In 2018 Swiss Re embarked on a cultural transformation. At the heart of the project was the ambition to create a commercial, agile culture driven by the idea of leadership from every seat, where everybody is encouraged to act as a leader and to take ownership independent of their role or hierarchical position.

The Swiss Re context

Founded in Zurich in 1863, the Swiss Re Group is a major and highly diversified global reinsurance company, with 14,500 employees located around the world. It is organized into three Business Units, each with a distinct strategy and set of objectives contributing to the Group’s overall mission: to make the world more resilient. Like other organizations, we operate in a business environment that is characterized by a high level of uncertainty and ambiguity, driven by the forces of political and environmental instability, changing regulations, and technological disruptions. 

Everybody is encouraged to act as a leader and to take ownership independent of their role or hierarchical position.

Advances in technology are impacting the insurance value chain and reshaping the competitive landscape. Long-term fundamental changes to the insurance value chain are blurring industry boundaries and shifting insured risks from personal to commercial lines. 

Operating in this dynamic business context requires us to be faster and smarter in identifying new opportunities, responding to client needs, and creating innovative solutions. In this challenging environment, we need courageous, purpose-driven, and agile leaders who engage with our people and create a joint movement to ensure our future success. But even more importantly we need a significant shift towards a commercial, agile culture that enables everyone to lead from every seat. 

Critical pillars for transforming Swiss Re culture

Against this background, in 2018 Swiss Re embarked upon its cultural transformation initiative. At the beginning of the process, we focused more on the traditional way of driving change through our senior leadership, encouraging them to take direct responsibility for driving change initiatives. This shifted however, instead of a centrally steered effort, we chose to follow an organic change approach, allowing the different business units and central group functions to experiment with different ways to develop the culture, to work in a more agile way, and to explore new business opportunities. This helped to unfreeze the organization’ as people were encouraged to experiment, try out new things, and take risks instead of following the traditional path of being overly cautious and risk averse. 

While this organic approach enabled the whole organization to become more flexible and to start to overcome deeply ingrained patterns, it was not enough. A more fundamental transformational change was required. We needed more passionate, resilient, and purpose-driven leaders to lead the way through the turbulent environment, leaders, who would inspire our people to change. 

This was the birth of the Pathfinder Experience, a transformative intervention for senior leaders, led by our Group CEO. Around 100 senior leaders with a track record of successful change leadership joined a focused development process that helped them to reflect on their own leadership purpose and to think about how they can courageously stand up for what they believe in, and how they can create movement in the organization to enable cultural change. 

In contrast to previous development interventions for our senior leaders, which helped them to explore how to lead in a dynamic and fast-changing environment, we invited them to a self-reflection retreat in a former monastery. To prepare for this experience, a coach helped them to kick-start their self-reflection journey. They also had the opportunity to join a virtual dialogue with our Group CEO to discuss their views on purpose-driven leadership, how they can be more courageous and how they can engage in life-long learning as a leader (Exhibit 1). 

Swiss Re trusted that a deep, personal transformational experience would unleash their energy and commitment.

Contrary to traditional leadership development interventions, participants did not have to work on a specific strategic challenge, nor had they to come up with a classical follow-up action plan. Swiss Re trusted that a deep, personal transformational experience would unleash their energy and commitment to do what is necessary to serve the company’s purpose and drive change. 

The Pathfinder Experience had the transformational impact we were hoping for. Reflecting on the purpose of their leadership role and sharing authentic personal experiences with a group of peers and the CEO, provided the participants of the program with an energy boost to act as change catalysts. We could see our executive leadership teams begin to work in a new way—building trusted relationships, where showing vulnerability and reaching out to each other for help to master business challenges started to become the new normal. 

Inspired by this positive experience, Swiss Re realized that we should unleash this energy further, so all employees could drive the company’s purpose and act as leaders, no matter where they were sitting in the organization. To achieve this goal, we created a simple set of Leadership Imperatives. These describe the behaviors that everyone in the organization should display to develop a culture of leadership from every seat: act courageously and speak up; adapt quickly and move things forward, inspire joint movement and take people along.

To lead from every seat means that every employee needs to become aware of their own leadership purpose and understand how this supports Swiss Re overall purpose and strategy. It also means that everybody should think about how they can broaden their area of influence to inspire others and shape our organization, culture, and business (Exhibit 2).

We learned that when everybody acts as a leader, the ways of how senior leaders and employees engage with each other are challenged. Acting as a leader can create tension in the day-to-day encounters between senior leaders and their employees. To be successful, it is essential to re-balance these interactions towards productive interactions on an eye-to-eye level. This requires patience, mutual understanding, and support. Senior leaders and line managers had to step back to provide space, and they had to empower their employees through coaching. The employees, on the other hand, had to actively step into the leadership arena and take ownership (Exhibit 3). 

To help employees embrace the cultural change and to encourage them to act as leaders, we offered them a wide range of development opportunities such as self-learning nuggets, virtual coaching sessions, leadership development programs, and large-scale change interventions for organizational units. For our high-potentials, we launched a specific 3-module learning experience, the Explorer Program that built on the idea of the Pathfinder Experience – building purpose-driven, courageous leaders through a deep learning journey. 

