Jon Winsbury (pictured above) is a 25-year insurance industry veteran and Gallagher Bassett’s (GB’s) executive vice president of international. When Insurance Business covers insurance industry news, GB’s leaders and staff often stand out as a particularly happy, positive crew.
IB asked Winsbury if he could explain why – is there a secret sauce?
“I've thought a lot about this because sometimes I think I don't know but when I really boil it down, it's connected leadership,” he said. “This is where the leaders are approachable and able to walk the floor, talk with the frontline people who make things happen, build relationships with the middle and junior leadership teams.”
Winsbury said his firm’s mentorship programs help nurture this leadership style and esprit de corps. He’s just finished a 12-month mentoring program with a staff manager in Melbourne.
“I found that we both got a lot out of that, and that's connection, right?” he said. “Now, when I go to Melbourne, we chat, catch up, I can talk to his team leaders about their issues and they'll be honest with me about what their problems are.”
Winsbury said executives at insurance firms, through no fault of their own, are often too busy to nurture these connections.
“They're too much into their tasks to actually take the time to talk to the squad,” he said. “In that time that you spend talking to your people about what their issues are, you develop a secret sauce.”
He said the staff feel listened to.
“They want to work for an organization that actually cares about them and their future,” said Winsbury.
Winsbury said his connected leadership style is something learned from experience. IB asked the GB executive what his leadership style was like back in the 1990s during his early management days.
He explained that he “grew up in Suncorp” as part of a young group of branch managers.
“A band of brothers and sisters, if you like, that worked together really well and was connected to their staff,” said Winsbury.
He found a similar environment at GB, he said.
“I wasn't high enough up then in the pecking order of life to have developed a [leadership] style but I think one of the issues I had to grapple with was a result of one of my strengths: I'm a problem solver,” he said. “I can rapidly get to the heart of an issue and deal with it – I've got weaknesses but that's one of my strengths.”
Winsbury said he tended to solve a problem himself rather than engage the team for help and explore other views.
“I'd tend to rush to the solution quickly and say, ‘That's what we need to do, teams, let's go!’ Rather than actually saying, ‘Hey, is there a counter view? What do others think?’” he said.
Winsbury said another big issue with his early leadership style was it didn’t allow his team to learn through a problem solving process.
“That wasn't good for anyone,” he said. “It wasn't good for me because I was piling all these problems on myself and it wasn't good for them because they either didn't have the chance to express their own problem solving abilities or they weren't necessarily learning anything.”
He said this “bull at the gate approach” was likely a result of being an operations manager having to work “in the midst of chaos.”
“Then as CEO, I'd transferred those habits into it and it took me a couple of really good mentors and probably four to five years to learn how to allow my executive and management ranks the space to solve issues without me interfering,” said Winsbury.
He said today he still finds himself “pulling my reins back,” particularly when his team is confronted with a familiar problem. However, he manages to control himself.
“I pull myself back and say, ‘What do you think we should do?’” he said. “That's been my biggest learning as a leader, to allow people to grow.”
IB asked Winsbury if this connected leadership style is a feature of the wider insurance industry these days.
“No, that's definitely a GB thing,” he said. “There are some competitors that are great, that I really admire, but the Gallagher Bassett secret sauce is a Gallagher thing.”
Winsbury said he has colleagues at big carriers “trapped in their endless cycle of structure and restructure and every time a new CEO comes, everyone is fighting for their life, to keep their job – that has not changed in 25 years.”
He contrasted that with GB, where he recently took a call from Patrick Gallagher Jr., the firm’s global CEO.
“I took some time off recently due to an illness [Winsbury is fit and back at work now] and Pat Gallagher rang me and said, ‘How are you feeling, Jon? I heard you are off work,’” said Winsbury. “So it's a great organization for that.”
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