The Path from Technical Contributor to Leader
By Su Su
The Stepping Stone, November 2022
In May, the Leadership and Development Section sponsored a webinar where four senior actuarial leaders with different backgrounds, experiences, and geographic locations shared their journeys and unique perspectives. Here are key takeaways from the discussion of the paths they followed to leadership. Quotes have been lightly edited for clarity.
Our panelists:Kelly Rabin, FSA, MAAA,VP and actuary at Hannover Re, and chair of the SOA L&D Section) |
There is No Single Path to Becoming a Leader
“You should realize you will not always have all the answers on how to become a leader, but you will learn along the way and find your own answers.”
“The conscious decision to take on leadership is often more tied to volunteer roles, such as intellectual capital development and marketing.”
Actuarial Leadership Roles Cover a Wide Spectrum
"In some cases, you lead people, and in some cases, you lead ideas.”
“Leadership doesn't necessarily constitute a single straight-line path and it doesn't necessarily constitute just one form of leadership.”
“The most common type of leadership is leading people and leading teams. You can also lead with respect to customers and client prospects of your firm. You could lead on intellectual capital.”
Manage Your Career Progress Post-Actuarial Exams
- Create your own syllabus on what you want to achieve.
- Make conscious decisions on how to use the time that you previously spent on exam study, investing in either learning and development or something else that you are passionate about.
“The learning and development don't stop with that last exam. You need to figure out and develop your own syllabus and things that you want to master yourself.”
“You need to make a conscious effort on developing a path and getting yourself those learning and development opportunities.”
“Actuarial exams create a habit of filling every spare second of your time with self-improvement and discipline. Don't lose that habit and create your own syllabus.”
Progress from Entry-Level to Leader
- Build a reputation for your performance and be reliable.
- Start small, with micro leadership, such as managing a summer intern or training a new student.
- Voice your opinion and perspectives confidently.
- Take on volunteer leadership opportunities.
“While you're doing the technical work as an actuary, one type of micro leadership is to seek transformation opportunities to improve processes and to lead that effort.”
“Leadership at the first entry-level role does not necessarily come from leading people and having people reporting to you, but could come from being willing and confident to voice an opinion and your perspective.”
“Take on the volunteer opportunities within the organization. Doing a good job will create a chain reaction that leads to getting that leadership position that you were seeking.”
Transition from Technical Contributor to Leader
- Be explicit with your manager about your career goals.
- Define your learning and development goals and link them to the team’s goal and your day-to-day work.
- Do good work and be the one to help the team meet objectives.
- Inspire and motivate others to deliver.
“You want to be the person who could deliver. You want to be the person who helps the team meet its objectives. The more that you're known as someone reliable and can get the work done, the more leadership opportunities will come to you.”
“Being a leader is not about you, it's about the team that you're working with. It is about leveraging, spotlighting, and highlighting the knowledge, skills, the talents of the people you're working with.”
Grow from Subject Matter Expert into Leader
- Get beyond the technical and bring in business and judgment skills.
- Act on incomplete information and be decisive—remember Colin Powell’s 40-70 rule of leadership.[1]
- Come out of the weeds and get your message across within the actuarial team, and especially to non-actuary teams.
“The thing that held me back earlier in my career was that fear of the unknown.”
“You have to be willing to operate on incomplete information. As a leader, you need to avoid analysis paralysis and be decisive.”
“Your communication skills are important. It's not just about leading a team, but getting your message across within the actuarial team, and to non-actuaries.”
“You need to build the trust that your team handles the technical details, and you pull yourself out of that.”
Where Should You Seek Out Your First Leadership Role?
- Being a subject matter expert (SME) in your first leadership role helps you focus on other aspects of leadership, such as people.
- Fungibility for technique and soft skills are transferable from one area to another.
- The skills learned through volunteering could accelerate your career development far beyond what it would have been if you focus solely on your paid work.
“A new leader needs to tackle so many things. It's the subject matter expertise. It's the people. It's the newness and its other aspects of leaders. Being an SME helps you focus on other aspects of it.”
“Technical fungibility is where you can bring similar underlying principles and concepts to a different context. The fungibility of the soft skills is how to influence people and ask the right questions.”
“As an actuary and a leader, you cannot just oversee people and need to be able to work more hands-on with technical components.”
How to be an Effective Leader
- Be authentic and carve out your own leadership styles.
- Be open, trustful, and supportive.
- Grow and maintain trust in your team.
