By Stan Sauerwein
Success has come in many forms during Carol Jardine's 28-year insurance career, but there is a common theme that connects all her notable achievements. The Chief Operating Officer of Canadian Northern Shield Insurance has always been customer-driven.
While in college studying chemical engineering, Jardine got a job as a part-time telephone adjuster for Liberty Mutual. During that early exposure to the industry she was taught to take a personal responsibility for the service obligation that insurance represents. It has been an important part of her value system ever since. "We are in business to provide asset and financial protection to our customers. We sell a piece of paper promising to be there when they need us most."
Jardine has become known for her consensus building management style, and has developed an almost innate ability to maintain balance between her work and private life as well. She showed that skill early in her career. During the late 1970s she gave birth to two sons over a short span of 21 months. Rather than give up being a road adjuster, a job she loved doing, Jardine integrated her role as a mother. She simply brought the boys with her on the road.
"I had two car seats in a Ford Fairmont with a territory that was a good three hour drive in radius east of Toronto," she says, chuckling.
Before she turned 30, Jardine became a Commercial Claims Supervisor. The Laurentian Group was in acquisition mode at the time, which she says allowed her to gain experience in a number of operations and she was soon offered a job as claims manager.
She says the experience taught her the value of teamwork "and how to work in a relationship where you are collaborating and communicating openly."
The executive at Laurentian saw something special in her management style, and before long she was promoted to her first executive position as a vice-president of claims.
She participated on projects at Laurentian's head office in Montreal which included creating a service company for handling U.S. losses. During that period, however, Jardine faced some personal losses of her own. Her marriage collapsed and she went through a divorce. She found she had to develop a new balance working as a single mother. But, by then, Jardine was also showing she was an entrepreneur at heart. It attracted Sun Alliance's CEO Bob Campbell to recruit her as part of a turnaround team he was forming for that company.
The team she joined was a 'Who's Who' of young insurance executives, including among others: Steve Hammond (now vice-president risk, underwriting and re-insurance at Royal & Sun Alliance), and Paul Green (current president of the Insurance Institute of Ontario).
"We were a powerful group. We had to pull together though we were a very divergent group of people. It was a true story of the parts being greater than the whole."
Jardine has never felt being a woman has helped or hindered her career, so she never paused to consider the inroads she was making for women at an executive level in the insurance industry. "I don't think the job is gender specific. If you are a leader, a person of integrity and you want to get involved, gender is not an issue."
Jardine's business persona was strong, but she began to feel a need for a new balance in her personal life about that time. As she'd been a lover of riding since childhood, she decided to pursue that dream in her off hours. On weekends she took on a non-paying job as a stable hand, mucking stalls and leading trail rides. She enjoyed it immensely, so much so she took up competitive show jumping. With her horse, Clearly Canadian, Jardine became a top-ranked amateur competitor.
"I've learned a lot about communication and teamwork riding horses. You can't talk to them and you don't steer them with the reins. You ride them with your legs, which is something most non-riders don't understand. You jump together. It's a test of teamwork and communication and confidence and trust."
Jardine met Jamie Knowles, the man who would eventually become her husband, and she soon had a chance to apply her team building skills again when Royal and Sun Alliance merged. The COO Bob Gunn "took me out of my claims box," she says, putting her in charge of the Royal & Sun Alliance regional operation in Ottawa.
But Jardine's work history was claims. Revenue generation was new territory. In Ottawa, her first act was to pull the 140 staff she supervised into a meeting and she made a confession. She said she had good business sense but was a neophyte when it came to underwriting and brokers. "So I asked them to teach me." It was a fresh attitude the Ottawa crew embraced. "They took me under their wing," she says, fondly remembering those days. Going on broker visits in northern Ontario, "I'd be the one on moose watch at the crack of dawn. By the time I'd been there a couple of years they had really groomed me. We built a branch that was extremely profitable," she adds, growing it from $48 million in premiums to $60 million in three years.
Shortly after her 40th birthday, Gunn made a new offer. Jardine was given an executive role as the vice-president claims for Royal & Sun Alliance. She saw it as an opportunity to apply her value system and customer service ethic in broad, industry-changing ways. "It was a job I'd always dreamed about, to be a claims exec of a billion dollar insurance company."
Teamed with Mike McGinley, the vice-president claims (US), she created a global knowledge-sharing group, helped build a worldwide best practices strategy focused on bottom line claims performance, and a new customer service focus for Royal & Sun Alliance.
"We created a community of claims people around Royal & Sun Alliance that became extremely powerful and had some pretty good ideas about how to make it happen. The one year we measured from stem to stern, we saw we'd saved the Company $250 million USD."
In the hurly-burly of world travel, Jardine also felt a responsibility to "give something back" to the industry. She volunteered for numerous association policy-making committees. While serving on one such group with the Canadian Claim Managers Association, the Ontario government decided to introduce No Fault Auto, and she was invited to present the industry perspective and recommendations on the provision of services to customers.
She also devoted herself to the task of injury prevention. Bob Gunn had been a founding member of a non-profit group called SMARTRISK, dedicated to public education on that subject. Jardine became an active advocate. "In claims for most of my career, I had seen too many cases where young people's lives were ruined because they took careless risks." Though her work schedule has since forced Jardine to withdraw from competition as a show jumper, she still maintains her connection with SMARTRISK and now serves as the group's Chairperson.
In 2002, Jardine faced a personal crisis when her husband was diagnosed with cancer. Once again she had to seek new balance in her life. Rather than pursue her career internationally, Jardine accepted an assignment to run the personal insurance operations for Royal & Sun Alliance. "My husband's health is my primary concern, so it was a great opportunity to stay in Canada and run a business of a huge size."
Though she took that job on with total energy and was successful, "when it was all over and said and done, I realized I needed to work in an organization that had more of a mutuality with customers or a set of values more aligned to mine."
For a short period she joined Allianz as the underwriting and marketing manager for Canada but she felt an even greater fit was possible for her as the COO for CNS. In April 2004 she accepted that challenge from CUMIS.
"CNS was not sure of what its future direction should be." Like all her previous management experiences, Carol relied on team building and consensus to help find an answer. "I asked the employees what they thought should be done. I asked all the managers, a core group of brokers. I met with industry associations and re-insurers. After about 45 days, a natural evolution of strategies for CNS came to fruition which was the combination of everybody's best ideas."
She says CNS is committed regionally, and renewed evidence of that came not long after she joined the company. The Okanagan had just suffered $250-million in losses due to forest fires and the Kelowna Branch team approached her with a plan. "They wanted to make sure they had done everything they could to prepare their community and other communities in B.C. in the event those circumstances occurred again."
CNS decided to participate with the BC Forest Service in a province-wide messaging campaign on risk prevention for homeowners living in the forest zones. The company reprinted 50,000 copies of an instruction booklet. The FireSmart Manual was distributed to the public through CNS brokers and credit union agencies. CNS purchased television airtime to broadcast a program promoting broader awareness and sponsored a fire index report on Okanagan television several times a day for six months to reinforce that message.
"The good news is this year, though we had a larger number of fires, we had no where near the impact or human tragedy that we have had in the past."
She says CNS intends to continue the process. "I'm a big believer in prevention messaging, so if one of our brokers or credit union agencies has an idea that will help their customers prevent tragedy and loss, then we will get involved."
It's evident that, to Jardine, the customer still comes first.
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