October 2026 | Customized Learning

Building the Bench: Developing Insurance’s Next Leaders

Every year at hundreds of insurance companies around the world, executives sit down for annual talent reviews and spend hours on a single question: which high-potential executives to send to Wharton. Roughly 95 percent of the leaders they choose are already on the company’s succession plan.

Enrollment in the Strategic Leadership Experience is not a development perk distributed to promising staff. Since 2022, nearly 500 industry executives have come through the program, developed by LIMRA and LOMA, the insurance industry’s largest trade association, in collaboration with Wharton Executive Education. This summer it won a Gold HCM Excellence Award for Leadership Development from the Brandon Hall Group.

Lisa Stevens, assistant vice president of Executive Development at LIMRA and LOMA, is precise about what member companies are committing to. It’s not just a course or a credential, but rather a deliberate succession strategy. “On the journey to help next-generation industry leaders become the next C-suite leader or company CEO, the program is part of a huge accelerated development plan,” she says. “And with this component, industry executives can accelerate their development path faster.”

The partnership began with David Levenson, president and chief executive officer of LIMRA and LOMA and a Wharton graduate, who had attended another Executive Education program and saw what the two organizations could build together. Steering committees of industry executives drawn from the association’s 700 member companies in 71 countries now shape what is taught. Stevens then relays the industry needs to Wharton, where Antoinette Simon, senior director of Wharton’s Custom Programs, taps the faculty who are doing the research to meet them.

The program consists of three week-long modules taught over 24 months, with action learning work in between; a six-month post-program virtual reunion; and other LIMRA and LOMA sponsored alumni events. Christopher Geczy, the program’s academic director, describes the rhythm as deliberate. “They learn something at Wharton, they test it in the real world, they work on it with their colleagues, and then they come back and do the heavier lifting for another week,” he says. “It’s an intense experience punctuating a multi-year career trajectory.”

Grant Ward went through the program and is now president and chief executive officer of Boston Mutual, which means he now decides who Boston Mutual sends. He came to the company as a lawyer, spent his early years in legal and compliance, then took on customer experience and claims, then the chief operating officer’s seat, then the one above it. What he notices is how common that type of career mobility is among the people he went through the program with. “So many of the colleagues that I stay in touch with have had three or four different roles in the time that they’ve been through the program,” he says.

What Technical Skills Cannot Do

“The insurance industry is being hit simultaneously by artificial intelligence, changes in distribution, shifting customer expectations, demographic shifts, and new sources of capital wrapping themselves around it,” Geczy says. “These are not problems to solve. They are opportunities and paradoxes.” This means, he adds, that these leaders have to connect technology, finance, strategy, human capital, and risk: “They are the DNA carriers of the profession, the present value of its future.”

For decades, the insurance industry promoted on technical ability. If you could produce the widgets, Stevens says, you became the manager, and if you could produce more of them as a manager, you moved up again. “Like many other industries, we learned that model was flawed,” she explains. “It wasn’t necessarily promoting the right people."

What the approach produced instead were leaders who knew one part of the business extremely well. Stevens calls the result a 35-year problem: insurance companies tend not to think enterprise-wide, and while plenty of industries work in silos, she says in insurance there are many opportunities to think broader. That is why the Strategic Leadership Experience begins with a week on enterprise thinking. Ward names it as one of the most critical competencies the program develops. “The emphasis, especially at the beginning, on thinking about the entire organization and making decisions based on that wider view was incredibly powerful,” he says.

“We are shaping the mindsets and behaviors to help insurance companies transform,” Stevens says. She calls them “ways of working,” and is candid that they are some of the most challenging things to teach. Module 2, for example, does not explain digital transformation, because a room of senior insurance executives already know what it is. Instead, the session focused on how they talk about it, strategize back at the office, and inspire others to think differently. Sessions on distribution trends and on making strategic financial decisions take the same approach, all built around the insurance industry rather than generic case studies. “The program was built for the industry rather than adapted to the industry,” Geczy says.

For Ward, enterprise thinking begins with how a company develops people in the first place. “When you have high-potential employees that you want to develop, the point is not necessarily where they are and what department they’re in at that point in time,” he says. “Ultimately, you are going to move them to some other department where they have to learn new skills, where they can’t fall back on their expertise in that particular arena.”

Keri Bush is watching that shift toward cross-functional experience from inside a member company. She has spent her career at Canada Life and arrived in the program as an assistant vice president, preparing for a full vice president role. The title came through in March. She now leads client advisory services for individual wealth.

“We used to build entire careers within one vertical silo,” she says. “Organizations today need executive teams that are more well-rounded than that. They need experience and perspectives beyond one line of business or one functional mandate.”

She describes Canada Life as a giant matrix, and the phrase she uses for what it now expects is that “laterals are the new promotion.” Leaders move across the business before they move up. “It’s much more of a lattice versus a ladder,” she says.

What Bush describes as a career pattern, Geczy treats as a feature of the room. Participants arrive from finance, technology, sales and distribution, underwriting, claims, product development, operations, and the general counsel’s office. “The program lets them see the enterprise from the perspectives of the people who run different parts of it,” he says.

They also arrive as competitors. “The remarkable thing is that people drop the sharp elbows,” Geczy says. “Nobody is giving away strategy. But there is a shared sense of how to get better, as a firm and as an industry.”

Permission to Say “I Don’t Know”

Bush identifies two sessions in the program as having the greatest impact. The first is a strategic planning boot camp that opened Module 1. What stayed with her was the distinction between what a leader knows she does not know and what she has not thought to ask about. Until then, she had believed that in order to present a strategy to her executive committee, for example, she had to have the answer to any and every possible question.

“That boot camp gave me permission to say there are things I don’t know, and that’s okay,” she explains. “And in fact, it’s very normal. Leaders need to lean on others to help us see what we can’t see.”

The second was the finance session in Module 2, about a functional area she had not worked in. While most of the session was spent on formulas, what she carried out of it was a sentence: Go where there’s flow. “We learned to find the momentum in the business and put the resources there on the reasoning that companies can stay too long with a strategy that used to work. It's easy to hold if you don't have the confidence to say it's not working for us anymore,” she says. “But once you can say that, you can then point out untapped opportunities and encourage everyone to go there instead.”

Geczy says finance belongs in the curriculum for exactly that reason. "Every leader needs to know something about finance. It doesn’t mean you have to be the CFO. But you should know your firm’s cost of capital, why growth matters, and how a financial decision in any part of the company affects the whole.”

What It Takes on the Other Side

Simon is direct about where the value actually shows up. "The learning is in the class, but the doing happens at the organization," she says. “When they get back and they’re engaging with their teams and their stakeholders, that’s when it matters.” It is why Wharton’s first call with a company commissioning a custom program is a set of hard questions: why now, why these people, what do you want them doing differently afterward?

Participants leave with a personal playbook and a written commitment to what they will apply, when, and who they need to help them do it. Ward says he keeps his alive by repetition: “I’m constantly applying and talking about lessons from the program. One week it could be storytelling, another could be decision making, and another how to read a set of financials.”

Beyond the individual participant, the employer also plays a role in applying the teachings. Systems have to be in place for the returning leader to act on what they learned, and someone senior has to protect the time. “If you’re going make the investment in the program, you also have to invest on the back end,” Simon explains, “giving them the space and time to make a difference.”

LIMRA and LOMA measure behavior change and business impact at one, two, and three years past the final residency, and Stevens tracks movement into larger roles annually. At least three graduates have become chief executives of their companies. "We're not just building for today," she says. "We are building for the next generation of insurance leaders."

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