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Posted 05.23.2009

Power & passion

Colorado Women’s Chamber of Commerce celebrates excellence, leadership and community service

Call them power women with a purpose.

This year’s Athena Award finalists are high-ranking professionals who care about their communities – and help other women achieve success.

On the following pages we profile Athena winner Caz Matthews, president of the WellPoint Foundation; and finalists Jill Tietjen, president and CEO of engineering consulting firm Technically Speaking; Sharon Linhart, managing partner of Linhart Public Relations; Cathy Hart, vice president of corporate services for Xcel Energy; and Tensie Homan, managing partner of accounting firm KPMG’s Denver office.

“The caliber of women leaders who were nominated for this prestigious award made it extremely difficult to select the Athena finalists and recipient,” said Donna Evans, president and chief executive officer of the Colorado Women’s Chamber of Commerce. “At the same time it is gratifying to recognize Colorado’s outstanding women leaders.”

ATHENA AWARD WINNER
CAZ MATTHEWS

WELLPOINT FOUNDATION PRESIDENT HAS EARNED ‘ROCK STAR’ STATUS IN DENVER

Photography by Todd Nakashima

From Caz Matthews’ loft on Market Street, you can see the southeast wall of Coors Field. You can also read the clock on that wall: Matthews times her workout to it when she uses the treadmill tucked by the street-view window.

“I watch the clock and trust me, I watch it,” Matthews says with a laugh.

It’s that down-to-earth attitude that carries through Matthews’ work as president of the WellPoint Foundation, the charitable arm of WellPoint Inc., one of the nation’s largest insurers. Matthews took the helm of the foundation in 2006 after 18 years with Anthem Inc., which merged with WellPoint Health Networks in 2004.

Matthews, 49, is best known for taking over Anthem-owned Blue Cross Blue Shield in Colorado in 1999 and steering it back to profitability and respectability over the next five years. After that, she spent nearly two years spearheading a similar turnaround at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Georgia before returning to Colorado.

Now, this year’s Athena Award winner gets to spend her time directing grants for one of the country’s largest corporate foundations. In 2009, the WellPoint Foundation will distribute more than $20 million to support health-care initiatives.
On this day in late March, Matthews was running late because of a tour at Ridge View Academy, a charter school near Aurora she visited to consider whether the foundation might support it. But whether that happens, no time was wasted.
“If it’s not in your giving mission … you can often think of other organizations or corporations or other persons that might be able to help, or you’ve heard of certain programs that they might tap into or apply for,” Matthews says. “In Denver in particular, it’s a very small community.”

Matthews has entrenched herself in that community, working with a variety of nonprofit, business and civic groups. And the downtown loft she bought five years ago – a contemporary space decorated with modern artwork — offers a meeting place for those efforts, holding up to 150 people.

“I bought it deliberately to be a space that would lend itself to events — community events, charity events, as well as political fundraisers because I wanted to be somebody who made whatever small contribution I could make to the community,” she says.

It’s that sense of connectedness that has led Matthews to make Colorado her home. A native of England, she has lived in the United States since she was 22, and first moved to Denver in 1999.

Her parents divorced when she was young, and she grew up in a “double Brady Bunch” household composed of a brother, a sister and five step-sisters. She shuttled between her mother’s home in England and her father’s home in Washington, D.C.

She once owned a farm in England, but she gave that up for a Colorado ranch in the mountains, where she keeps horses. When WellPoint sent her to Georgia in 2004, she knew she would return to Colorado as soon as she could. She made it back in 20 months.

“I was palpably homesick when I was out of Colorado. I loved Atlanta – Georgia is a fabulous state – but I didn’t feel rooted or centered,” she says. “And when I came back here it was like standing on firm ground again.”

On a recent night, about 50 people gathered at Matthews’ loft to hear about Project C.U.R.E.’s latest mission to Cuba to deliver surplus medical supplies. Matthews participated in the January trip so she could witness the Centennial group’s work firsthand.

“I love the work that Project C.U.R.E. does,” she says. “They’re a very high-grade organization, very well thought out, very efficiently run, with a great business model — which is take equipment and medical supplies that can no longer be used in the United States — and package them in a way that can be useful to underserved communities around the world.”
As she directs funding decisions in a tough economic environment, Matthews is looking for that kind of business sense in the organizations the WellPoint Foundation supports, including initiatives aimed at reducing the ranks of the uninsured. Three years ago, the foundation and its corporate parent committed to spend $30 million toward such programs.

Matthews transitioned from overseeing 3,000 workers in Georgia to helming a staff of six spread across the country in WellPoint’s various markets.

“I’m fortunate in that every single one of my staff loves their job because every single person on my staff is in the business of giving money away to deserving organizations,” she says.

LEADING A TURNAROUND

In her role as an executive at WellPoint, Matthews faced more trying circumstances. Newly divorced just two days before arriving in Colorado, she knew no one in town as she adjusted to her new surroundings and took on the task of fixing a company with serious problems.

“The challenges when I first came to Colorado were pretty significant within our own company. We had previously held the No. 1 market share position and had been a viable flourishing organization,” she says.

