5 Questions: EMC’s Angela Noble on women supporting innovation in insurance

March 8, 2022 7:23 AM

di-angela-noble-WIL-21 — Angela Noble of EMC Insurance Companies presents during Digital Insurance's Women in Insurance Leadership conference, Dec. 2021.

As VP of innovation for EMC Insurance Companies, Angela Noble leads the company’s strategic development in the rapidly digitalizing world of insurance. She also is committed to helping other women ascend into leadership roles in the insurance industry. In a conversation with Digital Insurance, she discussed the intersection between these two charges. An edited version of that conversation appears below.

How is the insurance industry changing in terms of bringing women along a developmental path toward leadership in the context of the digital transformation and innovation of the sector?

With the continued focus and education on DEI initiatives, we're learning to ask more “why” and “how might we” types of questions when it comes to conversations about women and leadership in our industry. I think if we want to continue to see an increase in these opportunities for women and insurance, particularly in the digital space, we should focus on early awareness of opportunities in this industry. I'm talking about early as in high school, maybe even middle school, and then mentoring early in the career. When women are able to see, hear and interact with other women who are leading in these areas, it, it opens minds and doors.

I have two daughters and they are both really interested in STEM. One of my daughter is in college and she's studying statistics. She tells me that often times she's one of the only young women in her class, and it's being taught by a male professor. At the high school level, my other daughter is the only young woman in the engineering classes, which are being taught by men.

Gaining that confidence level of being able to take that deep breath and walk into the room where you're the only woman, especially at that age is hard. So we need to make sure that we have that mentoring and that visibility of the women who have been through this. How might they support and encourage women who are just beginning or exploring those types of careers?

Have you seen women leaving the insurance workforce amid the pandemic?

I think we really have to dig into the data. Women did leave the insurance industry [during COVID], more than men did. But women leave or change careers for a variety of reasons and they're really personal decisions. So I think that we just have to start by listening and be really authentic when we ask employees of any gender what they want and need from their employers or what they're seeking in their careers. The good news is our industry is shifting and growing and that's creating a lot more opportunity for creativity, more than we've ever had before to really embrace like, well, what do people actually want and need? The pandemic did present a lot of opportunities to make a switch if you wanted to. So maybe it’s not “I gotta leave insurance,” it’s “I can go back to school now.”

How can in-person professional development and mentoring restart as the pandemic (hopefully) recedes?

We need people to understand what is the value you can gain from being in person that you might not gain otherwise. Not everybody is outgoing or good at networking, or might not even know how to network. And so I think that's where we can really help women in particular is providing these in-person opportunities to develop skills with not only networking, but even concepts like “executive presence.”

All you're doing is going from video call to video call – it used to be part of our culture that you would have coffee meetings every day or you'd walk down the hallway with someone – it just became meeting to meeting. And I think that's where professional development really suffered. It was literally, “I only have so many hours in a day, they're all meetings, and then I've got my other responsibilities.” So what can we do to bring that back to our culture where you can take three days in a week and go to a conference just purely to network and to learn from others, or take meetings in the office.

How do you operationalize innovation at EMC?

We approach innovation at EMC in three ways. The first is strategic alignment: Everything must be aligned to our strategic priorities and must bring value to either a business unit, an agency, or our policyholders. We do this through consulting. We have one person who works with our business units to create that strategic alignment and make sure that the business value is there.

The second way is collaboration. Our cross-enterprise innovation team has representatives from each of our major business units, talking about the things that they're doing and they're leading innovation for their unit. The other thing we do is a monthly program called “innovation for breakfast.” That's a monthly program where we highlight the innovative work that's happening around our company and in our industry. We do that with collaborative presentations from our business units and those startups, it's a really cool event.

The last thing we do is our quarterly innovation lab. Each quarter we focus on a new trend that's impacting either the industry or EMC or both. We take a deep dive into it, and think about what we need to know about this, how it might impact us, and what solutions might we look into implementing. It’s a comprehensive, collaborative kind of approach that I could probably talk about for the rest of the day.

How have you seen the insurtech movement evolve in recent months?

I think there's a big trend among startups not only just changing and growing, but reacting to all the trends and consumer preferences. I love seeing that and I also love seeing those startups collaborate and connect. I think they're demonstrating to us – the incumbents and the carriers – that we can work together. And so we're seeing things like the Riskstream Collaborative, which brings carriers together there to work on blockchain. It's so exciting because we should be sharing information and developing these types of solutions together.

And we always think of technology when we think about innovation, but innovation is also part of our culture and what we do and how we do it. So even back to our beginning topic of women in insurance and elevating them – that's thinking about how our industry is changing. How must we change to be able to welcome women leaders in. It's considering the whole person of how we do business and that's where those voices are coming in. So I think the trends are very positive.