Even through the remote nature of a virtual platform, it was invigorating to see the attendees of Insurance Business’s Women in Insurance UK conference come together to discuss the weighty topics impacting women working in insurance and to celebrate the innumerable contributions of female talent to the profession.
Panel discussions actively debated complex and sensitive subjects including the evolution of the insurance market’s mental health challenges, leadership qualities and resilience measures, and featured talent from across the full spectrum of the insurance ecosystem. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a highlight for me and many who joined the event either in-person or online was the eloquent opening keynote speech of two-times Olympic Gold Medallist Hannah Mills who shared insights into the power of collaborative leadership.
Collaboration was perhaps the unofficial buzzword of the conference, which drew on the perspectives of panellists and guest speakers to produce a holistic overview of the breadth of the experiences that define a career in insurance. That in itself was one of the most instrumental takeaways of the conference – inclusivity is about finding what brings us all together, not what sets us each apart.
From my perspective, the discussions represented an evolved perspective on what true diversity looks like and opened up the floor to a fair-minded evaluation of what the insurance profession can do to look after its professionals. The solutions being contemplated in response to the challenges being seen by individuals looked to make life easier for the greatest number of people possible – and what better measure of inclusivity can there be than that?
All too often, events that highlight one catchment of people do so to the detriment of those who fall beyond those parameters and, in doing so, can miss their central objective of broadening perspectives. It’s too easy for conversations about women in insurance to become fragmented into one-note, gender-specific debates that seem to want to create a whole other world for women, rather than to fix the internal weaknesses that make these conferences necessary.
It was refreshing to hear insurance experts touch on the subjects of men’s mental health, psychological safety in the C-suite and D&I initiatives that go beyond any single point of difference. An open-door policy with any stipulations is an oxymoron at best and an insult of people’s intelligence at worst, so to see people from every walk of life offer up their insights and dilemmas via Q&A sessions and the conference’s online chat facility was to see the principles at the heart of D&I brought to life.
It was clear from the conference and particularly these Q&A sessions that insurance professionals are looking for opportunities to engage. They’re willing to take on the tough conversations, and they’re happy to open themselves to new ideas and new suggestions for how to take their businesses, their colleagues and their own careers to the next level.
A lot of organisations have come to realise that benchmarking their successes or failures against those of their competitors is simply not enough anymore. In a recent feature with Insurance Business, Jonny Baker of STORM Guidance put this better than I could hope to when he likened benchmarking to, ‘being proud that your house only has two broken windows when everybody else’s has four – the fact is you still have two broken windows and if somebody wants to get in, they’ll be able to.’
Benchmarking isn’t the way to go anymore - collaboration and information-sharing is the path to enlightenment and insurance businesses need to reassess how they feel about those processes. The very concept of collaboration is likely jarring to many firms who have had the principles of competition and the machinations of inter-industry rivalry drilled into them for many years. But the post-COVID world is as much a clean slate as it is an unfamiliar battleground and there is time yet to rewrite the way businesses work together to protect their staff, their clients and the wider industry.
I wouldn’t refute for a second that COVID has lit a fire under a lot of people, but I would argue that its uncomfortable heat may yet prove to be a cleansing flame if the right conclusions are drawn from all that has occurred since March 2020.
