By Emily Viner, Vice President - Agency Growth & Development at Guardian Life Insurance Company of America®
At Guardian our work is helping people achieve greater financial security.
Within The Guardian Network™, financial professionals around the country work with individuals, families and businesses to help protect their todays and plan for the futures they dream of.
My job is to make sure we have the right people and teams. And now more than ever, research shows us the importance of having diverse teams. A Catalyst report shows that teams with gender diversity double their chances of exceeding performance expectations when compared to all male or all female teams;* it’s the diversity of thought that drives innovation.
Building diverse teams and offices and remaining relevant to all consumers.
We began by focusing on gender diversity, the highest level of difference among people. For years the financial services industry has grappled with how to increase the number of women in sales. Working as a financial advisor can be a meaningful, rewarding career and the statistics about women’s wealth in the United States are staggering, both related to what we’ll inherit as we outlive our parents and spouses and what we create on our own.
In an article in Forbes by Sasha Galbraith, she reported that women control just over half of the wealth in the United States but are expected to grow to two-thirds by 2020. Couple that with the need in the market for more financial professionals overall and it would seem that this career would be an obvious choice for women.
Unfortunately that’s not the case. Having grown up in this industry, I’m passionate about figuring this out once and for all and making sure more women have access to a financial advisor.
Today, we’re in the midst of a multifaceted initiative aimed at increasing the number of women financial professionals. Some of the work has included a focus on developing female leadership within the sales force, creating community, provide role models and work to ensure we have an inclusive culture that recognizes and allows everyone to thrive.
Developing women sales leaders has been particularly rewarding.
We learned that many women had not considered a move to management because they had never been asked, so we started asking!
Since we began this work in 2012, we’ve seen a 71% increase in the number of Managing Directors who are females and Guardian Leadership Institute graduates are now 26% women. These women are role models and mentors to the new financial professionals we bring into The Guardian Network™. And in both 2013 and 2014 our top new agents were women.
Generally women do not widely consider a career as a financial advisor as a meaningful, viable career choice and we need to change that. Our Be Meaningful™ Facebook community has over 22,000 members.
Cracking the code on gender diversity is teaching us the value of inclusive, diverse teams and paves the way for generational and ethnic diversity within The Guardian Network™.
Emily Viner is a financial services distribution and marketing executive with a purpose and a passion for securing the future of advisor distribution and leaving a legacy of strong gender balanced leadership. There are three distinct areas she currently focuses on: Field Management & Leadership Development, Building & Execution of Gender Balance Strategies and Association Marketing.
*The Bottom Line: Corporate Performance and Women’s Representation on Boards, 2004-2009. (Nancy M Carter, PhD., and Harvey M, Wagner, PhD., Catalyst 2011).