What is keeping chief executives up at night?

IN the first of a series of exclusive interviews with top Zimbabwean chief executives, we speak to Lawrence Nazare group chief executive of Continental Reinsurance. The company is one of the largest reinsurance companies in Africa and is headquartered in Lagos, Nigeria

Q: Could you take us through the milestones of your leadership journey and some of the inflection points that helped you get to the position you are in today?
A: In 1990 I was a young and adventurous fledgling lawyer working as a public prosecutor in Harare. I chanced upon a Zimbabwe Reinsurance Corporation (ZimRe) job advert calling for applications for a trainee underwriter — I didn’t know what reinsurance was nor what an underwriter did — but I applied. As fate would have it, I got the job. That’s how my reinsurance journey started.

Lawrence Nazare group chief executive of Continental Reinsurance.

A visionary by the name of Albert Nduna was our CE. I remain indebted to him — he is an extraordinary man who allowed young professionals boundless space and unlimited opportunities to grow. In 1999, after nine years with ZimRe, he recommended me for a position to lead Intermarket Reinsurance, a joint venture between Hannover Re and Intermarket Holdings. That was probably the biggest breakthrough of my career; I blossomed in my leadership growth there.
Perhaps the greatest inflection point in my career happened in 2009 when Emerging Capital Partners, the then majority shareholders in Continental Re, came calling. I found myself catching a flight to Lagos. Continental Re, and Lagos, have been home since then.
Q: What are the key strategies that leaders should be using to keep employees engaged, especially as they are having to deal with many external environmental stressors?
A: You must have a compelling vision and a well-articulated strategy that clearly spells out where you are headed, how you intend to get there, and the role the individuals you enlist must play in the accomplishment of your objective. Tell a great story about the end game, spin a great motivating yarn about an enthralling journey, provide everyone that you enlist an opportunity to be a hero, and the team will stay the course — willing and happy to make sacrifices because it all has meaning to them.
Q: Many corporate leaders are concerned about losing key people. What has been your experience of this in the reinsurance industry, and how are you dealing with the skills shortage, movements, and the changing skills requirements as a result of greater digitisation?
A: Great institutions thrive on being able to attract great talent, growing and retaining that talent, and letting that talent thrive. Even more importantly, resilient entities must have the capacity to regenerate talent, and the capacity for renewal, even when there is attrition. A meritocracy that’s reputed for performance, people involvement, growth, and achievement will always be a magnet for talent.
Increasing digitalisation places new demands on talent, but when you hire great people and blend them with a learning culture, they will always be adaptable and can pivot to new realities with relative ease. At Continental Re we are also quite sensitive to the demographic distribution of staff. We have built a team that’s a balanced blend of experience and youth.
Q: What is your company doing to nurture talent to be able to handle the pressure of senior management, so that, when their turn comes, they are already comfortable with the spotlight and know what to do when they get promoted up the corporate ladder?

A: We are uncompromising about hiring people with the right academic credentials, and then we put them through rigorous, on-the-job, apprentice-style learning to quickly assimilate the skills required for them to perform and contribute optimally to our mission.
Concurrently, we identify, deliberately, high potential individuals who have great, innate leadership qualities, and we place them on intentional mentorship and exposure programmes that are meant to accelerate their progress up the corporate ladder. I have seen from my experience that nothing motivates one to learn leadership skills more than being thrown into the deep end and being challenged to sink or swim.
Q: Are you concerned about the disruptive innovations that are taking place in the reinsurance industry? How can CEs respond to the need to continue to innovate and compete against not only the companies that have been in business for a long time but also the new ones that are coming up?
A: We must not fear disruption because it is the reality of life. Human progress through the ages has been spurred by disruptive innovation. If you are only focused on competing against your peers, you will soon face your demise. You must confront the new. You either innovate, join, or embrace the innovators, or you fade into obscurity. If we are to survive in the new normal of digital disruption in the insurance sector, we must collaborate with the proliferating insurtechs, support them with funding, help them to scale and ultimately be active participants, but benefactors, in the cannibalisation of our model.
Q: Monetary stability of a company is a non-negotiable part of being a CE. What are some of the learnings and strategies that you can advise other business leaders?

A: In insurance, our core business is to underwrite risk. It is an onerous undertaking. The more successful you are at extracting value from ‘risk’, the better chances you have of both protecting your capital and also growing it. The first rule in the underwriting of risk is to get the basics right; you then must do only the things that you know, be rigorous at doing those things, and deviate only into the things that you have the requisite competencies and resources for. Manage and protect your capital and know your boundaries and limits. There is no room for exuberance.
Q: How are the inflationary pressures across the continent impacting your business and how are you as a company dealing with these?
A: The intrinsic values of most of the risks that we underwrite are heavily weighted in hard currency because of the high import content of most insured assets on the continent. Asset inflation is therefore, closely correlated with exchange rate movements. Unfortunately, assets are primarily insured in local currencies. With most of our soft African currencies facing significant devaluation, insurers are badly exposed to inflation risk. As a company, we have taken measures to hedge against this by holding most assets backing insurance liabilities in hard currency, but we still have exposure. The technical solution is for insurers to price inflation risk when they underwrite and collect enough, upfront, premiums, but this is not always practical. We always urge our partners to continuously encourage their clients to review insured values so that we are all receiving adequate premiums to offset the inflation risk.
Q: How do you as group CE monitor customer experiences and customer satisfaction across the various business units?
A: As they say, measure what matters. We all tout customer-centricity and customer experiences, but such platitudes are of no value unless you get honest feedback. We have resolved to subject ourselves to bi-annual, independent surveys of our customers performed by a global research institution to measure customer satisfaction across all our offices. However, being from the old school, I always believe that the views of your customers will always reflect in the numbers — unhappy customers vote with their feet — they walk away.
Q: How critical is it for companies to build diverse and inclusive workforces to mirror the diversity of their customers, clients, and communities?
A: The one thing that my company has valued from the onset is local knowledge. In our history, local presence has always been the prerequisite to diversification; it is for a reason that our by-line is ‘Pan-African Commitment Made Local.’ We believe in interacting with our diverse customer base through individuals who have geographic, linguistic, and cultural proximity. We have also deliberately focused on the building of our teams on key demographic factors. It is vital to have a multi-generational team across all staff layers. We have now adopted a gender parity policy with strict targets across all our governance layers, starting with the holding company board.
Q: Do you feel that progress has been made in this area and what more needs to be done to provide equal opportunities for women to grow and lead in the corporate world?
A: We have made tremendous progress over the last 12 months. For progress to be made, you have to be purposeful about it — make the strategic pronouncements, lay out the targets, and purposely act to ensure compliance. As male leadership, we must also acknowledge how we predominate and use our historical position of advantage and influence to disproportionately focus our mentoring and sponsorship efforts on female employees. It has to be intentional and deliberate.
Q: What advice do you offer to young people beginning their careers during this challenging and uncertain time?
A: I have oftentimes quoted from the 1920s prose poem by the American writer Max Ehrmann, Desiderata — “Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time”. The uncertainty and challenges of present times make it crucial for young people to make the right choices; pick the right career; find something that you will enjoy, apply yourself; bring to the table whatever discretionary effort you can, work hard and smart; someone will notice, focus on personal growth; success builds on itself, be patient; loyalty breeds recognition, develop expertise; you will be valued and rewarded for it, and keep learning; you will grow and grow.
– The Executive Magazine