But Blue Cross Blue Shield had slipped to No. 3 and had lost about $200 million in the preceding four years. Its market share was eroding, its profit base was gone, morale was low and the company was losing employees.

“Employees will primarily stay with an organization that is financially viable. It’s the No. 1 satisfaction rater for any given employee. And so when the company wasn’t doing very well it prompted our associates to leave,” she says. The Price Waterhouse and Freddie Mac veteran, who began her career as an accountant, used the disciplines she had learned to apply some quick triage. What her management team needed was better data to measure performance.

“We didn’t know what our game plan was, what the business objectives were,” she says. “So we spent a long time in the early part of the time I was there developing business plans and creating metrics for success for every single department in the organization so that we had a comprehensive score card that I looked at daily.”

Anthem wasn’t the only one keeping a scorecard on the company’s performance. Matthews took leadership of a company that had a bad reputation for keeping up with medical claims. Early in Matthews’ tenure, the woman who several years later would nominate her for the Athena Award gave it to her straight up.

Hospital operator Exempla Healthcare was having significant problems with its claim payments by Anthem, says Debbie Welle-Powell, vice president of payer strategies and legislative affairs for Exempla.

“Our CEO and I went to meet with her,” Welle-Powell says. “We were sitting in this meeting, and I basically said, ‘You get an F for claims payment,’ and I thought this person would get really upset. Her response to her desire to improve that grade was noticeable. She really cared what we thought.”

A couple of years later, when a reporter called Welle-Powell to see if Exempla’s relationship with Anthem had approved, Welle-Powell gave the company a B+. She viewed the change as “a shot in the arm” for Anthem, which had made major improvements to its administrative systems.

Welle-Powell has been friends with Matthews ever since and calls her a “rock star in the community.” Her 22-year-old daughter, Ashlee Powell, worked for Matthews for several months as an assistant.

“One day she came home and said, ‘Mom, Caz has taught me about the kind of woman I want to be when I grow up.’ Nothing more needed to be said,” Welle-Powell says. “Caz connects to all women of all ages, all races and backgrounds. She is a champion and a consummate role model for so many of us.”

Christine Benero, president and CEO of Mile High United Way and former CEO of the Mile High Chapter of the American Red Cross, says Matthews encouraged her to apply for the United Way job.

“It was Caz who said, ‘You need to look at this opportunity. This is an organization I believe in. You should look at this because I know of your passion,’” Benero says. “She’s wonderful at connecting people’s passions.”

To inspire more women to give at the United Way’s highest funding level, Matthews offered to match each one who pledged $5,000.

“She is one of the most generous women that I know … and she has a tremendous vision for what this community can be,” Benero says. “It’s been an honor to be her friend over the past five years.”

TOUGH DECISIONS

Shortly after she arrived at Anthem, Matthews decided the company would increase its “involuntary attrition rate” – the number of people who were fired rather than left of their own choice — by 10 percent. Her managers weren’t thrilled about making that goal public within the company.

“And I said, ‘Well, this message is for the 90 percent that we want to keep — because the 90 percent know who the 10 percent are — people who are not carrying their weight, who are not committed,’” Matthews says.

As Anthem cut that 10 percent, it was able to retain more of the workers it wanted to keep. And the greater good prevailed, Matthews says.

“At the end of the year we regained the No. 1 market share position. We went from a $50 million loss to a $6 1/2 million gain,” Matthews says.

Among Matthews’ goals was to boost morale – she stressed to her leadership team that hers would be the only divorce among them in the coming year. And to give employees a greater sense of community, Anthem launched a major employee giving campaign for Mile High United Way.

“We got our giving up from about 6 percent to the high 40s in the first year … and established a whole series of volunteer programs and helped build pride in our company that way,” she says.

The company would ultimately win United Way’s “Spirit of Hope” for three years and the organization’s top honor, the “Champion of Hope” award, in 2002 and 2003.

“It was the only award that I ever got in a business or a personal context that made me cry,” Matthews says.

Matthews has served on Mile High United Way’s board of trustees as well as numerous other nonprofit, civic and business boards. She credits such work for many of the opportunities that later came her way, including her current board positions at Denver-based Qwest Communications and Dallas-based Perot Systems.

“The advice I would give to young women today would be to become involved in any active vehicle that can help you hone your skills,” she says. “You can get involved in volunteer opportunities, on boards, on committees to boards, civic organizations, charitable organizations.

“You learn best practices from these amazing persons who serve on boards or who work for these nonprofits,” she says. “And you can take those best practices and those skills and go back and apply them in your own day-to-day opportunity.”

Opportunities abound for women because corporate and nonprofit boards realize they need them, Matthews says.

“Women are sought after actively to make their contributions, to have their voices heard, as the wealth in this country has shifted to a much higher percentage of women making the active financial decisions,” Matthews says. “There is clear data to suggest that boards that have a nice diversity mix as it relates to men and women have a much higher performance track record.”

Matthews also has found that Denver in particular is a good place for professional women.

“The opportunity for women is significant, certainly more than when I lived in Atlanta or Washington, D.C.,” she says. “And the women here are willing to help you.”
— Mike Cote