Katie McLaughlin spent 22 years learning what it feels like to be the only woman in the room. Now the NFP senior vice president, based in Bethesda, Maryland, is making sure the next generation never has to.
Through a peer-to-peer cohort program she created in April 2022, McLaughlin has built one of the most talked-about women's development initiatives inside a major group benefits firm; one that has since expanded beyond its original borders and is drawing interest from across NFP. It spans benefits, P&C, wealth and retirement, with most members managing books of more than $1 million.
At the time of the program’s launch, the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) had recently published research highlighting the challenges facing women in the workplace compared to men, leading to disillusionment. Its director of policy and partnership research, Kerri Nelson, noted that "If organizations don't work to create equitable opportunities and more inclusive leadership environments, this disillusionment can have critical repercussions for organizations looking to develop and retain top female talent."
McLaughlin's path into group benefits was, by her own admission, an accident. A Division 1 lacrosse player at Fairfield University in Fairfield, Connecticut, she went straight into college coaching after graduating. When her husband - also a coach - took a position, the likelihood of finding two coaching jobs at the same institution was slim. McLaughlin took what she thought would be a temporary role at an insurance company.
"It's turned into a 22-plus-year career," she told Insurance Business Benefits US. It’s clear that what has kept her in the industry is not the products. It is the purpose.
"My heart has always been in coaching, but service to others," McLaughlin said. "The industry that we're in - there's no better way to serve others. Helping corporations insure their best assets, to insure their people - I take great pride in that."
That service orientation has shaped everything about the way she leads. NFP, one of the largest insurance brokerage and consulting firms in the United States, offers solutions spanning employee benefits, retirement, wealth management, and risk management, giving McLaughlin's team a broad platform from which to work.
She has used that breadth deliberately, building cohorts that expose producers to the full landscape of what the firm can deliver, not just the lines they were hired to sell.
The program McLaughlin created is called the Red Boat Crew. The name emerged from two things coming together at once: the convention of color-coding her producer cohorts and the timing of Women's Heart Awareness Month, which centers on the Red Dress Initiative.
When she reviewed her new producer roster after taking over her expanded leadership role, she found she had enough female producers to form a dedicated cohort of their own. The Red Boat Crew was born.
"People look for belonging," McLaughlin said. "They want to feel connected to something bigger than themselves. You spend more hours at work than you do with your own family - so don't you want it to feel like an atmosphere where you can feel comfortable? And more importantly, that you can feel like you're ready to succeed?"
The format is deliberately flexible. Each session has a loose agenda, but over three-plus years of running, the agenda has increasingly been shaped by the women themselves; what they need on the day they show up, whether that is a business challenge, a personal pressure, or simply a space to be heard.
"It's everything from individual goal to group goal. It can be non-business related that can actually have an impact on how you show up that day," McLaughlin said. "It's anything that they need to be the best versions of themselves."
The cohorts also compete against one another, which McLaughlin sees as a feature, not a contradiction.
"It's teaching you how to not just compete for yourself, but to compete for your team," she said. "You can have that mentality of hating to lose more than you love winning and still bring it into a healthy situation of competing at the best level."
The results have been tangible. Since the program launched, McLaughlin said the average sale among the women in the group has escalated. Mother-daughter producer partnerships have formed within the cohort. And producers outside the Red Boat Crew have started asking why they do not have something similar. It’s a dynamic McLaughlin credits with helping reshape the broader sales culture at NFP.
"The best athletes, the best individual performers, are actually those that lift up the team," she said. "If you can foster that type of culture, people are going to be happier, their outcomes are going to be stronger, and the clients are going to get a better product and a better deliverable. So everybody wins."
As the Red Boat Crew grew, McLaughlin recognized that keeping the group intimate was critical to its effectiveness.
She also recognized a separate need: producers new to the industry, with fewer than three years of experience, needed a different kind of support. The result is the Pink Boat Crew, a cohort designed for the next generation of female producers at NFP.
"There's no better way to stay focused on the future than to keep yourself looking forward, than to help lift somebody who's behind you to help propel them forward," McLaughlin said. "Because goodness knows, in my journey, I would have loved to have somebody help me say, watch that step, go this way versus that way."
The two-cohort structure now runs in parallel: peer support for producers at different stages of their careers, reinforced by one-on-one mentoring alongside the group sessions.
"Both go hand in hand," McLaughlin said. "That peer support, that group session learning, in addition to that individual support and that one-on-one mentoring - you've got to do both."
McLaughlin regularly speaks at college campuses, drawing on her network of former lacrosse coaches to arrange career talks with student athletes. She describes walking into rooms where the mention of insurance draws eye-rolls - and leaving them having made converts.
"If you're somebody who wants to help and you have a heart of service, but you want to compete because you love to win - this is a phenomenal industry to be a part of," she said.
She illustrates the point with a story about her own children. When her son was about seven, she tried to explain what she did for a living. Before she could start, he said: "Mommy, I know what you do. You help people."
"I think sometimes it's so hard to express - people think about the products that we advise on," McLaughlin said. "We're so much more than products. We help you get through the roughest stages of your life. We're there throughout the darkest times of someone's life or journey, and we're there to help. I mean, that's a lucky thing to be a part of."
For benefits brokers and brokerage leaders looking to replicate what she has built, McLaughlin stresses that the Red Boat Crew did not require a major investment or a corporate mandate. It started as an experiment.
"Although this is coming from the lens of Katie McLaughlin at NFP, these women are exceptional at what they do and more importantly, they're not unique in the sense of they only exist at NFP," she said. "They exist everywhere. So, why are we not doing this? Let's do it."
