NYSE Floor Talk Ellen Cooper, President & CEO, Lincoln Financial Group

Judy, thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here with you today.

Thank you. And yes, I'm two months now in the role of CEO, and I could not be more excited to be representing Lincoln Financial. And yes, just rang the bell, which is awesome. I have been with the company now for 10 years, and very much I'm part of the overall strategy. But at the end of the day, what we do at Lincoln Financial is we provide financial protection and security for everyday Americans. And so what we did through the pandemic to be able to provide that has just been incredibly valuable. So could not be more excited to be the new CEO in this role and also be thinking about our next chapter as we go forward.

Right now, we're most focused on a couple of things. We are really executing on a number of areas related to our current strategy. So we offer a lot of products around financial protection and security, and we are continuing to build product that really meets customer value propositions. So that's one thing that we're doing. We're doing quite a lot to modernize our technology, because at the end of the day, we, like many other financial services companies, are very much digitally enabled. We're doing a lot around our relationships, around customer service and customer care. And then the other thing that we're doing that's so important is we're really focused on our talent, because at the end of the day, we can't execute if we don't have a strong corporate culture, which we do, and also have really strong practices and processes around things like diversity, equity, and inclusion. And so I can't say more about the energy and excitement across the 11,000 employees that we have around CEO transition and also the value of what we do each and every single day. And making sure that we continue to really support that and enable it is really important in terms of future strategy.

Great question. So one thing that is really important is that we really pride ourselves on building strong teams and overall collaboration, so that people work extremely well together. But then we also do a lot as it relates to leadership development, and we're building out programs around mobility so that people can move across the organization and find opportunities. Just to give you a sense of how much of that we've done: I was internal, I worked for Lincoln for 10 years and became the CEO as part of that. We have four people that were just promoted that are now direct reports to me, and we have about 35 people in our next level down out of 75 that were internally promoted over the last couple of years. It really goes to what we're doing there. And then we also have just developed a broad enterprise-wide recognition program so that when people are doing great things, we're remembering to stop, pause, and celebrate. And we call it Shout Out, and it's just had tremendous success in recognizing all the great work and all the value add that our employees are doing each and every day.

Thank you so much.