Name: Assurant CEO Leadership Tip For Change: Speedy Action
Uploaded: 2019-08-23
Duration: 4 min 36 s
Description: Alan Colberg tells how he transformed the century-old insurance company.

[ MUSIC ] Owen when you became CEO of Insurance few years ago the first thing you set out to do was to change the company and I'm just wondering what was the key thing that you identified that you said It's time to reinvent this 120 year old company. The discussion I had with the board as part of becoming CEO was how do we think about the future and we are proud hundred and 20 year old company. But if you looked at the stock performance, other than the first few years after our IPO in 2004, we had been average best performer. And so what I talked about with the board is if we want to outperform We cannot stand still. So I laid out a real simple agenda which the board embraced which was around we need to pick the businesses that we want to be in that we can win at. We have a right to win. And we need to operate differently. So I had good alignment with my board from the day I took the job. How hard was it to get the board comfortable with this idea and also your employees? With the board. You know, I had the advantage of I knew the company well I've been around a long time and it was a discussion with here's what we need to do. And you know it took a little bit of time to get them comfortable. But things like the bold moves like exiting our health business selling our employee benefits business by the way. Those were the first two companies that built it. What is now Assurant. With employees is much bigger challenge and all you can do is communicate, be transparent, be honest, be direct and communicate. What was the first thing that you needed to do after you left the okay from the board? We had a history as a holding company effectively before I became CEO of not really doing things that company wide level. We immediately changed that. We started doing worldwide employee meetings, I started communicating with employees globally, I put in place something called Askelon, any employee can write me on anything and I'll respond personally. Did you respond to all of the queries? I still do. You still do. Why was this so important, of getting the employees Engaged We have 15, 000 employees, what I do matters but what really matters is what the 9000 people on the front line do when they engage with consumers. And every one of them every day is making decisions, the more they understand about what we're trying to do, the more they feel That they're part of a company they can believe in and trust. I heard you did special gestures too. You were very approachable, very visible. And I heard you had this rule, never eat lunch alone. Which was every day with somebody in the company. How important are little things like that? I always try to engage with people, you need to be external. I just wrote a piece from some forums I was at recently for our Internet around, I don't care what your job is, go and talk to somebody you don't normally talk to. I'm very approachable, and they see that I'm acting with integrity. We're doing what we say, we actually do it. Very important. How did you know that you were on the right track? You don't know right away because it takes time for results to happen where I started to feel it is when I would go talk with employees and I heard back excitement about the future where we were going. Which in the past, people felt very proud about the piece they worked in. But there wasn't that kind of feeling about Assurant. What did you find with the key in terms of pulling that off so that people were willing to try new things and experiment more rather then going back to the old way of doing things. As the world You don't have as long to adapt. So it was pushing speed and urgency was probably the biggest change. We created something called the fondness exercise, so before you could criticize the idea, you had to articulate what was good about it. So people know they can't just start explaining why well, we tried it before didn't work. They actually have to articulate the fondness, that was a big change. And then how do you as CEO Cope with when things don't work out even though it was a good idea, but it didn't pan out. I have no problem with something doesn't work. If we are honest about it, we are upfront about it. And then if it doesn't work, we'll stop it quickly. Better to try something and have it not work where I get upset is people hide the truth. They don't tell you it's not working. They tried it maybe time will fix it. There's no harm in trying something didn't work, but then need to quickly move on if it didn't work and learn from it. What would you say was the most important leadership lesson you've learned through this whole transformation process at a [ UNKNOWN ] My biggest regrets are probably it took me too long to make this decision or too long to get organization x I would urge speed. It's almost better to be partially right and then improve as opposed to wait to try to get to a really good answer. [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

Assurant CEO Leadership Tip For Change: Speedy Action

Leadership

Alan Colberg tells how he transformed the century-old insurance company.