Every insurance conference season produces its share of resilience talk. There are lively panels around grit, bounce-back and "leaning in." Belinda Speirs (pictured), Suncorp's chief executive of people, legal and corporate services, is arriving at this year's Women in Insurance Summit Australia with a different argument: that framing resilience as a personal trait lets organisations off the hook.
On August 26 at The Fullerton Hotel in Sydney, Speirs will appear on the Summit's "Career Resilience: Building Momentum in Times of Disruption" panel, alongside Melanie Quixley of Barry Nilsson and Anouk Sireude of AIG. The session is built around a premise: claims inflation, elevated interest rates and rising reinsurance costs are reshaping the industry and leaders are expected to navigate that volatility without the structures to do it sustainably.
Asked what she plans to focus on, Speirs didn't reach for the usual language of individual perseverance. "For me, this goes beyond individual resilience to the leadership practices and workplace culture that supports women to thrive in an uncertain world," she said.
That line could reframe the entire premise of the panel. Where "career resilience" sessions often default to coaching individuals through disruption, Speirs is positioning the conversation around what organisations owe their people during periods of upheaval, not the other way around.
It's consistent with how she frames the broader purpose of the summit itself. Asked why an event like this still matters in 2026, Speirs pointed to the limits of any single organisation acting alone. "Meaningful change cannot be achieved by organisations acting alone - it requires collaboration across industries and sectors, which is why it's important to have forums, like the Women in Insurance Summit for us to move beyond simply talking about change, to driving it," she said.
So resilience isn't just a quality individual brokers, underwriters or executives need more of - it's a structural output of workplace culture and leadership practice and fixing it requires the industry to coordinate rather than each firm quietly managing its own attrition.
For broking principals and insurer leaders navigating the same conditions Speirs is describing - consolidation, margin pressure, reinsurance costs - her argument lands as a challenge. If workplace culture and leadership structures are the actual lever, then retention and progression problems within a brokerage aren't solved by asking senior staff to be more resilient. They're solved by examining who has genuine authority, support and structural backing to lead through disruption and who is simply being asked to absorb it.
That question sits alongside the summit's broader 2026 agenda, which also examines the gap between technical expertise and commercial leadership - a transition data from the Workplace Gender Equality Agency and the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority suggests remains the industry's real bottleneck, more so than entry to the C-suite itself.
Speirs isn't claiming to have a tidy answer to that tension. Her comments suggest that when the panel takes place on August 26, she'll use the session to press panellists and delegates on whether their organisations have actually built the practices needed to support people through volatility - or whether "resilience" has simply become the industry's word for asking individuals to cope quietly.
