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Thought Leadership Research in Retirement Planning | Mike Mansfield
Publishing Thought Leadership in an Effective Way
An interview with Mike Mansfield about research and surveys for use in thought leadership.
Today’s guest is Mike Mansfield, the Program Director for the Aegon Center for Longevity and Retirement. We talk with Mike about the research that goes into creating thought leadership for retirement planning and how Aegon is helping people think about more than just finances for their later stages of life.
Mike shares how Aegon is finding their audience and reaching them by partnering with other organizations. He explains the methods they use to measure success, and how thought leadership is serving both the organization and its clients.
Plus, we explore how the preparation and deployment of their retirement readiness survey have changed post-COVID-19.
Three Key Takeaways from the Interview:
- How the previous experience that thought leaders have can elevate their message.
- Thought leadership is as much of a people game as it is a knowledge game.
- Use short targeted content to reach specific groups with your thought leadership that might not spend the time to read a full survey or report.
Join the Organizational Thought Leadership Newsletter to learn more about expanding thought leadership within your organization! This monthly newsletter is full of practical information, advice, and ideas to help you reach your organization’s thought leadership goals.
And if you need help scaling organizational thought leadership, contact Thought Leadership Leverage!
Transcript
Bill Sherman Hello. You’re listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership. I’m your host, Bill Sherman. And today we’re talking about one of my passions, organizational thought leadership. That is the people who create, curate and deploy thought leadership on behalf of their organizations. My guest today is Mike Mansfield. He’s the program director for the Aegon Center for Longevity and Retirement, which is a collaboration of experts assembled by Aegon with representation from Europe, the Americas and Asia. In today’s episode, we’ll talk about his work with the Center at the time of recording their 2020 Retirement Readiness report was recently published. So we talk about the center, the report itself, as well as the complexity of producing a global research study during the Covid 19 pandemic. Mike has been with Aegon for 17 years and before working for the Center for Longevity and Aging, he served as the sustainability officer and internal auditor. We’ll also explore the perspective of someone with an auditing and accounting background and what they bring to the world of thought leadership. All right. Let’s begin. Welcome to the show, Mike. Thanks, Joe. So let’s begin. Many people who get into thought leadership arrive from different roads. Tell me quickly a little bit of your story, how you got here and what you’re doing now.
Mike Mansfield Great. Actually, I got here through rather a securities route. I’ve been working at Aegon for the past 17 years. And my last job before I started this role was actually in our sustainability department and within the sustainability department. We were really looking at the social value Aegon has and how we could help people achieve a lifetime of financial security. And that was a real natural lead in to looking at that a little deeper and looking at the retirement research and what that means for Aegon.
Bill Sherman So you went from sustainable sustainability and the social piece to working with thought leadership. And I think one of the topics that’s important for you is the social contract in between individuals, communities, governments, employers. Could you say a little bit about that and some of the research that you’ve been doing at Acorn?
Mike Mansfield Sure. And I think this really goes back to our purpose in terms of helping people achieve a lifetime of financial security. What we’ve seen is that the retirement security is in many countries are based on three pillars how governments, employers and individuals all contribute to a sustainable retirement system. But there’s a lot of financial strain on governments and employer based retirement plans, and there’s a lot of responsibility shifting to individuals. And that’s oftentimes a responsibility that people either aren’t equipped or don’t feel comfortable to take on their shoulders. So we really want to empower people to make the decisions, to get involved in the conversation and to really think about their retirement preparations and what that meant. So the new social contract is a series of papers and reports that we’ve put out over the past four years, really looking in detail at how those social partners work together to create a sustainable retirement system for people.
Bill Sherman And so that’s research that’s conducted with both working folks and some people who are retired, but looking across a global basis, correct?
Mike Mansfield That’s correct. So we’ve been doing the research now for nine years in total, and we cover 15 countries around the world. So we’ve covered Europe, the Americas, Asia and Australia and have been doing the research because we really want to see how things are changing around the world and how that really is impacting people’s ability to to retire in a comfortable lifestyle, but taking really the best of what’s working in different countries so that we can share best practices to come up with a new social contract for people.
Bill Sherman Now you’re working inside Aegon’s Center for Longevity and Retirement, and from what I understand, that’s been around since 2015. Tell me a little bit of the story of how that center came to be, What sparked the creation? Because I’m assuming you weren’t in a meeting one day and people said, yeah, we should create a center for this. So what’s that story and how did the decision come about?