The central mechanism driving this change across Swiss Re is the already mentioned Leadership Imperatives. As part of the continuous goal-setting conversations, each employee reflects on how they can bring the Leadership Imperatives to life and act as a leader from every seat. 

How senior leaders and employees perform on these shared behavioral expectations forms part of the mutual, continuous performance conversations as well as the yearly performance evaluation. Additionally, we experimented with large-scale interventions that build on the experiences of the Pathfinder Experience.

We had to convince leaders of the benefits of a shared, group-wide approach.

At the heart of these large-scale interventions are face-to-face or virtual kick-off workshops, where participants from the same organizational unit start to reflect on their leadership purpose and learn some essential coaching skills to support each other. After the kick-off workshop, they work in small coaching groups to help each other with the desired behavioral change over a period of 3 months. All coaching groups of an organizational unit form a coaching network that offers mutual support and ensures progress towards the desired change. 

To further accelerate the change and to broaden the impact across Swiss Re we leveraged new ways of engaging our people starting with a radio show ‘LFES On Air’, introducing rituals and business dialogues, and making the ‘Pathfinder Experience’ accessible to all levels through a virtual, cross-hierarchical learning experience (see Exhibit 4). To further support and sustain the cultural change, we implemented modern people solutions (see Exhibit 5 on P123 for an overview) that enable leadership from every seat and foster a flexible, agile way of driving performance, providing feedback, and a learning culture. We introduced: 

Leadership development experiences to help employees embrace the cultural change and encourage them to act as leaders through for example self-learning nuggets, virtual coaching sessions, leadership development programs, and experimenting with large-scale change interventions for organizational units.

Initial scepticism turned into support and excitement.

A radical change in the way we manage performance from a classical top-down and rating-based approach towards a continuous, rating-free performance management approach that focuses on frequent feedback conversations to foster individual growth, real-time improvement and faster, smarter adaptation to business needs. 

My Feedback: an integrated digital solution that supports just-in-time feedback that makes it easier to exchange constructive feedback with colleagues across hierarchies and teams. 

Learning One: a learning platform designed to enable flexible, virtual learning allowing every employee to learn wherever and whenever they want, and share their learning’s easily. 

A refreshed ‘Own The Way You Work’ approach which promotes agile working with cutting-edge technology and flexible workplace solutions. 

Quarterly engagement and agility pulse surveys that allow us to frequently assess the engagement of our employees and how we are progressing towards our cultural ambition. 

Enabling factors and challenges encountered in the process

Our Business Units are used to creating and driving their own approach towards change, which posed a challenge. We had to convince leaders of the benefits of a shared, group-wide approach for the entire organization as opposed to customized initiatives for each unit. The simplicity of the idea of having just one set of behavioral expectations across all levels (the Leadership Imperatives), and the principle that everybody in the organization should act as a leader was very helpful in creating this joint movement across Swiss Re. Here, it was specifically important to build on the business units’ existing change initiatives and to integrate their ambitions and expectations into the overall approach.

Although our industry is risk-averse by design, we could leverage our willingness to learn and experiment and build on our collaborative spirit. These attributes are great enablers for change, and they are deeply ingrained in our culture as a knowledge company—a result of our continuous investment in focused learning and development that supported the delivery of our strategy over decades.

We needed to find ways to tackle our risk averse culture.

At the same time, we needed to find ways of tackling our risk-averse culture. Here we learned that it was beneficial to launch large-scale experiments accompanied by systematic evaluation and research. For example, to change our traditional way of managing performance towards a continuous, rating free approach, we ran systematic trials with around 2.000 employees who evaluated the outcomes of different projects. By doing this, we earned the credibility and the trust of the organization to push for wider cultural change courageously. 

Outcomes and future impact

Swiss Re culture is changing, and we created a movement that feels more ‘self-driven’ rather than top-down. Initial scepticism turned into support and excitement. We are convinced that we need cultural change to help us master the challenges posed by a turbulent environment. To create a culture where everybody fully embraces the idea of leadership from every seat and brings it to life in the day-to-day interactions will take time. 

Interestingly enough, the Covid-19-crisis at the beginning of 2020 had a huge impact on accelerating the change and transforming our culture. The crisis forced us to move to a virtual environment but to continue to run our business and support our clients despite the changing conditions. Here, our preparatory work on enabling the change helped us enormously to successfully move our global workforce to their home offices and stay fully operational throughout the crisis. Both employees and line managers embraced the idea of leadership from every seat and experienced what it meant to trust each other, to empower for faster decision making and to engage with each other in a different, more caring way.

Change processes do not work by the book—they emerge and build on each other along the way.

Change processes do not work by the book—they emerge and build on each other along the way. Sometimes, there are unexpected developments, and it is important to continuously identify opportunities to connect the dots from different change initiatives and merge them towards a joint outcome. We started with a very traditional focus on senior leaders and a vast diversity of cultural change projects. Now we are driving a group wide initiative with a clear focus.

Based on the results of our quarterly Engagement & Agility Pulse, we see that employees now have higher expectations from their peers and senior leadership. Given our ambition, they expect more agility and enhanced mutual inspiration from each other to drive business transformation and cultural change. The results indicate that we are making significant progress—however; it will take patience, enthusiasm, and endurance from every seat to bring our ambition to life.