Canada’s P&C leadership

Glenn T. Gibson, recipient of the Insurance Institute of Canada’s 2011 Established Leader Award, has a thoughtful and well-researched perspective on leadership in Canada’s property and casualty insurance industry.

When asked for his thoughts on the subject, he immediately launches into a discussion referencing Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell’s best-selling book about leadership.

Gladwell’s book seeks to identify the characteristics of exceptional industry leaders. On his blog, Gladwell defines an “outlier” as “a scientific term to describe things or phenomena that lie outside normal experience.” For example, temperatures reaching below zero on a summer day in August. “I’m interested in people who are outliers—in men and women who, for one reason or another, are so accomplished and so extraordinary and so outside of ordinary experience that they are as puzzling to the rest of us as a cold day in August,” Gladwell writes on his blog.

Gibson, executive vice president of Crawford & Company International, is himself a recognized leader in Canada’s property and casualty insurance industry. Naturally, he was interested in what Gladwell had to say.

But after reading the book, one aspect of Gladwell’s theory didn’t sit right with Gibson, who grew up in a low-income area of North Hamilton. Specifically, he questioned Gladwell’s characterization of exceptional leaders as coming predominantly from wealthy, university- educated family backgrounds.

“I had a lot of misconceptions about the backgrounds of people who got to top jobs,” he says. “Sometimes when you’re sitting down in the food chain somewhere, you have a perception that the person sitting up there above you, wearing the chains of office, has had this spectacular, gifted pathway to the top. And the reality is, it’s nothing like that. These are real people.”

In Gibson’s situation, he grew up in northern Hamilton playing junior football. After graduating from high school, he needed to raise money to go to university, so he took summer jobs on an assembly line and working for a few days over an open hearth in a steel mill. Some insurance professors at Mohawk College convinced him to enter the school’s insurance program, which he did. After graduating, he was hired as an adjuster in 1973 with the Fireman’s Fund Insurance Company.

Seven years later, he was among a group of people who founded Adjusters Canada in 1980. Under the informal mentorship of Skip Sutherland, Gibson quickly rose in the management ranks of the company. In 1998, Crawford purchased Adjusters Canada. From 1998 to 2000, Gibson served as senior vice president of operations for Crawford Canada. He was appointed CEO in 2000. Six years later, he became CEO of the Americas for Crawford International.

Recounting all of Gibson’s professional designations and achievements would be an article unto itself. Suffice to say, Gibson has parlayed his modest family economic circumstances into a leadership position within Canada’s property and casualty insurance industry.

Gibson found out his modest background and path to the insurance industry was not as uncommon as he first thought. Inspired by Gladwell’s book, Gibson undertook his own personal survey of 25 property and casualty insurance industry CEOs in Canada.

He found that 52% of the CEOs he surveyed came from middle-income economic backgrounds; 38% grew up in low-income economic circumstances. Twenty-five per cent came from farming backgrounds, 45% came from small towns and only 30% grew up in large cities.

In terms of education, 17% of the CEOs had no more than a public school education. Fifty per cent graduated with no more than a high school diploma. Twelve per cent went to college and 20% had a university education.

What does this tell Gibson about leadership in the Canadian P&C insurance industry?

“I’ve found that a lot of the CEOs I’m interviewing who are of my vintage — between the ages of 50 and 60, for example — became insurance professionals on the job,” he says. “How they entered the business was unusual for all of them. Everyone had a strange story. ‘I didn’t plan on getting here. I ended up here, I don’t know how.’ But once they got within the business, I think what differentiated them is that they became an insurance professional. That is a key thing in my mind.”

For Gibson, professionalism involves a continuous path of learning while on the job. Such education takes a wide scope: “You can’t be insular and stay in a zone where if you are an underwriter, you don’t learn the claims business,” he says. “Or if you’re an adjuster, you don’t learn the underwriting business.”

Gibson does see Canada’s P&C leadership falling comfortably within Gladwell’s observations about the importance of autonomous, complex and meaningful work in the development of successful business professionals. To some degree, leaders are able to make their work meaningful by mastering those things that are within their control, Gibson believes.

“I’m a big fan of some of the early Dale Carnegie stuff,” he says. “If you really look at the foundation of the Carnegie stuff, it’s really about control what you can control. So what can you control? My three things are: you control the attitude you bring to work every day. You control how hard you work every day. And you control your own personal education. If you take control of those three things, which are all within your control, you don’t have to worry about anything in Life. It will take care of you.”

A person’s work ethic is central to a person’s reputation within the industry. And in Canada’s P&C insurance industry, a reputation spreads quickly. “What people do day to day, and how they work, it’s follows them around,” he says.

A broad-based education is key to establishing one’s reputation as a leader and a professional, says Gibson, who was chairman of the board of governors at the Insurance Institute of Canada in 2002-03.

The Insurance Institute is the educational arm of Canada’s property and casualty insurance industry. More than 16,000 of its 38,000 members across Canada are graduates who have earned the Chartered Insurance Professional (CIP) designation or Fellow Chartered Insurance Professional (FCIP) designation.

“If you look at the last 15 years of people who have gone through [the Institute’s chain of command], you see the Institute recruits people at the senior executive ranks of the industry to join the board of directors,” Gibson says. “In doing that, they integrate you into the training and education of the industry in a broad base. They open your mind wide to everything that is going on. It’s like you get integrated into a club for life. Being chairman of the Insurance Institute of Canada was probably one of the highlights of my career. It was absolutely a door-opener to the CEO club of Canada.”