Mike Mansfield It’s a good question. No, it wasn’t. It wasn’t just one day in a conference room. The center was born. Like I say, we’ve been doing the research now for nine years, and we started 2012, had been doing it for a couple of years, and we started the center in 2015. And I think after having done it for a few years, we realized this is an area we really want to make a difference. We want to make our name in this area in terms of our thinking and in terms of helping people understand what’s happening. So the creation of the center was really a commitment to doing this over the longer term. It was a statement of the fact that we’re here to stay and help people think about going forward. And that’s the issue going forward. And I think what really helped us within the company we set up the center was we set it up with an advisory board from people from our larger country units. They really gave us some great perspectives in terms of what’s happening in the different markets. And also, we’re a great way for us to connect with issues in the business and so on, and we can take in and make sure that we incorporate those into our research.
Bill Sherman So as you developed that process and said, okay, we’ve done this for a few years, we’re ready to make a commitment going forward. One of the things that comes to my mind is you have to find where you’re going to focus. And I think you alluded that a little bit in terms of where are we going to make a difference? How do we add to the conversation? So can you describe a little bit of that And tell me, where did you find your lane, which became the new social contract? How did how did you realize what you were going to talk about and add value rather than repeating what others were saying already?
Mike Mansfield That that’s really, again, part of that evolutionary story. So who we when we started in research back in 2012, it really was quite a naturally paced conversation in terms of what does it take to financially prepare for. And as we’ve been doing the research and speaking with other people and the thought leaders in the area, we’ve seen that preparing for retirement and really preparing for longer lives is more than just finance. That to be able to enjoy a longer life, you really have to have good health so that you can do the things you’ve been saving so hard for, but also that you are able to adapt to changes in the way we living and working. So health was sort of woven into the story as we developed. And then again, we looked at what’s changing in the world and saw that it’s not just about wealth and having good health, but it’s also about making sure that you are resilient, that you’ve got this you’re keeping your skills up to date. You focus on lifelong learning so that you are able to move along on the rollercoaster of life. I mean, now more than ever, we see it with Covid that people are really being their resilience is being tested and they need to have as much in their arsenal as they can to make sure that they get through this crisis. And that’s kind of where it evolves, and that’s where we wanted to take the conversation.
Bill Sherman So we’re recording in August of 2020, and Covid remains a very signal issue for 2020 and going forward. And so you’ve got a history of looking at issues of aging, health and longevity. And so I want to ask you one, did you see a difference in the data between, say, 2019 and 2020 when you asked those questions? And then, two, how did the process of doing the survey evolve and change as you were working through Covid? Right. So the topic was relevant, but you’re talking to people at a time where their minds are elsewhere and trying to say, hey, we want to sit down with you and do a survey or interview by phone or online. It’s not top of mind for a lot of people.
Mike Mansfield Indeed. And that was the point forward to doing the research. So we did the fieldwork for the survey in late January. And at that point, Covid had been an issue in China and some other countries.
Bill Sherman And the survey covers China, correct?
Mike Mansfield It didn’t need it as a cover as China, but it hadn’t moved across to Western Europe, North America, to the point where it is right now. So our survey data was, for the most part, pre-COVID. So in writing the report, it was really one of the most challenging and interesting reports to write for the fact that we had to translate findings or translate the findings from the research and mirror that over what’s going on in the world around us. So we saw a lot of things about how people want to live and work longer. But we needed to translate that into how companies are reacting to the changes in terms of employment, changes in employment trends and so on, and be able to balance the message so that we can incorporate the trends of today with the findings that we had and from the research and actually turned out very well, I think in terms of being able to get the right balance in the conversation, even though our research data didn’t include all of the finding that might have been if we did a survey post-COVID.
Bill Sherman Now, your you mentioned you were in the fields in January of 2020, which suggests you might be back in the field January 2021 and Covid likely to be present and having different impacts on different geographies. How as you prepare for putting the next iteration of the survey into the field, how is your thinking being impacted? How are you and the team addressing this question?
Mike Mansfield It’s a good question and we haven’t started the detailed planning in terms of the questionnaire that we’d sent out yet for the 2021 survey. But I think we probably would be looking at many of the elements where people and how people save for their retirement. How are they thinking about job security, How are they thinking about their health? How are those factors playing into their plans and their ability to prepare for retirement? I think especially when you see labor contracts become more flexible in different countries, that’s got pluses and minuses in terms of people’s ability to move in in the job market, which also means you lose an opportunity if you’re used to a long term relationship with an employer to save over the longer term or have health benefits over the longer term, which means, again, more responsibility shifting to the individual.
