On Benefits and Friends

Lisa Hawker, regional COO of people solutions at Lockton and current chair of the Council of Employee Benefits Executives, and Jenn Walsh, founder and CEO of GenuineShift, sat down with Leader’s Edge at the 2025 Employee Benefits Leadership Forum.

They share stories drawn from over 30 years each of experience, muse on trends, and focus on the future of employee benefits.  

Read the Transcript   

Disclaimer: Podcast transcriptions are computer generated, please excuse errors. For the most accurate version of the conversation, please refer to audio.  

 
Lisa Hawker: 
That’s one of my favorite phrases that Jenn uses because it’s so grounding. Two things can be true at the same time, and I really use that as a thought pattern when I start to get stuck. It’s easy to get stuck when you’ve seen it a certain way for so long.  

 
Sandy Laycox: 
Welcome to the Leader’s Edge podcast. I’m Sandy Laycox, editor in chief of Leader’s Edge. In this episode, recorded on site at the Council’s Employee Benefits Leadership Forum this spring, we chat with two giants in the employee benefits brokerage industry. Lisa Hawker, regional COO of people solutions at Lockton and the current chair of the Council of Employee Benefits Executives, also known as CEBE, and Jenn Walsh, founder and CEO of GenuineShift. Each have over 30 years of experience in the industry. They are also close friends who have shared their work and life experiences for many years, and it was a delight to spend this time with them.  

First, we hear about how one of The Council’s very first study groups came to be. Both Jenn and Lisa were a part of an early iteration of The Council Working Group of Benefits Executives. Their personal and professional growth with this group is a prime example of how relationships do power the brokerage community.  

 
Lisa Hawker: 
A number of years ago when we had the benefit study groups through CIAB, there was this study group that existed, and I was in awe. All these very cool people. Jenn Walsh, Dave Oberkircher, Sean Pines, Chris Nadeau, Tim Byrne, Liz Smith. I saw them and I stalked them throughout EBLF and I would just show up wherever they were. I was like a little puppy. Finally, they let me in. I’m not kidding.  

 
Jenn Walsh: 
Was it Chicago, your first meeting?  

 
Lisa Hawker: 
Chicago was my first meeting.  

 
Sandy Laycox: 
Talk about that study group for a second. I know that it’s really homey and family. I remember when I first came to The Council and wanted to sit-in, Jenn Urso was like, “Oh no, you can’t come to that.” Just tell us about that for one second. 

 
Jenn Walsh: 
When I got the call from Cheryl Matochik at the time, letting me know that for years PNC had been running successful study groups and they were going to spin up the first benefits group, I wasn’t quite sure what I was signing up for, but leaned into it. My experience in that study group, every time we got together, of course, we had some laughs and built strong friendships. I left so much smarter. People in different regions, different agencies had to solve different problems at different times, so inevitably, whatever you were facing, somebody else that you trusted had already had to tackle some version of that. It just accelerated your knowledge.  

 
My team, at the time, would be afraid when I would leave those meetings armed with 27 more ideas to come back. To this day, we have a running text chain. People have retired. Our next era is doing different things. But the friendships are solid.  

 
Lisa Hawker: 
What I knew about that was that if I shared something, it was totally fine. If something was shared with me, it was really about us getting better at our craft, it was about us getting better for our industry. Anything was on the table. That might be something very business-related or we all went through some very personal things.  

 
Jenn Walsh: 
The fundamentals of our business, whether it’s personal lines, property and casualty, benefits, newcomers are always here. This is a relationship business. Often it starts in thinking about that in terms of you and your prospects and your clients, but at the core of it, to be effective for clients, you have to have an effective network of relationships within your agency, with your carrier partners, peers. Because we have big problems to solve, and tapping into those networks and broadening your idea of relationships is probably one of the things I think about and worry about the most over the next decade. Those of us who’ve been around and benefited, and even here at EBLF, you see those relationships crossover. But there’s a whole next generation that doesn’t know what that is, hasn’t experienced it, and is something we need to be thinking about.  

 
Sandy Laycox: 
We get deeper into the importance of diversity of thought as Lisa and Jenn grapple with the very real fact that two disparate things can both be true at the same time.  

 
Jenn Walsh: 
The diversity of thought, and especially in insurance where it’s black and white and we deal in contracts and assessing risk, there’s a trap people fall into in thinking there’s a right way or wrong way. There might be the best way at a certain point in time in your career or your agency’s evolution or growth, but often where people get stuck is two things can be true. It was the right decision at that time, but if all of a sudden now you operate in 32 states instead of 10, how you’re structured, you need to evolve and grow and that can be really hard to do. Talking to people who have scaled and gone to the next level and how to honor and respect the tradition within your agency or organization, while concurrently getting momentum to shift, that can be a lot harder.  

