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Extending Your Influence: Engage to Transform, with Charlene Li, Founder and CEO, Altimeter Group, Author, The Engaged Leader
The last skill an engaged leader has to master is engagement. And what I mean by engagement is when you actually reach out to somebody and engage with them in a two-way dialogue. Now this can be done through mass participation. You answering questions, for example at a town hall on a digital channel. But it also could be you reaching out to somebody personally, directly and having the rest of the world see it – engagement by proxy for example.
Engaging to Transform
And I think this is such a different way to engage because the opportunities as a leader to engage in the past were very few and far between. If you have a lot of employees, more than you can see physically in a room you have to start thinking about how do you extend yourself through these channels because it may be the only way that you could engage with hundreds, with thousands or tens of thousands of employees and customers. So I think engagement – again to transform that relationship, to bring people and increase and change the type of relationship you want with them is a key skill to have.
Lessons Learned from Mark Bertolini, Aetna
A great example of engagement is the CEO of Aetna Mark Bertolini. He was being challenged by a cancer patient who was in stage 4 colon cancer online on Twitter because his lifetime benefits had run out. And he was actually a student in Arizona and was starting to challenge Aetna and directly the CEO saying what do you mean I have no more coverage? And Mark Bertolini decided to engage him directly and say I hear you. This is what’s going on. Tell me more about what you’re seeing. And by showing that direct engagement rather than let PR or the Claims Department take care of it he put a human face on Aetna. So what was starting to explode into a PR nightmare became a PR saving moment because what Mark did was say it’s important for us to listen to these circumstances. And this is borne out of a deep-seated desire on his part to see health care change, to see health care be more human and being one of the largest insurance providers of health care he’s in a very powerful position to be able to change that fundamental relationship between insurer and a patient. And he takes it upon himself directly to engage with people.
Some people may say that in looking at Mark Bertolini that it was a terrible move on his part. That by setting the precedence of engaging directly with a single person complaining about their insurance coverage that he was saying well we’re going to respond to anybody and everybody who may be reaching out to us. What he actually said was something very specific. He goes, you know, we need to understand and hear all of these voices as an organization – as an organization. And that’s what he set Aetna up to do is that they wanted to understand, be responsive and any time a customer reaches out to them whether it’s a digital, social, phone, mail, in person they have to be responsive to that. After all, everybody is a human person and everybody has questions that need to be answered.
And by him taking that lead and saying I’m not going to be personally responsible for this thing but I’m holding my entire organization responsible for this. It was actually transforming that relationship. Now if you’re an Aetna patient, if you are somebody considering being an Aetna insured company you would take a look at that and go wow, this is a company that does things very differently and I’m going to take a different look at this. I’m going to think about that relationship that Aetna’s investing. They understand what it means to be engaged and to listen, to share the stories and to engage. This is a company willing to meet me in the places where I need them to be. So yeah, he was setting a precedence but I don’t think a dangerous one. He was actually setting up a challenge for his organization and the rest of the healthcare industry to say this is where we need to be today.
One of the biggest pressures on engagement is how do you stay out of trouble. And so you may be thinking well look at the example of Mark Bertolini, CEO of Aetna, who decided to engage directly with a patient who was causing a huge ruckus on Twitter about his insurance being cut off. Mark Bertolini decided to engage with him and say hey, you know, you’re causing a lot of questions here – raising a lot of questions and causing a lot of commotion. What’s going on? Now that’s dangerous in some ways, especially of you don’t have a plan. The difference here is that Bertolini and Aetna had a plan. They had a script to understanding what they could and couldn’t say. Now just a little bit of background, Mark, he started getting into the nuance of why Aetna was responsible and not responsible and into all the logistics of it. And he realized very quickly he had made a mistake. So he said, you know, I need to not talk about these legal ramifications or nuances.
We need to talk. Let’s get on the phone and talk with each other. And that’s exactly what he did. He took it off line, got on the phone with the patient, understood, said this is what we can do, what we can’t do. So he decided to engage on what topics and then also knew when to take it off of those channels. And I think if you’re going to decide to engage as an organization and as a leader, you really have to think about with whom, on what topics, when will you engage because that’s what’s in your control. You don’t have to respond and engage with everybody. And I would warn you against setting that kind of expectation because as a leader you want to engage very specifically to transform relationships, be very intentional about why you are engaging and then what kind of outcomes you want to expect. It should be a win-win and unless it’s very clear to you and your organization how are you going to achieve that win-win, you really should be engaging because you may be engaging in absolutely the wrong way.