What does it take to be an agile leader in the insurance industry?

Research released in early 2024 found that over a third of insurance companies rate their ability to be resilient and agile as weak, highlighting a lack of agile leadership skills. 

As a sector, insurance performs below cross-industry benchmarks for resilience and agility. At the same time, there is plenty of evidence that more adaptability leads to better economic performance.

Long-standing and traditional sectors like insurance have struggled to adapt structured hierarchies to the rapid changes brought about by technological advances, global economic instability and climate change. The report notes that effectively managing change is a particular area of weakness.

Before any organisation can start to benefit from operating in more agile ways, it’s important to consider your leadership. After all, cultural change simply won’t happen if it’s not supported and modelled by senior executives.

In this article, we ask 'what are the key agile leadership skills needed in insurance?'

1. Have a ‘yes, and’ mindset

In a risk averse industry such as insurance that’s been around for hundreds of years, it’s common to find hardened views and cries of ‘that’s the way it’s always been done.’ Maybe you’ve come across an IT Director who refused to use any platform outside of Microsoft for over 20 years. But agile leaders are good at accepting where they find themselves without complaining about it, and are open to exploring new ideas and possibilities. By being in the moment, they focus on meeting the current need.

2. Collaborate

Tear down those siloes and get the right people into the room to solve problems. If you can get departments to leave behind their departmental KPIs to focus on how to better manage say, underwriting and claims management, you’ll find great ideas appearing from unlikely sources. The most agile organisations are abandoning the functional model and migrating to product or customer-centric operating models.

Ultimately collaboration means leaving behind formal hierarchies and using flatter, more nimble networks to come up with answers.

3. Get comfortable with ambiguity

Maybe you recognise the kind of person who needs to have all the information before starting a project. Within change management, where change is the only constant, this is almost impossible and will mean you never make progress.

Agile leaders are comfortable with not knowing all the answers before they start, or not having a clear picture of what a solution will look like. But they do know what steps they’ll take to get there and are prepared to change tack along the way.

4. Listen

The best agile leaders are always listening. Insurers are particularly good at listening to their own teams, wider groups of employees, regulators and stakeholders. The Hyland research noted that the voice of the customer is an area of weakness though. Do you know how to get your hands on the most common customer complaints? Do you monitor social media sentiment? Have you spent an afternoon listening in at your call centre? Have you gone through the process of making a claim with your organisation?

5. Value people over process

This is the main principle of an agile manifesto within change management – to create an environment where impacts on people are considered first. How will the introduction of a new AI chatbot or ELTO system affect the relationships you’ve got? Trust takes a long time to build and is easily lost. Those with agile leadership skills recognise that when people stop trusting that change will benefit them, resentment or low morale can creep in.

Read our whitepaper on change fatigue here, which covers the increasing cynicism towards transformation programmes – and how to tackle it.

6. Every day is a school day

There aren’t many of us who believe we’ve got nothing left to learn. Agile leaders focus particularly on continual improvement and taking lessons from completed milestones or projects. They believe in being a T-shaped learner; combining deep subject matter expertise (the descending leg of the the T) with a desire to have a broad depth of experience, knowledge and skills in many areas (the shoulder of the T.)

For many leaders working in insurance, these characteristics may feel counter-intuitive. But as you adopt these practices, you will foster a culture of innovation in the face of uncertainty and change that will see your business thrive.