Brad Irick took up his post as CEO of Tokio Marine Kiln in January 2020. He has a long association with Tokio Marine Group and was previously Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Tokio Marine HCC.
Here, he shares his views on how he has approached serving the business and discusses his outlook on evolving leadership challenges and opportunities.
Brad Irick, Chief Executive Officer of Tokio Marine Kiln Group Ltd., Executive Officer of Tokio Marine Holdings
In what roles have you served during your time at TMK and TMHCC?
My time with Tokio Marine HCC began in 2010 when I joined the business as CFO.
For 18 months – mid-2018 until 2020 – I had a dual role with the Group. I served as Deputy CEO of Tokio Marine Kiln, while also fulfilling my CFO duties with Tokio Marine HCC.
At the start of 2020, I was honoured to become CEO of Tokio Marine Kiln, and it wasn’t long before the world went into Lockdown due to Covid-19.
What brought you to insurance?
I grew up in Longview, Texas, and, like my brother and sister before me, I attended the University of Texas at Austin to obtain my degree in Accounting. I spent 21 years in public accounting with PricewaterhouseCoopers and KPMG. While I can’t say I planned to specialize in insurance, my first year I was assigned to mostly insurance clients, and I quickly realized it was an industry that interested me and that I wanted to be a part of. So, I spent virtually all of those 21 years focused on large, multi-national insurance companies. Tokio Marine HCC was a former client of mine and a natural progression out of public accounting and into a public company CFO role, which was a career aspiration.
I’m fortunate that my career has taken me from Longview to Dallas Texas, to New York, Tokyo, Houston and now London. I continue to love the industry and its contribution to society and feel a responsibility to maintain that legacy within Tokio Marine and also as an industry leader.
How have the big steps you’ve taken influenced your approach to risk?
All change involves a degree of risk. When I moved to New York, my mom said, “you know you don’t have to do this”. Being willing to take on a new challenge, even when there is significant risk and uncertainty, has always served me well, and I believe having the courage of your convictions is a key leadership skill, especially within our industry.
How different is the CEO role from your previous leadership positions?
The CEO role comes with a broader responsibility for the organisation as a whole. It is a privilege to serve as CEO and the position carries an aspect of corporate guardianship that is more pronounced than in other senior roles. That responsibility hit me when I was announced as Tokio Marine Kiln’s CEO at an employee event in September 2019 and walked on to the stage and looked out at a sea of 550 faces. I still feel the impact of carrying the expectations of our people and their families to get this right.
In my experience, the CEO role is less prescriptive than other c-suite roles. This has challenged me to be very clear in my own thinking about Tokio Marine Kiln’s corporate goals and culture. It has also emphasised the immense importance of having a strong team of professionals who have the conviction to push back and stress-test ongoing plans to evolve the company.
What do you see as markers for success in your leadership of Tokio Marine Kiln?
Work is an integral part of people’s lives. Everyone should feel valued and supported in what they do and have the means to develop their skills during their career. If companies get this right, then it will go a long way towards delivering the products, expertise and service that clients need. In turn, this will generate strong commercial results.
Everything stems from our culture and making sure it sits at the centre of our corporate thinking is very important to me. We’ve seen a direct correlation between the focus we’ve placed on building the culture we want at Tokio Marine Kiln, and our performance. I don’t see culture to as an ‘add-on’ to strategy – it is strategy.
Setting a small number of clearly defined objectives each year is something that I think helps create focus and consistency for everyone in the business. And combining everyone’s efforts will help realise the company’s full potential, which I think is an important goal for leadership teams.
What character traits do you admire in other leaders?
Throughout my career, I have been fortunate to work with many talented people. I have tried to watch and learn from all my colleagues, no matter their seniority, and to see how their different approaches impact others.
Some of the traits that I have observed fostering a positive working environment are consistency and clarity. I also believe being direct, but compassionate, is something to strive for and that creating a supportive environment is important.
How challenging is it to create a single culture across an international organisation?
Having a unifying purpose that connects the business is essential. Tokio Marine’s vision is to be a Good Company, which is about empowering our employees, delivering on commitments, and looking beyond profit, for the benefit of society and our customers. During the acquisitions of Kiln and then HCC by Tokio Marine, the cultural alignment with Good Company was the first item on the agenda – it superseded all of the discussions on the numbers. That perpetual aspiration to be a Good Company drives our thinking and decision-making everywhere we operate.
If leadership teams are consistent in what they say and maintain regular, visible contact with people throughout the company, then I think they can develop and maintain a strong, unified culture across international operations. Ensuring there are open channels to gather feedback from everyone in the company also helps to highlight any creases in a culture. This makes it easier to respond quickly and effectively to an issue.
You then have to walk the talk. The leadership team has to embody the culture it represents and reinforce it at every opportunity.
Can you give some practical examples of how you are doing that?
At Tokio Marine Kiln, we try to create an open dialogue with our people by canvassing feedback regularly - at events, through our employee forum, sounding board sessions and through question-and-answer sessions in townhall meetings. We also run regular employee surveys and focus groups to see how our people are experiencing the culture we want to build. We make sure that we follow up on any issues raised and publicise the actions we have taken to remedy the situation and evolve our operations. This ensures everyone has a voice and an opportunity to contribute to the strategy, and get direct answers from the leadership team. Over time, we have found the changing feedback we receive and the different questions people ask, point to a growing level of team confidence in what the company represents.
What do you view to be the big challenges facing the insurance leaders today?
Since I became CEO of Tokio Marine Kiln, we’ve seen a global pandemic; geopolitical instability on an unprecedented scale; an energy and cost of living crisis, a sustained inflationary environment, and dramatic weather patterns – some of which I experienced personally when my home in Texas flooded as a result of Winter Storm Uri.
We are also seeing advancements in AI and technology, which bring challenges as well as opportunities. Risk profiles are ever-evolving and we need to not only keep pace with those changes so we can give our clients stability, strength and confidence to navigate through them – but also innovate in their wake.
These challenges are why our industry exists. As I’ve personally experienced, there is no progress without risk. We need to support advancement to help society, businesses, industries and economies achieve their potential. The world needs insurance - and what we do matters more than ever to our customers and society.
How is the role of a corporate leader changing?
The focus of corporate leadership has broadened. While results will always be important, how those results are achieved is the real measure of an organisation. This includes how a company supports and develops its people. How it serves its clients. How it engages with the communities in which it operates. How it impacts the environment and how it interacts with its corporate partners.
A key part of that is purpose, and the focus on inclusion and diversity has increased significantly – for the better. In our industry, once you have capital, success is down to the people you employ and how you can motivate them to perform at their best and fulfil their own - and the company’s - potential. Building that culture is a relentless pursuit.
I think today’s best corporate leaders are those who empower their companies to be excellent corporate citizens and continually push their organisations to increase the positive impact they have on society.