 
Lisa Hawker: 
That’s one of my favorite phrases that Jenn uses, because it’s so grounding. Two things can be true at the same time, and I really use that as a thought pattern when I start to get stuck. It’s easy to get stuck when you’ve seen it a certain way so long. I start to think, well, what if that’s not…. and this whole concept that two things can be true at the same time. It was the right strategy back when I did it.  

 
Jenn Walsh: 
It served us, and…? Especially as it relates to people and talent and how were structured and how we trained and how we promoted. That all made sense at a certain point in time. My longtime mentor, Stan Lore, for years, he would say, “Look, we have some bad habits. Some of them we like,” so you can preserve, but you often just have to call it and say, “This may not be the best thing for us to hold on to, but we’re going to. We accept the risk that comes with that.” That’s like when we counsel our clients, they’re like, “Yeah, I know but we’re fine with that exposure.” That’s really the same thing. Just acknowledge it. We’re going to hold on to that. We’re not going to grow out of that bad habit.  

 
Lisa Hawker: 
Jenn makes that good point, so I’ll flip to our CEBE meeting that we had on Tuesday. We had McKinsey come in and present their employer survey. It echoes what Jenn just said. Our industry is evolving. What employers need and what they want and what they value is changing. The costs continue to be the main driver. The stark contrast between the employer perspective and the broker perspective really hit me as they were presenting those results. If we don’t evolve, if we stay stuck in that former firm mindset, we are going to lose. If we can’t evolve with the client, and as the client’s concept evolves, we’re going to be left behind.  

That was just so telling to me, talking about everything from what does service look like, how are you going to help me to control costs, how are you getting paid, and am I okay with it now? If the concept of how we’re getting paid or what we should be getting paid changes, then we have to evolve everything from our model to how do we become more efficient? I thought the time we spent with CEBE with that McKinsey study was so valuable. Taking those insights and not ignoring them; I think a lot of people might want to go, that’s not true. The data is the data. 

 
Sandy Laycox: 
Continuing with the idea of client evolution, we discussed the broker-carrier relationship as part of meeting clients’ changing needs.  

 
Lisa Hawker: 
I do think that as we start to think we know our clients, whether it’s what I’ve told myself as truth around the relationship or what I’ve told myself as truth because I’ve had a client for a long time, we start to get this bias that we know the client better than they know themselves. Pulling that McKinsey study back into it, there were some great insights from that, where what are you bringing forth to the table? It may not fit them, but if you’re not bringing the ideas, I can guarantee you someone else is.  

This idea is that nothing is off the table when costs are the way costs are, and we have to think about that. [We think] a client would never do that, then someone else starts to talk to them. I’ll use ICHRA as an example. They would never do that. The culture of the company, they’re so caring, they’re so loving, they would never get away from a true employer-sponsored plan like that and go to individual accounts. Then someone brings that idea and they go, “Wow, they see it completely different.” They may see it as my organization has evolved. What I can do is start to fit the needs of my employee in a better way. I can start to meet that employee where they are by giving them a diversity of choice that I can’t give them under traditional employer-sponsored plan. That’s the evolution that happens. 

 
Jenn Walsh: 
In working with client service professionals, whether they’re newer in their career or established veterans, one of the patterns that comes back to this relationship discussion and knowing the client is, if I’m an account executive, I wake up every morning and I want to protect my client from risk and friction. Sometimes that goes to the extreme because what I might say is, “Oh no, they don’t want any friction. They don’t want anything to disrupt their employees,” and they forget to come back to the core fundamentals of my client needs to have a sustainable health plan that they can finance, and it may be worth some friction. We don’t want surprise friction, but that tension exists. My producer doesn’t want anything to go wrong with the client, so let’s define anything that could go wrong.  

 
If Sandy’s my client, I say, “Sandy, I recognize you don’t want any disruption with your engineers or fill in the blank. However, my responsibility is to make sure you know every possible option. You might decide that the tradeoff isn’t worth it for you but I owe it to you to at least frame what’s out there.” That doesn’t need to be marketing gone wild. It doesn’t mean it has to be a ridiculous amount of effort on things that aren’t worth it to the client, but these preliminary discussions for leaders to make sure their client service teams don’t over correct and to be too conservative.  

In February, when your competitor comes in and brings it up and everyone gets selective amnesia, “No remember that one time I brought it up and you said you weren’t interested?” It’s not a good place to be. Companion topic is that relationship between carriers and brokers. When we’re asking clients to take big risks in their program, whether they really are or it’s perceived because any change is risky in their organization, they need to know that we are aligned in our ability to implement what we’ve promised with the relationships.  

