Samata Tummala, head of technology at Beazley, believes that first and foremost a leader should be interested in building up a team, to give people the space to try new things and feel valued.
"I think for a leader it's important to be rational and also have the willpower to do the harder stuff and to push yourself to get to that next level of achievement," Tummala says. "There's a reason why you are the leader, it is to do the hard work [and] tackle the hard things that nobody else would want to, given a choice."
Tummala says she learned her work ethic and some of her leadership skills from a previous leaders she worked with, who was ex-military: "There were some career-defining moments where I learned [about] doing the hard work and being a team player."
Previous to Beazley, Tummala worked in medical malpractice insurance. She started her position at Beazley last year, and says she was drawn to the culture, people and the variety in the job.
When she started at the company, her focus was to reassess where software needed to be within the company's U.S. business and implemented a plan to offload most of the capacities that were running into a cloud-based ecosystem of components.
"It was our core system, and so there was some reluctance in doing anything major to these systems, because of a fear of what if we send it to the cloud, how will we get through… There were a lot of unfounded fears that I had to work through and make sure that we could avail all the latest and greatest software paradigm shifts that were in the industry. It was fun," Tummala says.
Now in her second year in the role, she says the organization is focused on elevating its system processes and governance models–adding that the company is shifting to a more streamlined, globalized rollout of software and upgrades as opposed to regionalized.
"I'm very excited about a more well-rounded global role, that's something that I'm looking forward to," she says.
That will follow a pattern of digitalization in insurance that should be revolutionary, she concludes. Standardization across the industry in policy and quote documents will likely be the next step, and artificial intelligence will be folded into decision-making algorithms.
"I think the insurance industry is going to go through a huge transformation in terms of process and digital," she says. "The paper is going to pretty much disappear. I think the pandemic spearheaded most of that already, and I'm very excited about that. Insurance is going to become affordable for all kinds of people. The more you see digital pathways making those data points possible, they're definitely going to play a big part in future insurance models."
