When Hurricane Sandy hit the mid-Atlantic coast, in October 2012, I was at my home in Westchester County, New York. It’s an old house, surrounded by old trees, so as the rain battered my windows and the wind shook the walls, I took shelter with my dog under a center-hall desk. But I was less worried about myself than about the thousands of Guardian employees who live across New Jersey and New York, within commuting distance of our Lower Manhattan headquarters. I had become CEO of the insurance company—which offers life, disability, and dental policies and administers family and medical leave—just over a year before. How would we help our people and our company get through this?
The Former CEO of Guardian on Using Values to Drive Strategic Planning
When Hurricane Sandy struck the mid-Atlantic coast, in October 2012, thousands of Guardian employees in New York and New Jersey were affected, and company headquarters was flooded by five feet of water. Two days later all the team members had been accounted for; some had been put up in hotel rooms, others had been supplied with generators, and Guardian had created a fund to cover employees’ hurricane-related costs.
That experience taught Mulligan to think even longer-term than she always had: What were all the things that could go wrong, and how could the company protect itself from them? What could go right if Guardian were poised to seize the opportunities presented?
Technology became a top priority: The company migrated many applications to the cloud and modernized employee productivity tools. It built a data analytics operation from the ground up and retrained actuaries to be analysts. Working remotely became common at Guardian. And its leaders anticipated two other important issues for organizations: diversity, equity, and inclusion, and the gig economy.