Changing of the Guard

For the past year at least, interviews with company executives and leadership panel discussion speakers have all presented a short-term forecast of retiring senior executives from the Boomer Era, followed by an expression of concern as to whether there will be enough young talent available to replace them.

Given the flurry of press releases in 2007 announcing the retirement of insurance and reinsurance company CEOs, we can now safely say: Forget the future, the future is now.

Without doing any research, it is easy to list at least five industry CEOs or managing executives that have either shifted out of or retired from their posts in 2007. They include (but, as lawyers would say, are not limited to): Claude Dussault of ING Canada, Igal Mayer of Aviva Canada, David Wilmot of Toa Re, Robert Landry of Zurich and, most recently, Bill Star of Kingsway Financial Services. And if we wanted to cast the net a bit wider than just private corporations, Stan Griffin retired this year as the CEO of the Insurance Bureau of Canada after 32 years of dedicated service. Based on the farewell press releases for these five people alone, the industry has shifted more than a century’s worth of experience in one fell swoop…

This is not to say the industry doesn’t have the talent to replace those who are moving their experience elsewhere. Subbing in for the departed will be a number of capable senior executives who have paid their dues by rising through their companies’ ranks internally, or who have made the jump from one organization to another.

ING, for example, has created a new chief operating officer position headed up by Charles Brindamour. Aviva Canada has appointed Robin Spencer to the CEO position. Toa Re has appointed Caroline Kane to take over Wilmot’s role as senior vice president and chief agent in Canada Wilmot. Zurich has appointed Alister Campbell, formerly at ING, to take over the reins from Landry. And Bill Star, who remains as chair of Kingsway’s board, will be succeeded by Shaun Jackson, who has been with the company since 1995 and most recently served as Kingsway’s executive vice president and CFO.

It should be emphasized here that the industry hasn’t really “lost” the talent moving out of the senior positions noted above. In many cases, even in retirement, the individuals named above are still working within the industry on a board-level, part-time or contract basis. In one case, an executive simply moved to Europe; in two other instances, company CEOs merely became board chairmen, hardly connoting any kind of “winding down.”

Nevertheless, the flurry of announcements in 2007 gives rise to a feeling that all this talk about a future “changing of the guard” is more than just a vague, abstract potential: we are now actually right in the middle of it. And one has to know that as everyone shuffles up a rung in the ladder to replace these executives, or as people leave their posts at other companies to fill these positions, there is a lot more internal resource shuffling happening than meets the eye.

How are the companies and organizations listed above handling these shifts? How are they recruiting new people? Are they finding any so-called ‘talent gaps’ in the search to accommodate whatever experience has been lost? What strategies are they using to find new people? What, for example, are the advantages and pitfalls to promoting from within? And, assuming a company prefers to fill gaps by promoting from within, what happens at the bottom of the ladder once everyone has climbed up a rung within the organization? Has it been easy or difficult to entice people into the industry? If not, what techniques to attract people to the industry are working? Which approaches are failing? And what, if anything, can be said about the secretive, but time-honoured tradition of pilfering talent from another insurance company’s treasury? (This topic tends to receive short shrift, for obvious reasons, but perhaps something might be learned from the insurers who have recently brought these concerns up in the much less comfortable environs of a courtroom.)

These questions have all been asked before. But as the changing of the guard we have witnessed in 2007 indicates, the answers should no longer be theoretical or unplanned. Perhaps the biggest question is how to amass specific answers to all of the above questions and present them to interested industry parties in a way that the information doesn’t start entering the twin realms of proprietary information and gaining a competitive edge. Once solutions start to get refracted by these concerns, the industry as a whole loses.