- Enable and inspire others to do their best to succeed.
- Lead with humility, with empathy, and embrace diversity.
“There wasn’t one sole individual who influenced me. You pick up on things that you like and you try to emulate them. You pick up on things that you don't like so much and you remove them from your own personal style.”
“As a leader, you are there to help the team to reach its goals. You are trying to identify the team’s needs, get them the proper guidance and mentorship, and ensure everyone brings their best to the team.”
“There are people who work for the team and there are people who make the team work for them. I decided very early on that I wanted to be part of the former if I ever got to lead a project, which is so-called servant leadership.”
Build Trust Within the Team
- Give people the freedom to make decisions and work the way that is best for them.
- Learn their value system (and share yours).
- Allow team members to take on a level of responsibility they are comfortable with and grow it at their pace.
“One key is to demonstrate that you are willing to take chances. Give people the opportunity to make decisions themselves and to be able to operate in a safe environment.”
“The type of trust you need to build is not just the trust in their technical abilities, but also the understanding that ‘we are a team.’”
“Your role as a leader is to enable people, which means to provide training, the tools, the support they need, the culture, and the environment, but also getting them to gain that confidence.”
How to Handle Underperforming Team Members
- Lead with empathy.
- Understand that person’s perspective.
- Provide training and mentors to ensure the team members are given opportunities to perform the way that they're expected to.
- Tough decisions or choices sometimes cannot be avoided.
“We have to make sure that they're receiving the training needed to do the work, that they were being given opportunities to actually perform the way that they're expected to.”
“The leader needs to be empathetic to the resilience of all the colleagues you work with. The leader needs to understand what challenges the team member, and address and remove those challenges.”
“It's the leader’s responsibility to deliver results. As a leader, you do need to have tough choices and tough conversations sometimes. The underperforming person could bring the rest of your team down and create a toxic culture for people who are going above and beyond.”
Provide Constructive Feedback
- Provide timely feedback.
- Provide coaching to help team members learn from mistakes.
- The success is owned by the people who do the work, and the leader owns the failure.
“Immediate feedback is very important. When something is not great, you have to say it at the moment. When something is going well, you should make it public.”
“People make mistakes. You learn from them yourself and you help your colleagues learn from them. Ultimately, they can manage bigger aspects of the project and the organization.”
“As a leader, you back up your colleagues. You make sure that you speak with one voice as one team.”
Receive Constructive Feedback
- Treat all feedback as well-intentioned (even if you think it isn’t).
- Don’t take it personally.
“You have choices about what feedback you internalize and what feedback is not necessarily relevant or situationally dependent.”
“Don’t get defensive, and check your vulnerabilities. Take a step back, pause before you react, and think about why your reaction is this way.”
Effectively Manage Up
- Ask directly for feedback and work on solutions that are authentic to you
- Provide “fearless” (honest and transparent) advice to superiors.
- Bring solutions, not problems.
“Provide fearless advice. It is about the trust of your team, it’s about trust in all directions, and managing up is being honest and transparent in your communications and communicating frequently.”
“If there are problems, you have to be clear about what those are. Never complain. Bring solutions and not just problems.”
“For the different leaders that I report to, I make an effort to understand their priorities and their communication styles. I will tailor my communication approach to their styles.”
“I don't view this as ‘managing up,’ I view it as interacting peer-to-peer.”
Do a Leadership Self-Evaluation
- Self-evaluation helps the leader to understand how effectively they operate and influence others.
- Avoid being too self-critical or not being critical enough, and focus on relevant things.
- Do project post-mortems; the feedback on how the project went gives insight into your leadership.
- The turnover rate sheds light on your leadership.
“I do self-evaluate periodically. I'm constantly looking for feedback on the things I do well that I need to continue polishing or focusing on.”
“Self-reflections are very important. You need to take the initiative of seeking credible feedback from people who are willing to give it to you.”
“Bad managers are the number one reason why people leave a company. Try to understand why someone is wanting to leave and take that moment to reflect.”
Thanks so much to our panelists for sharing their wisdom on actuarial leadership. Let’s conclude with this quote:
“Being a leader shouldn't be your primary goal but just an outcome of helping your team meet its objectives.”
Statements of fact and opinions expressed herein are those of the individual authors and are not necessarily those of the Society of Actuaries, the editors, or the respective authors’ employers.
Su Su, FSA, MAAA, is a senior manager at Oliver Wyman. She can be reached at Su.Su@oliverwyman.com. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/su-su-1120a121/