Develop a culture of trust if you want to be more agile

Agility is going to decide the winners and losers in the insurance world. Although a much overused and often maligned term, ‘agile’ principles will underline how successful organisations operate in the years ahead.

Agile businesses will be able to change their offering, to understand and provide what a rapidly changing market wants and exceed customer expectations at the drop of a hat.

We’ve already seen a number of small start-ups and agile operators come to the market with some innovative offerings. The challenge these new players often have is how to scale and grow to maximise their product offering.

As insurtech matures and the big players get to grips with their data and the necessary pace of change, or start to work more effectively with start-ups and scale-ups, we’ll see some really interesting developments.

Change will happen in two ways. Firstly, investments in technical infrastructure to enable flexibility, innovation and collaboration; humans are natural problem solvers so people will find new ways to do things, be more efficient and develop workarounds. But, the better your tech stack, the more these problem-solving skills can be used to solve the right problems for your business.

Secondly, the culture within teams across the business will develop to take advantage of those technical capabilities. The big challenge here is how you free people to innovate, to dare to do things differently. Inevitably this requires becoming more comfortable with risk and trusting your people.

Trust is something we strive to embed at Covéa. We have to trust our people to do the right thing. The more we trust our teams the freer they are to try new things, to be themselves. There will be failures, but take away the blame & shame reaction and instead make it about learning and suddenly it doesn’t seem so scary. We have to stop seeing failure as an endpoint and view it as a learning opportunity on the way to success.

Trust has to come from the top down – it’s huge and scary and feels really vulnerable, but it delivers vast rewards. Leadership isn’t about having all the answers but enabling your people to realise their potential and being open and honest with those around you. Teams never learn to trust their leaders if the leaders don’t trust them first. And it has to be explicit and obvious; tell your people you trust them and give them permission to own what they do and make mistakes in the right way.

The real challenge in an industry which is so bound by regulation and legislation is how we give people a fail fast framework, how we enable them to try new things without fear and reward them for doing so. This is the path to a culture which embraces change, a culture which is flexible and agile enough to pivot and respond quickly.

A culture which lacks trust is never going to be free enough to really disrupt and deliver innovative products and services. Trust has to be embedded into processes - every idea or prototype will have to go through some sort of approval process at some point and people have to trust that this process is fair and measured and that when there’s a ‘no’ that this is legitimate and where it’s a ‘yes’ then there is recognition for the individual and team responsible.

Building a high performing, agile culture takes time. But trust and transparency is essential if we are to reap the rewards of what insurtech can offer in the future.