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Shontelle Mixon ’03 MBA

Headshot of Kellogg alumna Shontelle Mixon '03 MBA
Here are two important things to understand about Shontelle Mixon: She loves to optimize, and she is passionate about merging financial and operational imperatives to yield successful outcomes for the customer. So it is perhaps not shocking that Mixon would excel at auditing. Yet her career path to her current role as chief audit executive was not a direct one.

In her early career as a business assurance professional at PwC, Mixon grew interested in internal roles where she could fuel more of her passions. “So I chose to go to Kellogg, and I picked finance, strategy and HR management as areas of concentration. It allowed me to see the world in a very different way than before,” she says.

With an MBA in hand, Mixon broadened her work experience with roles in operations and finance. She began working in the utilities industry as the manager of financial, planning and analysis at Exelon Corporation in 2003. She later moved into health insurance as the director of financial operations audit in 2007 in her hometown of Chicago where she excelled at being responsible for all non-information technology audit areas. Recognizing she needed a richer understanding of the health insurance sales, marketing and provider network operations, she took a lateral role in Provider Network Enablement and moved to Texas in 2015. A few years later, while on a sabbatical to support family obligations, she wrote a devotional book, “Don’t Wait to Live…Live Now,” and she reconnected with her alumni network through the Kellogg Alumni Club of Dallas/Fort Worth.

“I realized how much I missed my Kellogg community,” she recalls. “I missed being inspired by how we help one another, encouraged by how we support each other’s endeavors and careers and are challenged to think differently.”

Now back in Chicago, Mixon serves as secretary of the Kellogg Alumni Club of Chicago (KACC) board. Mixon says the Kellogg alumni clubs provide a valuable space for personal friendships and mutual career guidance. “Alumni clubs extend the Kellogg experience by introducing ways for alumni to engage across all programs post-graduation, highlighting alumni resources available, connecting all club leaders to a worldwide alumni network, and creating a community of leaders passionate about helping alumni acclimate through the best and worst of times.”

In addition to KACC, Mixon is a loyal donor and member of the Kellogg Leadership Circle annual giving society. She is also a member of Kellogg Black Alumni Network, Kellogg Executive Women’s Network, Kellogg Finance Network, Northwestern University Black Alumni Association and the Kellogg Inclusion Coalition.

Mixon’s Kellogg MBA, alumni support and broad skill set helped her rise to become the top internal auditor at Health Care Service Corporation (HCSC). With nearly a century of experience in healthcare, HCSC serves nearly 23 million people nationwide as the third largest member-owned health insurance company in the U.S. HCSC is an independent licensee of Blue Cross Blue Shield Association and the parent company of five independent Blue Cross Blue Shield Plans in Illinois, Montana, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas.

In her role, Mixon works across the organization to help management identify, manage and minimize risk, and maximize sustainability as the company embarks upon unprecedented growth. Her annual work plans include assurance, consulting, regulatory exam oversight and coordination, fraud, waste and abuse investigations, performance and customer audits, and continuous monitoring within topical risks such as artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, operational and technology transformations and organizational talent management challenges.

During her short time as an audit leader at United Services Automobile Association (USAA), she learned servant leadership is about putting yourself in the shoes of others who serve unselfishly and are the most authentic. Thus, she sees her greatest value to the HCSC employees and members is to ask senior leaders and third parties how they have minimized risk by optimizing strategic imperatives, analyzing gaps and recognizing opportunities proactively. “I am a Virgo; we look for opportunities by nature and are innately curious,” she says.

Responsibilities at HCSC keep her busy, with multiple board meetings and audits. Embracing HCSC’s vision and purpose of believing in the power of collective action that amplifies local relationships, knowledge and expertise, she is committed to giving back to her community and to Kellogg. Her Kellogg network showed up for her when she needed it, she says, and now she does the same. “That sense of community — it’s so important. It’s why I am on the alumni board.”

Mixon grew up on the South Side of Chicago, and as a kid, wanted to be a veterinarian. She held on to the dream through high school. It survived her family’s move to the south suburbs, which she says was a challenging adjustment. Then she hit a snag. “Thanks to my biology classes, I found out I was afraid of blood, so being a vet wasn’t going to work out,” she recalls.

Her baby boomer parents touted potential careers with an eye toward practicality: “Doctor, lawyer, CPA. It’s a very short list,” she jokes. Indeed, her father was both a certified public accountant and an attorney. He was her first mentor and the main reason she went into business. Her mom, who was an experienced executive assistant for a prominent health care attorney in Chicago and Northwestern University board member and alum, balanced her innate drive to help others with the need to make a difference in business.

After graduating from the accounting program at the University of Illinois, Mixon went to work for one of the big public accounting firms, PwC. There, she applied her knowledge of the accounting standards and COSO practices, including the then-new Sarbanes Oxley Act, to the auditing of financial statements for major clients.

She considered going back to school full-time both as a business and law student. But her PwC partner and mentor proposed that she stay at the company, which would sponsor her to get an MBA. “It was clearly the optimal choice to stay at a company who cared about retaining her and contributing to keeping professionals in the Chicago local market,” she says.

With many MBA options within the Chicago market, her mom’s boss – another of Mixon’s mentors – was a “die-hard” Northwestern alum and told her, “Of course you’re going to Kellogg!”

“My experience was fantastic,” Mixon says of Kellogg. But it was also challenging as a working mother taking classes in the evenings and weekends with an extensive consulting travel schedule. “You start post graduate programs thinking you have a perspective of the world, and you get in a classroom with other people with different backgrounds, personalities, tenure of experiences, and you get a wealth of new relationships and opportunities to see things differently. I used it as an opportunity to be a sponge of learning about myself, others and how to show up in different ways than as an accountant.”

For example, “I loved strategy,” she says. “What were the strategic imperatives that drove operational and financial decisions? I wanted to learn how to connect these dots and explore more about how I could optimize the outcomes from those business decisions from my professors and classmates.”

Now she is leading HCSC’s audit operations in a time of significant growth and transformation. “I am equipping my leaders with thought leadership and tools to ask themselves every day, ‘What are we trying to accomplish, what does success look like, what does the member need? What does the company need to be successful and how can we enable it to be prepared?’”

Mixon takes it to heart that HCSC’s members are also the company’s owners. That is what “mutual” means in the insurance world. “Every day I show up, I’m thinking of spending their money in a fiduciary way. If our audits do not highlight internal control risks and inefficient or ineffective processes, that could translate directly to the cost of insurance for our members.”

Similarly, Mixon sees the power of mutuality when graduates give back to Kellogg to perpetuate its vision into the future. “As alumni, we return to our communities and employers with the opportunity to influence hiring decisions, encourage others to enroll in one of our programs and provide a pipeline for professors and faculty to accelerate future imperatives in our world.” She sees her greatest contribution to Kellogg, her profession and her community as raising two young adult daughters who see their responsibility to make a space for everyone in our society and create a world of endless possibilities.

About Shontelle

Shontelle Mixon ’03 MBA, CPA

 

Divisional Senior Vice President

Internal Audit and Special Investigations

Health Care Service Corporation (HCSC)

 

Secretary, Board of Directors

Kellogg Alumni Club of Chicago (KACC)