Blair Richards’ ability to build consensus and lead strong teams has been a driving factor behind the success of the Halifax Port ILA/HEA Pension Plan. He says those skills didn’t come naturally to him, but he learned their importance while growing up in a large Acadian family. Richards is one of seven children—his mother is one of 12; his father, one of 14. “I’m just used to large groups,” he laughs. “Informally, you learn that you have to get along if you want to accomplish certain things.”
Family aside, through more formal education, Richards eventually acquired “soft skills” such as team building, trust and delegation. “Once I bought into this idea that the results would be better if I didn’t micromanage everything—that you had to surround yourself with good people and then trust them to do the job—things got a lot better.”
Richards was a longshoreman and actively involved in ILA Local 1341 in Halifax before jumping ship to the pension team in 1992. (Employers and union locals asked him if he would consider a position that included the responsibilities of health, pension and investments.) Though he remains a card-carrying union member, he hasn’t been to meetings since becoming CEO of the pension plan on Jan. 1, 2000. “I am a blue-collar guy operating in a white-collar world,” he quips. “If you had said to me, ‘You’re going to be in a suit, and you’re going to spend all your time with accountants, actuaries, lawyers and investment people,’ I would have thought, You’ve got some serious drugs happening. Yet here I am.”
But that blue-collar guy who double majored in history and French at Dalhousie University quickly saw that the education valued in the pension industry was more “quantitative.” So he got his executive MBA at Saint Mary’s University and finished other certifications and courses, as well as becoming heavily involved in various pension industry associations. “It was critical, in my mind, that I not be sitting in meetings with investment managers or accountants and not understand what they were presenting,” he notes. “It was never that I had to be able to build an optimization table or a balance sheet, but I thought it was really important that no one should ever be able to put one in front of me that I didn’t understand.”
Richards says his parents instilled in him and his siblings an appreciation for learning. “My parents were forced out of school early. They had to go to work to contribute to the family. And I think that stuck with me.”
He is also a big promoter of the work of the federal government’s Task Force on Financial Literacy, whose recommendations are focused on improving Canadians’ understanding of saving for retirement. “It’s unfortunate, to say the least, that we allow kids to go through 15 or 18 years of school and have them not understand credit, banking and so forth.”
Richards passes on the knowledge he has obtained by ensuring that the Halifax Port ILA/HEA Pension Plan trustees fully understand the complexities of the plan. “One of the reasons we’ve been successful is that we make it clear to the trustees that we’re going to invest in them,” he explains. “They’re not forced out after two or three years because of a popular vote.”
And he pushes the importance of education on colleagues or other industry professionals any chance he gets. “When people compliment me about whatever I know or whatever I’ve done, I push back immediately. I say, ‘There’s nothing that I’m doing that you couldn’t do. You should consider this particular course or that particular certificate.’ I’m not suggesting that there’s a big take-up,” Richards laughs. “But I would suggest that [knowledge] is not innate—it’s acquired.”
Brooke Smith is managing editor of Benefits Canada. brooke.smith@rci.rogers.com
Get a PDF of this article.