Now, carrier reps maybe aren’t local or carrier reps are local with the client but the account managers are external. I used to hate on Legacy Lunch & Learn; I, for years, would say Panera Bread got a lot of $500 and I don’t know how much work got done as a result. However, somewhere in the middle is truth to something Lisa referenced earlier in the all or nothing discussion: we need to be thinking about the relationships. We have hundreds of account managers interview carrier reps as an activity in our account manager academy and they’re just shocked at what they hear and what it tells us is, outside of transactions and email, people aren’t talking and the natural reaction then in most carriers is, this certainly calls for an outing to Topgolf, and now Topgolf has become my new Panera.  

 
Lisa Hawker: 
It’s your new Panera, and we still don’t know what the client needs. 

 
Jenn Walsh: 
You still don’t know what the client needs. You still are not addressing that people work differently. As much as I love to be at a late-night event, not everything has to be revolving around alcohol. Relationships can be built outside of some social gatherings. There’s a different perception of people’s willingness to work outside of work hours. I don’t have all the answers. I just know that it’s a fragile system right now. If we’re falling down on implementation and execution, and if client service doesn’t think that as a carrier you can actually execute, I guarantee they’re slowing things down. The carrier may not know why they’re not winning deals or updating to the new product or contract that they’re trying to compel. It’s probably because they think you’re risky and you’ve got to build that relationship and trust.  

 
Sandy Laycox: 
Carrier conversations are always top of mind during EBLF, so we discussed the trends Jenn and Lisa picked up during their meetings onsite.  

 
Jenn Walsh: 
Some trends I’m hearing from the carriers is that the agencies and brokers are asking the carriers to train their team. Somewhere in the middle makes sense. Product knowledge is one thing. How to be an effective advocate for your client with a carrier sits with the agency or the brokerage. I understand the pressure because many of our managers and leaders have books of business. They’re managing 15 to 25 or 30 individuals. Where they can outsource or leverage, whether it’s The Council or other networks or the carriers, I think paying attention to the ask, we have our lanes and there’s certainly, like a Venn diagram, some crossover. That’s one concern.  

The other is, and I hear this from both sides, everybody says that the people they’re working with are inexperienced. If you have a veteran account manager with a rookie rep at a group insurer or medical carrier, they can guide them. But we have a growing group, the blind leading the blind, and they actually don’t know what can go wrong. They don’t know how to look around the corner.  

We’re all going to have to just rumble our way through that because we don’t have enough people to meet the growth goals, but we don’t want to be surprised by it. Understanding who the contacts are, who the relationships are. We have to be aligned together but we can’t point fingers. That’s probably the trend that I’m seeing. We have to keep bringing it back to the client. The client can’t get the outcomes they want if we are not all aligned.  

 
Lisa Hawker: 
Spot on, everything Jenn’s saying. The bandwidth is pulled super thin. When you have inexperienced people trying to solve problems, it takes them ten times longer to solve the problem. The other problem, though, is if you’re relying on the carriers to be your education, they might learn the “what”, but they don’t learn the “how” and the “why” nearly as effectively. The carriers generally aren’t dealing with the “how” and the “why” and the interwovenness of the “how” and the “why” like the broker is, because they may be, to Jenn’s point, if it’s a group rep, they’re thinking about their life and disability products or their voluntary products over here. If it’s the medical carrier rep or the medical carrier team, they’re thinking over here. The broker has to think across the entire spectrum, not only of the product portfolio, but the client dynamic and the independent situation.  

You’re not getting that situational learning that, really, we’re struggling with, because it used to be that I would sit next to Jenn and I would learn. I would hear it, and there is some osmosis that goes on. There is a water cooler. As we’ve become post-Covid, remote, hybrid, all those things, it is difficult. What I find fascinating is it’s our young people that want to be back in the office. They want mentorship. They want to be led as well, but our top people and our senior folks are not there to lead them, because they think, “I can do my job. I’m doing the same web calls. I can just do it from the comfort of my living room.” It’s not that they’re not doing their job, but they’re not training the next generation.  

There’s a gap there that we’ve got to figure out how to fill. Unfortunately, with a tight labor market and all those other things, we have to be really sensitive to that. What do you ask of that senior person who’s like, “I don’t want to come to the office anymore. I’m happy doing this,” but they’re not getting what’s lost. You’ve got to sell them on the value they bring beyond just the book that they’re working on.  

