Early in her career, Amanda Smith says she experienced an episode of burnout. But it helped her learn what kind of leader she wanted to be.
"A great leader is someone who really empowers their team to succeed," says Smith, who is chief product officer at Plymouth Rock Home Assurance Corporation. "I'm definitely someone who is very driven by work, but I also want to make sure I can go home at night to spend time with my family and that my team can do the same thing."
With the entire world going through the pandemic, Smith says that more people have gained the confidence and empowerment to speak out in the way she did earlier in her career, and she tries to tune her leadership to that frequency.
"I learned the hard way that if you just push yourself all of the time to constantly be focusing on work, it hurts your work productivity in the long term, and you get to a point where it's no longer effective," she says. "Now I work with my team to recognize those signs as they're happening and really have that open and honest conversation of, 'Is there too much stuff on your plate?' 'How do we need to reprioritize?' It doesn't mean we're not driven people if we set boundaries but I think it's important to recognize that sometimes there is a breaking point."
Smith is an actuary by training and did a fellowship through Casualty Actuarial Society. She says being in a catastrophe management role during Hurricane Sandy made a huge impact on her career and helped her become passionate about homeowners insurance. She started working at Plymouth Rock two and a half years ago.
"My job is really to ensure that we are priced appropriately and have the right underwriting guidelines in place," Smith says. "There's a lot that is happening in the insurance industry with homeowners like inflation changes and climate change. So, a lot of what I'm doing is working with my team to make sure we have the right defenses in place, that's really our underwriting, to make sure we're taking on risks that we feel we can appropriately price and drive pricing adequacy across the book."
To facilitate this work, Smith says data and technology are essential to what they do. Plymouth Rock does its "homework up front," she says.
"We've done research on all of the homes in our footprint and we more or less have a predetermined price for each home," Smith says. "That way, when the customer comes to us, we already know what we're going to charge and so, the data we need to be able to do that is absolutely paramount to our day to day."
Plymouth Rock uses aerial imagery data and partners with a vendor on fly-over pictures that are updated on a near-daily basis that way if a data refresh is necessary, the process is much quicker. Smith says the company also is exploring such technologies as water valve shut offs that crank themselves and products like Ting, which plugs into an outlet and tracks electrical currents for potential fires driven by an electrical surge.
"We're still figuring out how we want to partner with them and potentially integrate it into the offerings that we have," Smith says about Ting, "It's another example of how technology is really changing the landscape."
