Leadership Profile: Maggie Wilderotter (Part 12)
Check other articles in the series...When Maggie arrived at Citizen, one of her first goals was to develop a strong leadership team. Here she discusses her philosophy on establishing a leadership team as well as how she assembled her current team at Citizen.
SM: This is probably not a good question for a public company CEO, but it looks like you are quite excited about the CZN opportunity. Is this something you see yourself doing for the next five years? MW: Yes. I do not have any plans to do anything else. I am very excited about it. I am really on a journey. I have put together a terrific leadership team.
SM: How did you put together your leadership team? MW: When I came to the company, what I had to do was to assess what were the capabilities of the company, and where. What are our strategies? Where do we want to head? It is something I did collectively with the board as well as with the senior people within the company. Then what I looked at is where there were gaps in the leadership in order to get where we need to get to. I then proactively started to go out and recruit to fill those gaps. Over the last two and a half years we have built a combination, at our senior level (the top 30 people in the company), of employees that have been with the company a long time, and new employees.
One of the things I did focus on is diversity of thought, experience, and also of talent. We really didn’t have any women in operational positions in the company from a senior P&L perspective. Of the senior leadership the only woman other than me, who had just come into the company, was our head of human resources. I set about to balance those scales, and today close to 40% of our leadership, of the top 30 people in the company, are women. 50% of our field operations from the senior leadership perspective, are run by women.
SM: So, you come from the school of thought where you do strategy first and then you recruit the leadership team as opposed to vice versa. Some people recruit a bunch of people and then decide on a strategy. MW: I believe your resources have to follow your strategy.
SM: I agree with that as well. MW: It is not just about the talent, it is about where you put your money, and how you prioritize what you work on. You don’t want to go hire a bunch of people and then figure out that you do not need them.
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