The carriers, every day, try to figure out how to differentiate themselves. They just do. We come into these meetings sometimes and they talk about, why carrier A is different than carrier B and this particular item or that particular item, whether it’s integrated absence or network development or a whiz bang contrabulator. I learned that word from Jenn, whatever that is. [We ask,] “So how are you going to get that?” When the client and the internal team at the broker is like, “Yes, and they have these cost pressures. Yes, and they have these pressures, 

 
We’ve not done, as brokers and as carriers, a good enough job of putting some ROI on those other things, on those other investments. We sometimes as brokers say, “No, don’t give me a sales pitch. I want you to just teach them about disability,” but they lose their opportunity to talk about something that might differentiate. If you can’t give me an ROI, or maybe not return on investment, but value of investment. They’re doing it and they’re putting those dollars into it and they still end up on a spreadsheet and they’re penniless. They might have had a communication platform or they may have had an enrollment platform or something that that client could have used and leveraged so heavily.  

 
Jenn Walsh: 
My specific recommendations I would make to carriers would be to be explicit about where your products differ by state. We now have people serving books of business and there’s a lot of assumptions. “Oh, it’s everywhere but California.” “It’s only in California.” We know the reasons why that is, but don’t assume that people know that, because they’ve maybe managed a book of business here and they’re dropping in to support over here.  

The other would be, in the marketing, be explicit about your implementation resources. De-risk the process because it isn’t all about the pennies. If you actually have implementation resources, you have an implementation guarantee, and you have a track record of delivering on that, I would not wait to have that be your onboarding process. That should be part of your sales process because the client and the broker who are looking at it, hygiene factor. You’ve got to be in the running on the numbers. But I would really emphasize that.  

 
Sandy Laycox: 
Finally, we discuss the role of The Council in this complex healthcare environment.  

 
Lisa Hawker: 
I’ll just say, first of all, my experience and having the opportunity to lead CEBE and having the opportunity to work directly with our government affairs team, I appreciate how spot on the GA team is, so first and foremost, kudos to Joel and to Blair and the whole team for being so astute and being so tuned in. What I also appreciate, and Blair and I had a conversation just walking by each other, something’s being brought to the surface and she’s like, “It’s coming from a carrier. I need to know is this real?” The willingness to reach out to any of us that are working in that broker space and take a temperature.  

 
I think that the opportunity that we just experienced a month or two ago with having Kate get involved in state legislation, because that opportunity for some state legislation to go awry and start to snowball. I know historically it’s almost always been focused on federal legislation, but I think we’re finding that in the current political environment, some things are popping up in states that could start to have a snowball effect. Maybe things can’t get done at a federal level, so we’ve got to be really tuned into that. For me, my experience has been always spot-on. The openness, the willingness. Take a few perspectives.  

 
Scott, when we do our advocacy and legislative meetings, he just throws something out there, like, “Why is this a big deal? Is this noise or is this real?” My favorite word in the world is professional curiosity. They’re just as curious. I can’t say enough great things about what The Council does for us in terms of the advocacy stuff.  

The other piece of that is the continued focus on education. We can’t rely on the carriers to provide everything. The Council’s done an amazing job of continuing to build out educational resources and always staying fresh.  

 
Jenn Walsh: 
From my perspective, it’s continuing to build a nimble, responsive workforce. Whatever comes with legislation, economic headwinds, everybody who is here needs to have the people who are ready, willing, and able to respond, whether they are veterans, whether they are newcomers to the business. We can continue to pivot and respond, but everybody has to have individuals in their organizations to react and lead their clients, because it’s all about the clients at the end of the day.  

It’s what I love to see, whether it’s as instructors, part of insurance, professional school, collaborating with The Council, our own academy programs. Even since I’ve been here at EBLF, meeting with Hunter from Institutes, there’s a growing network of people thinking about training and staff development and making sure members know who to tap into when. It’s such a huge problem. There are more than enough people to train for everyone at any point in time. I’m loving the energy around that, because if we have people who are nimble and curious, they’ll be able to respond in a moment.  

 
Lisa Hawker: 

I think The Council has done a good job and could continue to develop being the chief dot-connector. I really think that is very important. To your point, there’s enough of it to go around. If The Council becomes the place that I know if I go there, if they don’t have it, they know where to point me. That’s incredibly important because that way, you don’t have to develop everything. Having that collaborative environment and knowing it’s not us, it’s them, just allows everyone to use their resources better. We all have to do that and be more nimble, to your point. Yeah.  

 
Sandy Laycox: 
That was Lisa Hawker and Jenn Walsh onsite at The Council’s Employee Benefits Leadership Forum. I hope you enjoyed our conversation as much as I did. For more Leader’s Edge podcasts, go to leadersedge.com or find us wherever you listen to podcasts.