Rebecca Braitling, Poyee Chiu, and Sue Covelli-Buntley of UpSpiral Leadership interview Ron Arigo.
Rebecca, Poyee, and Sue all worked with Ron at Chubb Insurance where Ron served in multiple senior-level HR and business roles. After moving on from Chubb, Ron became the Chief Human Resources Officer at the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and is currently the Head of Human Resources at AAA Northeast. Ron believes in cultivating talent and has often played the role of mentor and friend.
[00:30] Introducing Ron Arigo
[07:53] Ron’s Passion for Creating Change
[11:08] How Ron Was Able to Think Bigger and Face Challenges
[15:27] The Art of Storytelling
[16:29] Managing Resistance to Change
[23:25] Lightning Round: A Series Of Brief Questions
[40:21] The Flip: “Change Is Hard”
After 28 years at Chubb Insurance, Ron sought a new path to attain his goal of becoming the Head of HR and occupy a position in which he could leverage what he had learned at Chubb to drive change. His time at Chubb had helped him establish many best practices and learn the value of investing in people, but the change had been mostly incremental.
Following his time at Chubb, Ron served as Chief Human Resources Officer for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Ron had essentially inherited a multifaceted business in his role. Though it was government, there existed a representation of various businesses like health and human services, transportation, information technology, and finance. He would be accountable for enterprise-wide recruitment, development, and retention of talent in a pool of stalwarts of public service. Many of the employees could not appreciate what they were missing in terms of HR and how it could serve them more effectively. He was hired and introduced as a change agent, but faced doubt among the team about the need for change and would have to sell every idea to them.
An important lesson Ron learned in his endeavors to drive change, often with audiences of varying change tendencies, is the art of storytelling. Often management uses either data or anecdotes to persuade and inspire. Ron’s winning formula is both. He affirms the importance of using data to ensure that you root yourself in fact and avoid being dismissed as not credible and using anecdotes to represent what else may be going on in the organization that data is ill-equipped to communicate. Ron adopted storytelling as a way to merge the data with the anecdotes.
According to Ron, the leadership trait that the world needs most right now is collaboration. As he sees it Project Warp Speed is an example of “best practice collaboration”. Government, scientists, business leadership, military, airlines, and other logistics-based organizations are collaborating on an incredible scale to end the global crisis of coronavirus. Although he believes government is sorely lacking in the skill of collaborative leadership, he identifies Governor Charlie Baker of Massachusetts as a leader who best models this leadership trait. “He is a leader who reaches across the proverbial aisle to get things done,” says Ron.
Ron’s biggest wish for the world right now is (relative) normalcy. The pandemic has created conditions that impede development and self-actualization in the different phases of our lives and we are living in the realm of protectionism. He shares his personal mantra for the times, “take this time to get physically healthy, mentally healthy, and as best you can, financially healthy, and emerge strong.”