Bill Sherman So we’ve talked about several iterations and the of the Retirement readiness survey. And the center from its history. Let’s talk a little bit about who you’re trying to reach now. So as you said, you’ve been doing this for nine years. Who is your target audience for the center? Who are you trying to reach and influence? Can you describe some of those target audiences and how you’re trying to reach them?
Mike Mansfield And I think I’ve mentioned earlier that if you look at retirement systems in many countries, it’s often based on three pillars the individual, the employer and the government where we’re writing the reports. We always bring in recommendations for those three stakeholders. So they would be our main target audience in terms of who we want to reach with recommendations and engage in the conversation. And the way we’ve done it is we’ve tried to partner with organizations that reach a similar audience in terms of people and in terms of the level of people that we want to work with. So we’ve had a long term relationship with organizations like the OECD and have spoken at their forum and been involved in in many of their programs who are involved in future work working group and other groups to make sure that we are really addressing issues with the right people so that we can get the message to people and engage them in the conversation.
Bill Sherman So with the report, I can see that when you’re trying to reach folks in government, public policy NGOs as well as employers, there are folks who will sit down, read a report, digest it as part of their role and responsibility. How about for the individual employee? How are you making that information and telling the story in a in a way that the individual workers somewhere around the world can access it and make better choices? Because you talked about that more responsibility is being put on their shoulders. How are you getting the information to them?
Mike Mansfield That’s a good question because, I mean, much as I think our reports are wonderful, they are in many cases, you know, 40, 50 and sometimes even longer in terms of length. So, I mean, I don’t think many people are going to read them cover to cover. So what we do with the reports is we try to bring a collateral that’s engaging. And I think that’s very important because it’s it’s really all about having an inclusive conversation. So what we’ve done in the past is we’ve brought out videos that are more targeted to individuals that we share on social media. We run different campaigns. We did a report back up a little bit. So we bring out the annual report every year. And that’s sort of the global look. We also bring out thematic reports that are looking at groups that are more vulnerable for retirement when it comes to preparing for it. And we did one this year on women. So the report we did, looking at women’s preparations with a really lovely series of social media posts around women looking forward and backwards. What advice would I give my older self for my younger self? And they were really engaging and really helped get the conversation going on social media. So I think that really helped the individual as well as the policy folks. We might likely reach through areas like The Weekly.
Bill Sherman So you’re trying to reach different levels of audiences with different although they’re all invested in the topic. They have different degrees of time available to digest the information. So how are you measuring success for reaching these audiences and how do you know the message is being heard? Can you give me a story, an example, or are you using metrics? How do you gauge the effectiveness of the research Readiness survey as well as the other materials you’re putting out?
Mike Mansfield So we do that in at various different and various different ways. So in terms of the research that comes out, we would measure media reach once increase. And so we would put the we put the report out and we have our launch will monitor the number of media outlets that cover it, which would be one to make sure to see how it was getting taken up in the press. Another important metric would be looking at speaking engagements to see if we’re invited to speak at events like the ACTU and who were invited to speak at an event organized by the World Economic Forum recently as well, and other similar thought leaders like the AP. Very important for us as well. But also we would measure success in terms of some of the programs we’re doing. How are we moving the needle and helping people prepare for their for their retirement? And one example would be a program we ran last year to help people who were age 50 in the past. Think about entrepreneurship, for instance. Something to them was I couldn’t help them.
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Bill Sherman So let’s shift a little bit here and I want to ask you a question. You’ve got a background and you alluded it to it earlier where not only working in sustainability but a background in accounting, Right? And how does that past prepare you for what you’re doing today? Well, if you were to look back and you were talking earlier about, you know, what advice would I give my previous self? I’m guessing that when you went to college, you said, I’m not going to be writing research reports on longevity and retirement preparedness. So where’s the through line and how does it help you, your experiences that have gotten you here?
Mike Mansfield I’m not sure. In college, I even knew there was a job called retirement research. So it’s.
Bill Sherman Very.
