On the thirteenth installment of our See It to Be It podcast series, Amy C. Waninger speaks with Traci Adedeji, the AIO program lead at AIPSO and president elect of the Rhode Island Chapter of the CPCU Society, in a wide-ranging interview about her unique role, her unconventional journey into the insurance industry, and so much more. Traci espouses the importance of establishing mentoring relationships at work and shares some advice on how to foster a very strong professional network on LinkedIn. Check the links in the show notes to connect with her and find out more about the CPCU Society!

Connect with Traci on LinkedIn.

http://bit.ly/2T9giYR




Find out more about the CPCU Society on their website. They're also on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. Links in order, beginning with their website:

https://bit.ly/3cWpbh7

https://bit.ly/3giUQeG

https://bit.ly/2WUwfFu

https://bit.ly/3e6nON4




Find out how the CDC suggests you wash your hands by clicking here or below.

https://bit.ly/2Ug4l5K




Help food banks respond to COVID-19. Learn more at FeedingAmerica.org:

https://bit.ly/2WD73Uk




Check out our website.

https://bit.ly/living-corporate




TRANSCRIPT

Zach: What's up, y'all? It's Zach Nunn. Now, listen here. Y'all know what we're trying to do. We're trying to build, inspire, encourage, empower, all on a platform that affirms black and brown experiences in corporate America. And it's interesting because as I came up just kind of coming into myself as a professional, I didn't see a lot of people that looked like me in consulting. I didn't see a lot of people that looked like me in human resources either. But when I would come across someone who looked like me doing something I wanted to do, it gave me encouragement. It gave me a stronger sense of hope that I could do it too, and so it's with that that we're really excited to talk to y'all about and bring you another entry, actually, into our See It to Be It series. So the next thing you're gonna hear is an interview between Amy C. Waninger, a guest on the show, a member of the team, and the author of Network Beyond Bias, and a leader who just happens to be an ethnic minority. In fact, yo, Sound Man, give me some air horns right HERE for my leaders. [he complies] Yo, and give me some more air horns right HERE [he complies again] for the See It to Be It series. So catch y'all next time. I know you're gonna enjoy this. Peace.




Amy: Hi, Traci. Thank you so much for joining me today.




Traci: Oh, it's my pleasure. I'm honored that you asked me to join you.




Amy: Well, I am excited, because you and I have worked together before on committees and projects, but never in the same company, although we are at least in part in the same industry, in the insurance industry. And so I was wondering if you could tell me just a little bit--because your job title is program manager, but a lot of people who are not in a project management space or in a corporate space with a lot of projects may not understand what a program manager does, so can we just start there with kind of what is that job?




Traci: Okay. So technically it's "program lead." I work for AIPSO, which is not an insurance company, but we provide services to the insurance industry. So the easiest example that I can offer for what we do would be let's say that in the state of Rhode Island, most--every state actually has a mechanism to handle what's called residual market business for automobile insurance, because in just about every state you have to have automobile insurance to be able to drive. So what happens is that, you know, if Allstate writes 40% of all of the standard automobile business in a state, the state will say, "Well, you also have to write 40% of the residual market business in that state," and--




Amy: And the residual market is typically, like, really high-risk drivers that couldn't get insurance other ways, right?




Traci: Essentially--exactly, people who are unable to get insurance through the standard market for a variety of reasons. So what Allstate might say is, "We know we have to write this business, but we really don't want to program our systems to handle this business. We don't want to hire people to handle this business that's underwritten and processed a little bit differently than our standard business, so what we're gonna do is we're gonna hire AIPSO or a company like AIPSO to handle it on our behalf." So that's probably the cleanest example I can give of what we do. There's some variations on the ways those different mechanisms work, but that's probably the clearest example. As the program lead, my responsibility is a little bit of underwriting, a little bit of program or project work. If we have to implement changes in the system, I'd be involved in the business requirements and working with the technical folks to make sure that our systems can accomodate what it is that we need to do from an underwriting and processing perspective.




Amy: Thank you for that. I appreciate that. So how did you get involved in the insurance industry? Because I'm guessing, based on all of the people I've talked to in the insurance industry, that when you were 5 years old and, you know, you went to a family event and Grandma said, "And Traci, what do you want to be when you grow up?" You probably didn't say, "I want to be an insurance program lead." [both laugh]




Traci: You are absolutely correct, although I do love insurance so much that I think we have to get to a point where, especially little brown boys and girls say, "We want to work in insurance." I was--I'm 54 years old. I'll be 55 in April. And when I was 16 years old, I was a teen mom, and when I was 17 years old I had another baby. So here I am, two children, college dropout, and my parents said, "You gotta get a job. You gotta do something to take care of your babies." So I got a job working at an insurance agency as a file clerk, and one day everybody was busy, the phone rang, I answered the phone, and it was a very simple call that I was able to answer because I had been listening to the people who were customer service representatives, so I just handled the call. I got promoted to customer service [?], and this was in 1984, and just worked my way up. I went from working on the agency side of the business to the company side of the business, as an assistant underwriter to an underwriter to an underwriting manager in different companies around the New York City area. In 2007, I thought I was in love, [laughs] and actually left the industry and moved from the New York City area to Rochester, New York. That relationship and the business that we were trying to build together in a different industry didn't work out, and I had to get a job, and insurance was all I knew at that point, 'cause at that point I had worked in the industry for over 20 years. So I came to Amica in Rochester, moved to Rhode Island, and, you know, Amica is an amazing place to work. I was very happy working there, but I got a call one day from a recruiter--that's what happens when, you know, people have your information out there when you're networking, and the gentleman said, "I've got this position I'm trying to fill. Do you know anyone who would be interested?" And when I looked at it, it looked like it was the perfect storm of everything that I'd learned to do in all of the different positions that I'd had in insurance. So I went on to interview and I said to myself, "Okay, I really don't want to leave Amica [?], but, you know, this is a really cool opportunity." So I had a number in my mind. I said, "Okay, if they come back at that number, that's gonna be the universe telling me that this job is for me." I interviewed on a Wednesday, and on Friday I got an offer at the exact number that I had in my mind.




Amy: That's amazing. So I always tell people, "When a recruiter calls, answer, because you never know what's waiting on the other side of the phone for you," and if not for you, then someone that you know, right? You may think, "Oh, I have no interest in that whatsoever, but I know someone," and if you can connect those two people, you've just created something amazing for someone else.




Traci: Exactly, which was also the relationship with that recruiter, because if you then get to the point where you legitimately are looking for a position, they're gonna remember how you helped them out when they were trying to place folks and they're gonna do their best for you.




Amy: Absolutely. And sometimes you even get a little referral bonus out of it if you--[both laugh] if you, you know, send them to somebody that they can place. So I've had that work out for me too. I was never expecting it, but when it happened it was always nice. So you've already told me about the different types of positions that you've held in the industry, but, you know, you came into this industry kind of by chance, right? You just happened to get a job at an agency. What has been the biggest surprise to you about working in insurance that you didn't realize as someone from outside?




Traci: This is something that I've known for a while, but I think the thing that solidfied my interest in insurance and was my "a-ha" moment was when I started studying insurance, when I started studying--I actually started studying for my CPCU, which is, as you know, a professional designation in the industry. I started studying for my designation in 1992, and in studying insurance I came to have an appreciation for first of all how important insurance is, but also how diverse the industry is. Pretty much any discipline that you would be interested in studying, there is a job for you in the insurance industry, and that is I think the coolest thing about insurance.




Amy: Yeah, I had a similar experience. So I came into the insurance industry as an IT professional. That was my background. No insurance background whatsoever, but I just happened to be a consultant that got plac