Turbo-Charging Leadership Development to Grow the Business

This article is written by Mike Casella , President & CEO of Chubb Ins. Co of Europe

Chubb is a global, speciality insurance company headquartered in the US. In 2002, Chubb in Asia Pacific faced a number of challenges to growth. While we were in the boom times of our industry business cycle, we know this wouldn’t last. More importantly, we knew we wouldn’t be well positioned for the inevitable down cycle.

We saw the need for more flexible business models that would work in developing markets where we’d had only limited success. In terms of leadership, we needed our leadership team and key managers in the organization to embrace this view and acquire new capabilities. This was difficult because we were facing a challenge for which there was no cut and dried answer. There was no expert we could hire with the right answers. And there certainly was no training program to which we could send our executives that would build this capability.

In 2002, Chubb Asia/Pacific engaged Organisation Solutions to partner with us on a year-long Executive Leadership Program (ELP) to help us build the leadership capability needed to grow our business. The program included a series of workshops, individual coaching, action learning projects tied to key growth opportunities in the region, and a bit of classroom learning closely tied to the action learning projects.

I’d have to say that it was the work associated with the action learning projects that created the most substantial change in the participants and in the company. The participants, most of whom were members of our senior leadership team, were asked to determine the potential of different growth opportunities, identify obstacles to growth, and measures for dealing with these.

As the participants struggled with these issues, they identified our own corporate culture as a barrier to growth. Our past success had been driven in large part by excellent controls over underwriting risk. Also, we’d grown by push-selling products from the US into new markets via the same distribution channels. But now, we wanted to grow in markets without these channels – and our products weren’t necessarily fit-for-purpose in our fastest growing markets. This was a significant and unintended outcome of the program.

The impact of the ELP was great. In addition to driving growth in key markets, we improved our capabilities for growth where new products or go-to-market models were needed. The ELP turbo charged our growth initiative and accelerated the development of many of our key leaders. It was a learning process for me as well as the participants.

Let me share some of my personal lessons learned as the champion for this initiative:

Resist the urge to take over. Like most people in my role, I’m quite action-oriented. But, this made it hard for me to keep from jumping in to try and resolve issues raised by the ELP participants. Early on, a number of the participants seemed to expect me to drive the process. I felt pressure to solve problems for them. As a result, our consultant coached me not to jump in and resolve the group’s problems. This turned out to be quite good advise.

Become comfortable with discomfort. Most executives have attended a range of training or university-based education programs. They can be terrific learning experiences. But they seldom change the organization footing the bill. My biggest problem with them is that they’re too safe. I think most executives and experienced managers know how to behave in a classroom – no matter how famous the faculty or institution. This hinders profound learning that, in order to be effective, has to be messy, ambiguous and uncomfortable. Early on in the process, it was important for me to reassure the participants that what was happening, was actually supposed to happen.

Be patient for deeper learning to happen. Along with the need to accept that profound learning requires us to experience discomfort, I also found that the most significant learning didn’t happen right away. It took several months of hard work on the action learning projects, and quite a bit of feedback, for many of the participants to start behaving differently. Had we demanded “short-term wins”, we would have prevented real transformation – both individual and organizational - from happening.

One size really doesn’t fit all. Most of the ELP participants had long tenure with Chubb and shared a common organization culture. But, they were very different people. They represented nine different nationalities – and came from all different parts of the organization. Everyone seemed to benefit from different aspects of the experience. For example, the use of external coaches throughout the program was optional. Some used them, others did not. Some found the peer coaching to be most impactful. Some took a lot from the classroom learning, others did not. The take away for me was that to create change and learning for different people, you really need a portfolio of interventions. This seems easy to say, but hard to do.

Leverage the experience to gain greater insights. To me, one of the advantages of this program was that it gave me a chance to observe several of our key executives behaving and interacting in a range of situations. In our company, we’ve learned pretty well how to act in a meeting or conference. We know how to pull together presentations and give speeches. So, I enjoyed watching as some of the participants took ownership for driving culture change in the company – not just Asia Pacific, but the world. I could observe a shift in how many people saw themselves as leaders. I also got some new insights about how my actions could either support or hinder learning and change in the company. In my position, this kind of learning can be a bit harder to get.

(c) 2010 Organisation Solutions Pte Ltd.

About the Authors: Mike Casella is President & CEO of Chubb Ins. Co of Europe, member of The Chubb Group of Insurance Companies, one of the world's leading insurance organisations, founded in 1882. Chubb Insurance is not affiliated with Chubb plc, which sells security and fire protection products.