The Equity Talk: Why Darryl Page came out of retirement to be Chubb's chief culture officer

• Darryl Page came out of retirement to return to insurer Chubb as its chief culture officer.
• For the latest Equity Talk, he pointed out that DEI work helps businesses perform better.

There's no rest for the weary, Darryl Page told me during the second week of 2024.

He's vice president and chief culture officer at the insurance giant Chubb, and diversity, equity, and inclusion work falls under his remit.

Page told me he is focused on having engaging conversations at Chubb around DEI. "I think a view that this work is racist is, in my mind, misguided," he said.

"I think you have to, maybe, put the rhetoric aside and deal with the absolute facts," he said. In recent weeks, there has been DEI backlash, including tweets between corporate bigwigs such as Elon Musk and Mark Cuban. "The facts would suggest that this work has value, and it brings value to the organization and to the corporations that are engaged in it," he said.

DEI work helps businesses perform better, "as well as being the right thing to do," Page said, pointing out that "people start out from different places and have different life experiences." He said there's an important difference between equality and equity. Page used an example of walking into a room of people and giving them all a pair of size 10 shoes. That's equality, he said. While everyone has shoes, it doesn't work if you're not size 10. "But if you're going to treat people equitably, you're going to walk into that room and give them the shoes that fit their feet," Page said.

"I'm an advocate of treating people equitably," he said.

"Companies that embrace these concepts outperform," Page explained. "I think it's important that the work proceed."

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What do you do? Your title is unique.

I'm the chief culture officer. What that really focuses on is, overall, the care and feeding of the company's culture. It's a conversation about employee engagement. It's a conversation about how we understand and how we live into the key tenent of what our cultural dynamic is. I actually think that the culture of Chubb is fairly unique. We talk about culture in the context of it's what we practice. It's who we are. It's the behaviors we expect. And it's what we reward and recognize as a part of how we do our business on an ongoing basis.

Why did you take on this role? What change did you hope to make?

I've been in the insurance industry for more than 40 years. I started my career in 1981. I joined Ace, which is the predecessor company to Chubb, in 2012. I ran the international personal-lines business overseas. So I really came to this work as a business leader with a lot of experience running a business.

Interestingly enough, I retired from the company in July 2022. And I actually got a call back from our chairman and our chief human resources officer, and they asked me if I was interested in rejoining the company to take on this role of the chief culture officer. After some back and forth and some dialogue, and after some personal issues that I navigated through, I was excited to be able to rejoin and take on this opportunity. I felt like there was an opportunity for me to make a contribution in a way that would help Chubb's cultural identity get better aligned with its business identity in the marketplace. So that's really my story, and it's why I came back from retirement.

You talked about the culture of who the company is — and your workers — and then your business and clients. How are you measuring those two things?

I talked about Chubb's culture being unique. We do business in 54 countries and territories around the world. We operate in 30 different languages, minimally. We have three main pillars of our business: commercial lines, personal lines, and accident and health.

When you think about all the different combinations of those businesses that we operate, we probably have over 200 different product combinations. And so when you think about 54 countries and territories, 200 different product combinations, 30 different languages, diversity and inclusion is at the core of how we do our business globally.

The opportunity, I think, to mesh these two things is to find a way to do our cultural work in the same way in which we do our business work. In my mind, one of the real key attributes I think that I have an opportunity to bring to this work is to create clear pathways to better integrate these two things so that it's not separate work, but it's central to how we do what we do every day.

Was there a moment when you thought, "I need to do more? I need to have a bigger impact."

I think it first occurred to me right after George Floyd's murder. As you can imagine, a number of different companies were having very different conversations and I was approached by my predecessor in this role as a business leader in the organization to participate on a panel that was going to be part of a global broadcast, to talk about some of the issues that I experienced as a Black man in this industry for 40 years.

The subject matter was pretty raw and pretty clear to me. What I experienced after I spent an hour and a half on this discussion with my colleagues is I started getting phone calls and interactions from people, some of whom worked as part of my team, others that I had only met on a couple of occasions, but they were reaching out to me and wanting to have a conversation with me.

I think there was something about that, which helped me understand that there was a story I could tell. There was work I could do to help create a little clarity, a little focus, and a little alignment around how we can get some things done.

I've been involved in this work in the periphery for as long as I've been in the industry. When I started in this industry, in 1981, it was not unusual to walk into a room and be the only Black man. And the interesting thing about it is that there are still some rooms that I can walk into today, in 2023, where that's still the case. So there's a lot of work to do.

Can you recall a moment when you were dismissed and you had to stand up for yourself or you had to find your voice?

They're probably too numerous to count, to be really honest with you. There are a few instances where there's important business information that you need to impart, and you may have a difficult time getting the attention of leadership.

Early in my career, I experienced those types of situations. What was really interesting to me, and I think it's still a hallmark of how I try to do what I can today, is you have to find a way.

Sometimes when you walk into the room and you want to have a direct conversation, and people are preoccupied with other things and other circumstances, you don't have their full attention, or you're not getting the listening that you want. Sometimes when people do that, and they get dismissed or they don't get the hearing that they want to have, they give up. I think the challenge around this is that if you're really committed to your view on this, then you have to find a different way.

I worked for a boss early in my career who I had this experience with, and I found out that he read everything. I'd go to his office and talk to him and try to accomplish what I needed to accomplish. I got kicked out a couple of times. So I decided to write a memo to a couple of my colleagues and copied him on it. It wasn't a day later when he came to my office and said, "Is this what you were trying to tell me?" And I said, "Yeah, actually it is." He said, "Well, this is really critically important." And I said, "Yeah, I think so." And he said, "I wish you would have worked a little bit harder to try to make sure I understood this." And I said, "Well, I think I did." I said, "You know, you tossed me out of your office a couple of times, but I understood that you read everything that comes across your desk. So I didn't write this memo for those folks that it's addressed to. I wrote it for you, and now that we're here having the conversation, I think it's fair to say that we got done what we needed to get done."

So you find different ways, and I think that's an important element of any type of work that you're going to do in corporate America. Because you can be in a situation where your voice may not resonate the way that others' might. But if you're persistent, and you're focused and you recognize the importance of what you're trying to talk about, I think you can get the work done.

What do you find most overwhelming about your job?

It probably isn't necessarily overwhelming as much as it is kind of surprising: There's always an element of people saying that words matter.

When you begin to have conversations around belonging, equity inclusion, people sometimes have their own definition of what those words really mean. I find that it's very important to try to take those concepts, simplify them, and put them in a way that can resonate with people and where you can create clarity. I think a hallmark of my career from a leadership perspective — I always have said this to people — I said, if I can create clarity, I can create focus, and then I can create alignment. And I think one of the opportunities in this is how do we create clarity, how do we help people understand that this work isn't about advantaging one group over the other. It's about creating fairness and clarity.