Place at the Table

Rick Roberts is a curious guy.

That is a good thing, given that risk management has been Roberts’s profession of choice for just shy of three decades.

“You have to have curiosity to ask questions so that you can dig into issues with people to find out where risks are,” says Roberts, 2015 president of RIMS, the risk management society.

“I’ve never had an issue with asking questions and digging deep into problems and issues. I think that’s an attribute a risk manager has to have,” notes the seven-year member of the RIMS Board of Directors (BoD).

Being curious may be all the more important today in light of the ever-changing face of risk and the ever-evolving role of the risk professional. To say things are different than they were in 1988 when Roberts, now director of risk management and employee benefits at Ensign-Bickford Industries, Inc. (EBI), began his risk management journey can only be characterized as an immense understatement.

It has been no easy task, but risk professionals are now more frequently getting a seat at the strategy table,

a place Roberts contends they belong. “That’s where we feel we should be because anything you do in business has an element of risk,” he says.

“If you look back even as recently as 15 years ago, the risk manager of the company would have been seen as the insurance professional,” Roberts says of risk professionals’ long migration toward mitigation. “It has been a progression to get away from just being the insurance buyer to taking the same skill sets that you use, and applying those to business problems and strategy problems,” he adds.

Of course, challenges remain. “We’re still seeing the challenge of how best to communicate the value of risk management to our member companies through our risk professionals,” Roberts points out.

That said, he is heartened by the growing buy-in. “Senior management is really reaching out to risk professionals and the risk managers of our member companies are really looking to get input to help better assess risk within the company, to start working on the strategic plan and how to mitigate risk.”

Roberts is also encouraged by the new relationships that are forming internally within organizations. “Risk management now working with IT, risk management now working with audit, risk management now working with operations. It used to be more siloed,” he suggests. “I think partnerships that weren’t necessarily thought of before are now making

more sense,” he says, prompting solutions based not only on more, but also on different, perspectives.

Roberts says he is thankful that his work experience – coupled with his time to date at RIMS – has allowed him to look at risk from different viewpoints.

Roberts did not start his working life in risk management, holding “jobs doing a number of different things, mostly computer development, including automating insurance agencies,” before moving to health benefits provider, Aetna, he says.

“But I got really interested in risk management, got the ARM (associate in risk management) designation and then moved within Aetna (where he worked for five years) in a risk management position,” Roberts reports.

He later moved to EBI, where his duties have ranged widely, from heading security operations to managing the medical department, handling business resiliency planning, developing risk financing programs for lead paint and asbestos removal operations, and steering the enterprise risk management (ERM) program.

He currently designs and develops risk-financing programs, manages the ERM program and negotiates its employee benefits programs.

Roberts says that he has also gained exposure to different points of view away from work, most notably while serving at RIMS. His years on the BoD have “been tremendous to interact with” professionals and “hear how they handle risk,” he says.

For RIMS as an organization – and risk management as a profession – more change is on the way. Since taking on the position of RIMS president in January, Roberts notes that work has unfolded and continues to unfold.

RIMS has a number of objectives this year, including global expansion, advancing development of RIMS internal network to help members do their jobs and access the information they need, and working toward a standardized definition of risk professional. “We’re really working or trying to get to a point where we standardize that, and that’s going to take a while,” Roberts says.

Whatever the ultimate definition, “it has to be broad enough to encompass everybody that should be included under the umbrella, and then narrow down to a point where you can come up with it and define it as a profession.”

Though this will take time to achieve, “it’s something that we think is very important to continue to elevate the risk professional,” Roberts says. “We think it becomes a differentiator that will help our members,” he adds.

One challenge is how to get a risk management person, who is highly technical in his or her work, to think strategically – what he calls “an entirely different focus and a different approach.”

Says Roberts, “How do we develop those soft skills? How do we help people transition to that point where being asked to do things strategically versus in a technical manner?”

CHALLENGES TODAY, TOMORROW

Taking a strategic view is table stakes in a risk environment that is ever-changing and increasingly interconnected. Consider, for example, an issue as frequently mentioned in the media as in the C-Suite: cyber risk.

“Those types of issues, which have an element of insurance/risk financing behind them, are coming to the forefront,” says Roberts. And although everyone is far more aware today, “there’s still a pretty sizeable disconnect going on between what the Board of Directors thinks is occurring around cyber and what the IT professionals and risk professionals think is happening around cyber.”

Questions still need to be asked and issues “ferreted out around cyber,” he says.

Another issue on the risk radar is the proliferation of services offered through apps, such as Uber and Lyft.

“We’ve got all kinds of concerns around those types of services because of how they classify the drivers and what gaps are created in liabilities,” Roberts says. “Are you an independent contractor? Are you an employee? Who’s going to pay for what in the event that an accident occurs?”

Beyond auto, there are also apps related to property. “It creates all kinds of new liabilities and once that’s done, until you have

legislation coming in to figure out who owns what part of the liability, there’s going to be a question in gaps,” Roberts argues. “Those new types of service models are going to keep proliferating. So being on top of those service offerings is going to be an interesting challenge for a little while.”

When it comes to risk, change is to be expected. That, however, may be part of the appeal – and the ongoing challenge – of being a risk professional today.

It is an environment in which Roberts’s curiosity is unlikely to wane. “A lot of time people say there’s no stupid question. And then the real stupid question gets asked and people laugh. But how else do you learn?”

In that respect, he suggests it may be best for risk professionals to take their cue from children. Roberts recalls hearing a statistic that children ask something in the realm of 140 questions a day. “When you stop asking questions, you’re stopping learning.”

In light of everything unfolding today, now would hardly be the time to stop.