Interview with Dennis Drent, CEO of VPI

VPI, the Veterinary Pet Insurance Company

VPI, the Veterinary Pet Insurance Company, a wholly owned subsidiary of Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co., is the oldest and largest provider of pet health insurance in the United States. Founded in 1980 by veterinarians, the company issues policies for cats, dogs, birds, and exotic animals. Dennis Drent (pictured above) has been the CEO of VPI for five years. Prior to assuming this role, he worked at Nationwide Insurance as Chief Internal Auditor.

We spoke with Drent recently about his experiences in the top executive role at VPI, and he shared his perspective as it has been influenced by his partnership with Rich Trafton and Diane Marentette of the New Brain for Business Institute.

Developing and Turning Around the Executive Management Team

VPI had several organizational challenges that needed to be addressed when Drent took over. Key company infrastructure areas—including systems and financial reporting—required close attention. Due to Drent’s prior management and auditing experience, Nationwide executives thought he would be a good fit to turn the company around. Drent made the move into the CEO position at VPI in September 2005.

Drent admitted that he was in a unique situation as he took over the CEO role at VPI, because he had never run a company before. In addition, VPI’s erstwhile senior management team members had either been fired or left – there was virtually no senior management team in place. Drent’s new C-level team members had been solid middle managers. Thus the whole executive management team was new – to each other and to their roles. Dennis was well aware that some thought the company might fold, but he intuitively believed that his move and this company were sound. It turns out he was right.

A Scattered Team

Early in Drent’s tenure, the team was struggling to come together. The executive team members’ actions were scattered and they weren’t coalescing. They weren’t working as a team, because they were siloed in their respective functions with each person mostly going his or her own way. And they often had both long yet surprisingly unproductive meetings. Drent felt stymied, and in 2006, he brought in Rich Trafton.

Rich attended many of the leadership team’s meetings; he also conducted one-on-one meetings with the members of the leadership team. He came to describe the unproductive team meeting activity as “swirling,” because no one addressed any problem directly. Discussions went around and around at great lengths, and no conclusions were made.

Rich was blunt: Change the meetings. Ground rules were established, including “no swirling allowed.” He taught team members to call each other out for it and helped them learn how to focus their discussions toward results. They learned to actively manage their meetings, so that they had a purpose. They began to assign tasks at the end of the meeting. Along with this guidance, Rich included all the members of the management group in a personality assessment process. This allowed Drent to realize how and why some people had difficulty fitting well into his vision of how the team could operate. Some of these people would eventually leave. Drent continued to use the assessment process as he hired people, with an eye to finding those who fit well into his organization.

Slowly, the executive team began to knit together. Along with the meeting work, Drent began to realize that he and his team were generally too polite to each other. “Polite” was edging out “honest” to the detriment of the functioning of the team. Drent wanted his team to be respectful, yet truthful and meaningful in their dealings with each other. (See a similar discussion in the blog post The Consequences of Nice-ness.) Dennis laughs and says that they are still a little too nice to each other, but they have come a long way.

Lasting Change is Slow

Drent admitted that making these changes has been quite difficult and has taken time. (See Rich talk about why change is hard.) Yet, the effectiveness of the executive management team was critical to the future success of the company. The team now employs one person full time as Executive Team Senior Administrator – called the Chief of Staff – to actively manage meetings and their outcomes; this person does follow up, lists tasks assignments, and supports the team’s effectiveness. Drent acknowledges, “It’s expensive to have a full-time person doing this, but it’s worth it.” What seems like a simple thing, changing how meetings are run, was in fact core to the problem solving and decision making of the executives at VPI. It was quite difficult to change – it involved a major culture shift in the team and took literally a couple of years. Now, the culture shift is evident – it has settled into simply how the executive team works.

The CEO Changed, Too

Rich has also been very forthright with Drent in another way: he helped him see how he could be more effective, too! It wasn’t just others who weren’t fitting in – Drent was on a fast learning track, too. One example Dennis related is his efforts at maximizing his relationships with people he reported to at Nationwide. Drent reacted to potentially difficult or confrontational situations with corporate folks in ways he could see were not helpful. Rich urged Drent to change his own story about the situation – he gave Dennis a way to change his mental models. For example, Rich suggested that someone may react in a certain way not because she/he is unhappy with you but because she/he has some circumstances you don’t know about. Drent’s efforts to change his stories truly has paid off in better relationships all around.

Drent has also been aggressively working on improving his public speaking skills, particularly important for when he addresses VPI staff at their regular all-employee meetings. A clear and confident communicator is a much more effective executive.

Drent’s focus quickly expanded from turning around the struggling company to shaping the company in ways that would help it thrive in sustainable ways.