A unique opportunity to elevate your leadership skills to a new level and gain science-based benefits for your pool is coming up at AGRiP’s CEO and Senior Staff Institute, Aug. 4-7 in Grand Rapids, MI. Top pool leaders who register now can secure their place at this exclusive event and take advantage of early-bird pricing.
“The CEO Institute is unlike other conferences in that we are able to take a deeper dive into leadership issues,” says Michelle Voskuil, CFO for Cities and Villages Mutual Insurance Company in Wisconsin. “The CEO Institute has had the most influence over my professional development.”
This year’s professional development opportunity focuses on the benefits of building a diverse and inclusive organization, with a particular focus on diverse perspectives by executives and governing bodies. It’s led by AGRiP Inclusion Resident Dr. Robin Hindsman Stacia, who uses her specialized diversity, equity and inclusion training to help AGRiP members strengthen board and organizational performance.
Research finds that highly diverse organizations and teams are twice as likely to meet financial goals and eight times more likely to achieve desired business outcomes. Diverse governing bodies also:
- Are three times more likely to be high-performing.
- Shown to be six times more likely to be innovative and agile.
- Report feeling more inspired and confident.
- Create a culture of inquiry, bolstered generative capacity, and deliberative thinking.
Collaborating with peers at the CEO Institute, without pool board members or service providers in attendance, is a unique learning opportunity. Pool executives and senior leaders will learn ways to strengthen the performance and decision-making of the pool’s governing body and staff, with an eye on building inclusivity that speaks to process, rather than political correctness.
The sessions will use tools and takeaways specifically authored for pools, and focus on the role of the CEO in reaping the benefits of diversity and inclusion for their organization. Attendees will think about both cognitive diversity – our different talents, experiences, and worldviews – and demographic diversity in charting a course for the future of their pool.
Additional conference programming will focus on strong board orientations and current conditions in reinsurance relationships.
The Institute starts with a big-picture view of diversity in public entity pooling, including why groups of people with varied backgrounds and experiences perform better, and the role of CEOs and senior leaders in keeping the pool open to new ideas and voices.
Next is the development of tools to overcome an inherent part of human nature: bias and false associations, including how to move beyond “mindbugs,” and examining pool policies and practices that may be unintentionally biased, to the pool’s detriment.
Using the validated CliftonStrengths assessment, attendees will delve into their own cognitive strengths, and compare them with those of their executive peers. They will identify what the similarities and differences mean to public entity pooling generally and their pool specifically. They’ll hear from one pool that undertook an evaluation of strengths, and the steps taken as a result.
As the governing body is the core of a pool’s success, attendees will spend time learning how their work to foster inclusivity will support forward-looking, generative governance by the pool board.
Then, armed with the knowledge built during the sessions, attendees will begin to build an inclusion plan, considering how to cultivate inclusivity throughout their pool organization and governing body by identifying goals, barriers to achievement, and the strategies necessary to create change.
Finally, they’ll learn how to bring inclusion practices back home, and look at ways to create change where it’s needed.
And because a key benefit of the Institute is, according to John Brownlee of CORSA, “a great opportunity to collaborate with my peers over complex issues associated with pooling,” both formal and informal collaboration time has been built into the schedule. This includes a welcome reception on Sunday night and a Monday night event that includes local food, retro arcade games and trivia.
Register now for the CEO and Senior Staff Institute.