Vice President George H.W. Bush once dismissively referred to the need for strategic clarity as “the vision thing.” The statement dogged him for years in his political career.
In contrast, the insurtech veteran and co-founder of Roloff Consulting, Ema Roloff, is quite clear about vision: Insurance technology leaders in the industry need to find their business visions and shout them from the rooftops. And then shout them again.
“From a leadership perspective, the most important thing that they can do is get very, very clear on what their company vision is and what's needed as an organization to accomplish their goals,” says Roloff.
“That vision has to be well-articulated and communicated all the way through the organization, which in itself is a difficult task.”
Her viewpoint’s informed by several years of selling process automation services and software to multiple industries including insurance, healthcare and manufacturing.
Roloff first planned to be a high school social studies teacher but diverted into corporate training to teach “big people instead of little people,” she allows.
Then her father-in-law and husband staged “a personal intervention,” insisting she’d like sales because it essentially was “helping people solve problems.” After applying for a sales job “to get my husband to stop talking about it,” Roloff fortuitously landed in the insurtech sector — the world she now longs to fundamentally change.
Leading change
With tech services-consulting firm Naviant, she found herself talking to insurtech founders and others, taking their companies through technology transitions. “I always gravitated toward asking them questions about change management and the people side of change,” Roloff says. Their answers were, well, underwhelming at times.
“So I started to get incredibly passionate about that idea. Through some of my experiences selling into large organizations, I saw how big of an impact losing sight of the people in this whole process was in the success of these transformations.”
Putting people first in a company’s technology vision is the foundational message of Roloff’s LinkedIn- and YouTube-based show, Leading Change. She calls on her education background not only for consulting but for training others in social selling as well as her experience consulting with leaders about achieving their goals.
“Everybody knows when they talk to me, we’re going to talk about people. We're going to talk about change. We’re going to talk about finding this balance” of technology with people, Roloff says.
Using vision to bridge the insurance industry’s talent gap
“We’re at the cliff’s edge of the talent gap … with this looming number of people that are going to retire,” Roloff says. “We’ve really done nothing as an industry to actually fill that gap.”
A necessary first step toward “changing the narrative and getting people excited about coming to work in the insurance industry,” she says, is for leaders to make their vision clear to the people they work with and to the wider insurance community.
Why? It may be the only way to find employees and keep them. As proof she points to a survey of millennials, which (while not recent) shows that eight out of 10 millennials have said they've never considered a career in insurance. “And I would imagine that that number might be even more steep for Gen Z.”
“How do we use technology to … minimize how big that chasm is?” The industry could potentially use artificial intelligence to capture generational, institutional knowledge that’s inside the minds of retiring insurance people, for example.
Branding to lead change
Insurance leaders need to “lean into our competitive differentiation … those leaders that are sitting at the top have to get really, really clear on what their vision is and do a really good job of communicating it,” says Roloff.
At Aartrijk, we recognize that branding plays a key role in leading the change that Roloff recommends. A clear tech vision can make a company distinct as an employer. That company can use the principles of branding, tapping its strength to create a memorable, esteemed brand.
Branding isn’t just for the outside world. It’s for reaching and connecting with internal stakeholders — employees who make the brand go.
Leaders can turn to their branding tools to deliver their vision to current and future workers — those who will make the vision a reality, as Roloff says.