PolicyMe, headquartered in Canada, is a fully remote company providing life and health insurance for the 21st century. It’s easy to get a quote, apply, and find out if you've been approved for insurance in minutes, not weeks. Their policies are simple and straightforward, as insurance should be!
PolicyMe was growing quickly and promoted many employees to management from within. As a result, many of the managers were early in their management career. The impact on the business manifested in a few ways:
The VP of Culture and People, Vanesa Cotlar, knew PolicyMe needed to strengthen management capabilities internally and saw an opportunity to build a manager community given the re-occurring challenges.
Vanesa took it upon herself to run a few training sessions that were well-loved and well-attended but she ultimately didn’t have the bandwidth to build the content for a full program. As a growing startup with a small people team, they needed a way to maximize their L&D capabilities.
Vanesa felt very comfortable facilitating, but she just didn’t have the time to create the content. She looked at bringing in a training company, which had its benefits from a third party credibility standpoint, but the downside was the program would come and go and she couldn’t create the continuity she knew PolicyMe’s managers needed. Plus - it was very pricy!
I chose Elevate because they provided the content that I would have built if I had the time. I didn’t have to compromise on quality. I could facilitate the sessions using the facilitator and discussion guides. Elevate is excellent particularly for growing start-ups where you want to run the sessions, you really care about the quality of the content, but you don’t have time to build it yourself.
Summary
Topics Covered in the Group Sessions
The one that helped me the most was delivering constructive feedback. I have been using it for the past few months. Following the structure helped keep the feedback direct and to the point, making it easier for me to deliver the feedback and easier for my report to understand what I want to see changed.
PolicyMe was looking for results showing that the program was building a community of empowered and effective managers.
PolicyMe felt the greatest areas for improvements were around increased manager skills in:
Increase in manager confidence leading tough conversations
PolicyMe leveraged Culture Amp to run pre and post surveys.
Managers reporting, “I feel well equipped to thoughtfully and effectively engage in tough conversations,” increased 22%.
PolicyMe knew the program was a success after seeing significant improvements in all key areas, including a 22% improvement in manager confidence in leading tough conversations.
But why? And why did PolicyMe’s team double-down on this skill set?
At the heart of almost all chronic problems in our organizations, our teams and our relationships lie crucial conversations - ones that we’re not holding or not holding well
After 20 years of research with over 100,000 people, Kerry says the key skill of a leader is the ability to address tricky issues. He and his team studied over 2,200 projects in hundreds of organizations and found that they could predict with nearly 90% accuracy which projects would fail.
The predictor of failure? The unwillingness or inability of employees to speak up at crucial moments.
Through the insights from Culture Amp and Elevate’s training program, PolicyMe empowered managers across the company to skillfully engage in crucial conversations, supporting PolicyMe’s continued growth and ability to innovate and serve its customers well.
When I ran the wrap-up session, everyone said they wanted to keep going. They shared openly how good the experience had been. This was really meaningful. I think there’s nothing better. That's how valuable people found them to be. It's incredible. And I think the content is great. We want to run some of it out to the entire company.
Since we originally drafted this case study, Vanesa launched a company-wide learning program, continued additional sessions with both cohorts and is in the process of launching a third manager cohort, for all new hires and manager promotions made since the last cohorts closed! PolicyMe created a culture of learning.
Miguel Gentile,
VP of Product
Vanesa Cotlar
VP of People and Culture
Vanesa Cotlar
VP of People and Culture
Vanesa Cotlar
VP of People and Culture
We are on a mission to help leaders be the kind of manager they would want to work for. Speak with a leadership development expert to learn how Elevate can level up your team’s leadership skills:
We've helped hundreds of leaders, managers, and rising teams with our science-based frameworks and sessions. 98% of attendees say Elevate improved their confidence to manage their team, and 95% of attendees said they’d recommend Elevate to others.
We've helped hundreds of leaders, managers, and rising teams with our science-based frameworks and sessions. 98% of attendees say Elevate improved their confidence to manage their team, and 95% of attendees said they’d recommend Elevate to others.