Mike Mansfield Very I’m a I am certainly a chameleon. I started off life, as you say. I studied accounting in college. I became an auditor. And since I moved into sustainability and I think I’ve learned things as I went along and I, I really have been wonderfully fortunate to have so many opportunities. I think as an auditor, you’re trained and it’s ingrained in you to think about things from the perspective of what can go wrong, what’s out there influencing systems that’s going to make them either not work or make them work better. And that really does help when you’re looking at the topic of retirement living longer because you’re really looking at things like, you know, what’s influencing us and what can we plan to make sure that we’ve got a more robust system. And I think the move into sustainability really was looking at what we as a company can do to create systems that will work in the long term. As a as a life insurance and pension company. We’re making people have a relationship with people over a 30, 40, 50 year period. We need to be around for the long term. So what’s it going to take for us to develop a system that is sustainable where no one gets left behind and a system where when the sounds of responsibility are shifting and people feel empowered and that there is fairness in the system and fairness in the discussion so that those two areas, the audit and the sustainability, I really think help give me some balance and focal points in terms of thinking about the research and thinking about where we want to focus our messaging.
Bill Sherman Wonderful. The reason I asked that question is for most of the guests on this podcast, as well as people who are practicing and thought leadership, it’s a second or a third career. And what I typically find is that your past roles really inform sort of the mindset you bring to the thought leadership work that you’re doing. And so it’s really interesting to see how that auditor’s sort of attention to detail and looking and saying what could go wrong. Makes total sense of how it would connect to planning a survey. And then you also have the things where even when you ask what could go wrong, there are the large unexpected events such as Covid, where you think something could happen, but you’re not really prepared for it to happen. And the scale and the magnitude, perhaps. Right.
Mike Mansfield Absolutely. And, you know, I think just even as a short aside, I mean, it was a big step to move from idea to sustainability. But I think if you have that mindset of what can I take from my past and bring it to my future, my way of getting into sustainability was convincing people with an accountant, you know, here’s the other guy. So looking at sustainability, we need to have our non-financial numbers, right? So let me take care of making sure that the numbers are right. And I work really closely with a colleague who is a journalist by background. So, you know, I was a numbers dude and he was the writer. And to get a good team and again, you just you take what works in the past and you make it work again in the future.
Bill Sherman So I’d like to put you a little bit on the spot and ask you a question. We’ve been talking about thought leadership. I’d like you to ask and I’d like to ask you how you define thought leadership. What is it you’ve talked about working with thought leaders from other organizations and individuals? I’d like to hear your perspective. How do you define it and how does it serve the organization?
Mike Mansfield So I think like for me, thought leadership is really getting people to take the next step in terms of the way they’re thinking and in looking at ways of considering different perspectives and different issues that might impact the way the world is evolving around them. I think that that’s very important in terms of what we want to do achieve with thought leadership. So it’s really getting more into the mix of our of our discussions. I think, to make it work. Really what I’ve learned is that it’s a it’s a people game as much as an island. They’re really trying to convince people to get involved in the conversation. You really have to be inclusive in terms of encouraging people with different perspectives to get involved and bring that message across in a way that’s both empowering and achievable for people.
Bill Sherman So I’d like to ask you there for an example on getting voices involved. So when you say, hey, we’re looking at issues of longevity and retirement, that’s a big issue that no individual or organization can tackle on their own. How are you bringing voices? How are you joining the conversation and making sure that others are heard included and that they’re part of the conversation to the right voices that might not be center stage get lifted up. Can you give an example or a story of either what you’re doing or when it works well?
Mike Mansfield Yeah, sure. So I think internally we sort of look at it from the from the business perspective and getting people in from different parts of the business in terms of what’s changing in their world. But looking outside as well, I think we need to have both internal and external perspective. We’ve been working very closely with an organization called the Academies when it comes to an agent here in the Netherlands. And like you could imagine from the name of the organization, they’re really focused on helping people achieve wellness throughout their life. And the program I mentioned earlier about people who might be interested in entrepreneurship in their 50s and above. We did that project with them because we really wanted to look at the fact that there are stereotypes out there about what it is to be older, about the contribution people make at different stages of their lives. So we wanted to break that, that stereotypes and highlight that program.
Bill Sherman So how did that project go? Can you give an example or story of how that came to life and the results that happened?
Mike Mansfield Sure. So it was a project. So we’ve been doing research for a while and seeing that people’s views on aging and their transition to retirement is changing. So we have 30 people now see retirement as a clear majority. Want some form of transition to retirement. That’s a great finding. But, you know, you need to move from findings to something that’s concrete. So with the London Academy for Vitality and ran a program to help people discover if entrepreneurship was something for them and we put them on a course to see how you develop a business plan, how you pick your idea and so on. And the wonderful thing was the winner was a gentleman who was 82 years of age. He started up a business which was based on an idea he had for his life. He was ready to live in his home. He wanted to live independently on his own, but still wanted to feel connected and developed an app that would allow him to do that. And I think that program really helped us understand that people are living longer. They can make a contribution. So all the things I mentioned before in terms of maintaining good health, lifelong learning, this was how you tie all those things together and make sure that people are and stay economically active, committed to their in their dreams and live out what they really want to do with their lives. So it was a it was definitely the feel good program for last year.
