Secret to Success: People Matter
Written by Melanie D. G. Kaplan Tuesday, September 21 2010
Liz Haar, president and CEO, Accident Fund Holdings Inc. 
It’s only fitting that Liz Haar ended up in an industry that deals with accidents, well, by accident.
“I had not intended to go into insurance,” says Haar, president and CEO of Accident Fund Holdings Inc., the country’s ninth largest non-governmental specialty writer of workers compensation insurance. “I was intending to go back to school and get a master’s in statistics and do research or teach. But I needed a job to pay for my master’s. And I never left.”
Haar had entered a male-dominated industry that didn’t have the best reputation, but with her degree in mathematics from the University of Michigan, Dearborn, she found the technical and theoretical sides of insurance fascinating.
“A lot of what keeps our economy running is that there are insurance companies willing to take on the risk,” she says. “But behind the technical part, it’s all about relationships. You don’t get many careers with that mix.”
After about a year, Haar committed to insurance. She began as an actuary at Michigan Millers Mutual, at a time when it wasn’t uncommon for her to be the only woman – and the youngest person – in meetings.
Her second career stop was at Citizens Insurance Co., where she met her mentor, CEO Roy Westran (who later became chairman of the board at Accident Fund Holdings). At a point in her career when Haar was heavily focused on the business side, Westran taught her about the people side. “I had the opportunity to sit down with him and ask for advice,” she says. “He talked to me about having gratitude and about all the things people to do make [our business] possible. I knew it in the back of my head, but I wasn’t very good at remembering it all the time. He really brought it home for me.”
Haar joined Lansing, Mich.-based Accident Fund Insurance Company of America as the chief actuary and was named president and CEO in 2005 (Accident Fund Holdings Inc. was created in 2009). Today, Haar says she sees more female executives than there were even five years ago. She’s not the only woman in meetings, and, unfortunately, she laughs, she’s not the youngest anymore either. “The number of women is still definitely not representative of the world in which we live,” she says, “but it’s better than it used to be.”
It’s no surprise Haar ended up in an industry that helps people. She grew up volunteering through her 4H club, often working with animals. As an adult, she has donated her time to countless organizations that are close to her heart. One is the Michigan chapter of the American Red Cross, to which she was drawn after her son needed a blood transfusion for a childhood surgery. She also sits on the boards of a few industry organizations and a career advisory council to help young talent recognize the opportunities in the insurance field.
Haar says her success – like everything else in the industry – comes back to people: peers, bosses, coaches, mentors, and friends. “There’s nothing you can accomplish in the business world alone,” she says. “I wouldn’t have this job today if it weren’t for the 1,100 people who work for our organization – the agents who sell the insurance and the employers who buy it.”
And Haar is quick to say that she also wouldn’t be where she is today without her husband and kids. She has gotten better at asking for help – at work and at home – and it’s even easier now that her children are 17, 15, and 12 years old. “I think it’s very hard to tell people when you need help – as a CEO but also in other roles,” she says. “I’ve found that almost all the time, the people you ask are receptive.”
The trick for Haar is prioritizing -- knowing what she has time to do and where she needs assistance. When she loses sight of her top priority, she says it’s easy to get sucked into day-to-day tasks. “Email is a perfect example,” she says. “You can make a whole career out of nothing but answering email, but then you can’t devote your time to what’s really important. This is a constant process.” Every day, Haar prioritizes emails as they arrive. In a five- to 10-minute check, she labels them green, yellow, or red, with green being issues she needs to respond to in the next 48 hours. Her assistant uses the same color coding system for all the paperwork that enters her office, which goes into three inboxes. “I review those regularly to make sure they are focused on the right thing,” she says. “Am I really spending my time on things a CEO should be spending her time on?”
She also reminds herself of priorities at home, and she has to let some things go; she may, for instance, accept laxer cleaning standards while spending more time with her kids. Work and family usually battle for the No. 1 spot, and her personal self – the one that covets more yoga and gym time – inevitably comes third. She has recently gotten back into horseback riding – a childhood hobby that she has rekindled so she can ride with her daughter -- and she spends many weekends with her family at sporting events – watching her son’s soccer games, the Detroit Tigers, or University of Michigan football.
And while she tries to make the right decisions on the endlessly tipsy work-family scale, she remembers one thing that Westran, her mentor, once told her. Every night he would sit down with his family, and before dinner they said grace. He gave thanks for the customers and employees of the company. “That was very meaningful for me, how he always remembered the people,” she says. “He kept that in the forefront.”
Melanie D.G. Kaplan is a contributing editor at SmartPlanet/CBS Interactive and a regular contributor to The Washington Post, where she writes about road trips with her beagle. She lives Washington, D.C.
