Providing authentic leadership with a sense of purpose
Stepping into the Chief Financial Officer’s role of a 120-year-old organisation at the age of 31, was a daunting task. A quote from one of my favourite authors Craig Groeschel reads as follows; “People will rather follow a leader that is always real than one that is always right”.
This quote inspired me to be authentic and curious in order to truly understand the organisation and understand its people, challenges and strengths.
Metropolitan’s purpose is “To help our clients achieve their financial life goals. To create value for all our stakeholders.” Which has a strong alignment towards my personal passion in life, to see people move towards financial freedom. Having this alignment helps to show up everyday to be your best self and to align every effort to see this purpose come to realisation.
In order for one to be most effective an early learning was that a one-size-fits-all leadership style would not be effective. In this role I had to engage a wide and diverse audience compared to a more specialist audience in the past. In order to make the engagement most meaningful, one learns to tailor your leadership approach to be most effective to the audience. Do you get it right the first time? NO! One of the key learnings were to communicate as simple as possible. Simple in the context of the audience that speaks to things that is within their control that can influence the business for the good. Using metaphors to explain concepts that is not well known has been very useful in breaking down information to help achieve the right outcomes. Similarly, in leading one’s team you need to ensure that you get to know them and understand their motivations, what gives them a sense of purpose and how they prefer to be managed. Really knowing what goes on in their lives also helps one to understand the ups and downs your teams go through. Tailoring one’s leadership style to these aspects helps to create trust and allows you to find opportunities for developing your team members. Some of these opportunities comes in areas that is not necessarily a traditional finance type of project, but what we have found is that there is a lot of value add that finance team members can make with the way they think about things.
When appointed to the CFO role I had a young family. This requires one to find some form of balance between life and work. As a father of four young kids aged seven and younger, the CFO role and finding time to recharge was a challenge. Being an introvert the constant engagement with people was not something that came naturally, and I made the realization that one needs to find time to recharge. At first prioritising self-care felt selfish, but I soon realised that if one does not prioritise recharging you get depleted and are not able to give your best version of yourself to your family. One of the shifts I realised I need to make was to measure balance over a long time period. In my situation I would hardly be able to achieve balance over one day and even over a week in some cases (for example travelling for work a whole week). Being intentional about finding balance over a longer period helped me live with less guilt and more with a sense of fulfillment.
Stabilising the business and motivating the sales team
After joining Metropolitan my first realisation was that we were doing to many things all at once, and we needed to identify what was the most critical aspects to get right for the organisation to move forward. As a team we spend a lot of time to fully understand the key drivers of success for our business. Subsequently we spent time to make sure we can simplify this into concepts that could be understood at the coal face. The key focus was to drive the right activities rather than driving outputs. One could achieve outputs, but if this was not derived in the correct way it could be costly to the business.
The second theme was to create real time metrics to help identify whether there is traction and progress on these activities. We spent a lot of time developing various analytical tools and other reports to enable especially our sales teams. In the end our sales teams now have almost a real time view of how they are doing against their key performance areas.
Digital
The most challenging part of my journey in the last couple of years have been to balance the business of today and the business of tomorrow, most notably from an investment perspective. Trends in technology, changes in consumer preference and different generations of clients makes this balancing act complex.
Stabilising current revenue sources through investment and renewal whilst investing in how the business can look like in future whilst providing sensible shareholder outcomes is a challenge.
As a finance professional one tends to think binary i.e., black and white. This kind of thinking one needs to overcome and unlearn and be able to lean into uncertainty. Also being able to accept that some projects will fail whilst others will deliver 10x returns was a key mind shift to make. The ability to be able to identify soon enough whether things are trending in the wrong direction and to take corrective action is critical.
One must also be careful to just accept that digital will create cost efficiencies... Challenge these key assumptions carefully and take into consideration the cost of running technology once developed. Other learnings include the over estimation of digital adoption which then results in some cost savings not realised as old channels needs to be kept intact.
At Metropolitan we have invested in digital in both the business of today as well as the business of tomorrow. In our core business (business of today) we are gradually moving towards a paperless environment and have made a lot of progress in digitising our business processes. One must however be careful to assume that all customers will adopt immediately and needs to bring your clients and employees along on this journey. The usage of Robotic Process Automation to remove manual repetitive tasks has been a significant benefit to our business. We have automated many back-office processes such as bank account validation, and claim payment verifications and as a result, this has impacted the efficacy with which we can serve our clients and also results in fewer manual errors. This in turn has improved our turnaround time and client satisfaction and it also enables our employees to spend time on more impactful and meaningful work. We are also starting to see some cost savings emerging from these projects which contributes to the bottom line.
At Metropolitan we have carved out a standalone business called Metropolitan GetUp to help us navigate the changing technological environment and to serve the younger and more digitally savvy market. Metropolitan GetUp has the mandate to stay on top of all the latest trends in technology and to find use cases for the insurance industry in the market we serve. Setting it up like this enables us to focus on our core business to achieve consistent results with minimal disruption, while at the same time, we are looking and building the future via our GetUp business to futureproof our business. Building the business of tomorrow has been (or rather is still) a big learning curve.
The impact of technology on our business
Metropolitan’s vision is to be a household name with a product in every South African emerging market home. Technology can certainly help us achieve this vision. However, it is important to use technology to solve business problems. Technology can sometime look very appealing, but if not used in the context of solving a business problem it can soon become a very expensive white elephant.
Be careful not to try and build/develop everything. Try and partner to solve some more generic components of your business and invest/build components that will differentiate the business. Even some components that could be differentiating is not always the system, it is how you utilize the system that will create the competitive advantage.
There is no doubt that technology will impact the insurance industry in a big way. This will put traditional insurance operating models under pressure and scrutiny. The use case for technology has many applications for example risk selection, client self-help service, risk management and even providing financial advice. All of these should ultimately lead to better client satisfaction.
It is critical to keep an eye on the emerging trends and the startup world to see how one can learn from them and or partner with them. As a group we have invested and partnered with some of these external startups to stay close to the innovation that is happening in the market.
