Partha Srinivasa joined the company two years ago as CIO, he became one of the key leaders in driving this effort. “The most important part of our strategy is we work as a unified team with an enterprise mindset,” he says. “The work can be on product, claims, service, or IT, but it’s run by one team — Erie’s Enterprise Transformation Office.”

The primary themes of the transformation include modernization, digital, data, and cloud. Even though much of the modernization effort involves IT, Srinivasa ensures it remains a business effort, and isn’t limited to IT. To make this happen, the first point is the importance of sponsorship, especially the CEO’s work to highlight the criticality of the transformation.

The second is Erie’s Enterprise Transformation Office. “We prioritize everything based on our strategy, and we made the decision to deprioritize all work that isn’t aligned to that strategy,” he says. “We’ve also made a cross functional team of leaders who lead the enterprise transformation office that’s responsible for strategy, planning, and delivery.”

Finally, the way Erie Insurance drives transformation is by leveraging enterprise business agility. Key to this is transparency on progress, which Srinivasa achieves by ensuring his peers and the board are given regular updates through a scorecard that shows where they are on the primary themes. “My dashboard shows the progress of our modernization program and tells the board that we’ve moved the needle from A to B,” he says.

A question of talent

Executive level sponsorship and a collaborative transformation office are critical, but they fall flat if the talent — both inside IT and throughout the enterprise — doesn’t have the right skills or mindset.

To identify transformational talent and keep the focus on the execution, Srinivasa uses the concept of IDEATE: Innovation, Delivery, Efficiency, Acceleration, Talent, and Execution Quality. With the need to IDEATE in mind, the company takes a multi-pronged approach to talent development.

In the IT organization, there are several high-level talent programs focused on attracting, retaining and developing talent. One of their key talent pipelines is the apprentice program, which runs for 18 months, and trainees are exposed to at least three areas of IT and are expected to be productive while they learn. At the end of the program, they’re placed into a role in the department where their skills and interests are best aligned.

Srinivasa also runs an IT Leader program for those who don’t have core IT skills but are strong leaders. “Our IT Leader program is for senior people who might have a military background or leadership experience in a non-IT function,” he says. “But they have great communication skills, and know how to get things done. This program allows our IT team to have the right balance of technical and leadership skills.”

An ethos to drive change

The IT organization at Erie Insurance also runs a “lateral move” program where technologists shift from working on legacy to emerging technologies, which allows Srinivasa to upskill his staff. He also takes a stretch assignment approach: “Maybe your day job is as a business analyst, but you’re getting a stretch assignment to be a project manager,” he says.

As important as any of these programs, he adds, is the opportunity for everyone in the IT organization to pursue a cloud certification, as well as train in agile development. The retention results from this training is strong, says Srinivasa, with attrition rates in IT at the lowest in the industry, and similar efforts are in place within their ecosystem of partners.

What Srinivasa is looking for from all these programs is what he considers to be the most critical skillset for transformation talent: customer centricity, a pioneering mindset, collaboration, and adaptability. But more than any of these skills, he says, is the ability to drive change.

“Sometimes companies will start a transformation before everyone is truly committed to the change,” he says. “The most important skill I look for in our talent is the ability to link daily activities to the broader transformation goal, and have a passion for shifting from the old to the new.”

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