Bill Sherman Well, and that’s a great stereotype breaking example. So if I were to say picture a app developer in your mind, the image is not the 82 year old gentleman, you know, saying, I’ve got an idea to make life easier on how to live. You come up with an entirely different image on your and your head.
Mike Mansfield And if I can be a mind reader, it’s probably a guy with a hoodie, a garage or something.
Bill Sherman Yeah, possibly. Yeah. Whether in Silicon Valley, Silicon Alley, all sorts of places in the world where you’ve got someone with a coding mindset and instead you have someone who’s approaching it from the other side saying, I want to stay connected. I need to use technology to help me stay connected with family, friends, the world, whatever I need, and solving a problem through technology rather than coming the other way out of it and saying, I know technology, what problems need to be solved?
Mike Mansfield Absolutely. And you know, the one thing he said at the end of the program when we interviewed him, he said, you know, when you retire, it’s all lovely to drink coffee with your friends and travel and so on. But you really should ask yourself the question, what do I want to become? And it’s stuck in my head because, I mean, it just it’s to me it shows that at all stages in life, we have a contribution to make, you know, a program that can really help give somebody the confidence and empower them to take the next step.
Bill Sherman In the spirit of what do I want to become, which I think is a great sort of motto for all of us as we go forward. The focus in this conversation is for thought leadership practitioners. How do we become better at what we do, right? And that’s an evolutionary process. You’ve been doing this for a while, so I know that there are many listeners out there who are new to the practice of thought leadership, either creating content, deploying it, curating it. My question for you is what advice would you give to someone who is relatively new to the role of thought leadership for their organization? Maybe a tip or two that you’ve learned along the way that would make life easier? Where should someone focus their effort?
Mike Mansfield I think one thing I learned, I think it’s something maybe it’s from coming from a technical role as an auditor is that you often, as you’re trained as an auditor, to kind of know accounting rules and know how things work. And over the course of time, I’ve learned that people really are the motive behind what makes things work. And research really is about people. It’s it has to be about people. So include people in the conversation. Talk to people about ideas. Everybody has an idea out there and you need to hear as many of them as you can so that you can put them together in your head and come up with how they’re linked together, how they how they how it impacts one person’s view of the world and that impacts of yourself. Understanding other perspectives. Talking to people really is crucial and not just to focus on the only on the technical part, which is absolutely very important. And then your research has to has to be accurate. It has to be super high quality for people. And engagement within and outside the organization is really important. Building allies.
Bill Sherman I think that’s so true. Thought leadership is a catalyst to help focus energy and conversation. It helps people see around corners. And like you said a little bit earlier. Identify the next steps to take.
Mike Mansfield Yeah.
Bill Sherman But if you’re trying to do it on your own, you’re pushing the boulder up the side of the hill. You have to recruit many hands towards a shared vision to achieve any success on a project that’s really worthy of thought leadership.
Mike Mansfield And I think it’s only a shared vision is going to have resonance within a company. It can’t just be your vision and you’re one person within a company, but many people at all levels have to do. I mean, you have to have executive sponsorship who see that it’s important. You have to have people in the business who can talk to their clients about it. You have to be able to have people who can use it within the company h.r. People to help move the conversation as well. So. It is really ambassadors are really important.
Bill Sherman So as we wrap up now, Mike, I want to ask you, we’ve talked a lot about the retirement Readiness survey and the Center for Longevity and Retirement. If people want to learn more either about the survey or the center, where should they go? How can they find some of the work that you and your team are doing?
Mike Mansfield That’s a good. Well, it’d be great if they wanted to get in touch. They could get in touch with me directly. Mike [email protected] or you can visit our website aiken.com where you can see the research. There’s a tab on our website that’s going to all our previous research. So it is all available on the website now. And you can also see some of the work that we do in our collaboration with our colleagues at the nonprofit Transamerica Center for Diamond Studies in the US and the Institute for Longevity in Brazil as well.
Bill Sherman Thank you very much for joining us today.
Mike Mansfield It’s been a pleasure. Thanks indeed.
Bill Sherman If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please join our LinkedIn group. Organizational Thought Leadership. It’s a professional community where thought leadership practitioners talk shop about our field. So if you’re someone who creates curates or deploys thought leadership for your organization, then please join the conversation in the organizational thought Leadership LinkedIn.
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