The Role of a Leader – Mike Edgeley, A-Plan Insurance (Part 1)

I’ve recently interviewed several Executives from a number of leading insurance organisations, discussing the role of a leader and other topical issues.

Today’s interview is with Mike Edgeley, Managing Director at A-Plan Insurance.

Spanning an impressive 17 years in the military, Mike held various leadership and operational positions, within both The Parachute Regiment and as a staff Officer within the Ministry of Defence.
Mike spent eight years at BGL in various roles utilising his operational and commercial skills and then held MD positions at Lancaster Insurance followed by a portfolio of 6 medical businesses providing services into the GI, Life, Travel and Corporate sectors, for Capita.
Currently Managing Director at A Plan Insurance, after starting as COO in 2015.

Q1. How does the military teach you leadership skills?

Leadership is taught in a very structured process, starting with the theory of leadership in the classroom, followed by placing people in a range of practical leadership situations. In the first instance it should be remembered that the military selects people for Officer training for their leadership potential, so there is a baseline ability. What then follows at Sandhurst is a 12-month course to develop those inherent abilities, through a range of classroom work, lectures and then practical application within a series of exercise scenarios.

It is all designed to prepare young Officers to be able to join their units and take on their first command appointment. The very first lecture at Sandhurst is ‘What are the components of leadership’, and invariably will include John Adair’s model of three overlapping circles which encompass ‘the task’; ‘the team’ and ‘the individual’. This really forms the basis of all that follows.

But the learning doesn’t stop there, clearly. Throughout your military career you constantly gain and learn leadership experience within your unit. You are constantly placed in new, different, and at times demanding and difficult situations where you continue to learn and develop. Units tend to operate within a formal readiness cycle: training for operations, at readiness for deployment, deployed on operations.

Once an operational deployment is completed, the unit will then start the cycle again (operational commitments allowing). Throughout this cycle the learning continues at unit level, is formally assessed and graded. And throughout your career additional courses are attended, which although designed to hone specific military skills, aspects of leadership are a part of all of them. Out of a 17-year career in the Army, at least 4-5 years was spent on training and development courses.

Q2. How different is leadership in a military role compared to that of a commercial role?

Fundamentally it’s very similar in a military and commercial environment, but it’s just got completely different applications. The actual skills needed are perhaps surprisingly very similar.

When I was at BGL Group, I used to deliver leadership presentations to our managers and senior managers. In most instances people used to think, “Okay, I think I know where this guy’s going to come from. He’s going to talk about parachuting, warfighting and it’s going to be interesting but a completely different kettle of fish.” I used to start the presentation by building on those expectations and say, “Leadership in the military puts you in these difficult and demanding situations and expects you to do XYZ.” And a number of people would respond by saying “Wow, how on earth did you end up in insurance? It must be so different in comparison.”

In fact I would then flip people’s view of leadership around and say, “Almost the opposite. It’s exactly the same skillset and you are applying it, day in, day out. So whereas the military used to have a formal process to develop leadership ability, and would then practise, practise, practise and then apply it – in a commercial environment, you’re doing it live day in and day out. But in many cases you probably haven’t had much formal training. So there’s a greater degree of self-selection and, if you end up being a good leader in a commercial environment, it’s probably because you’ve got some very good innate leadership skills and you’ve applied them continuously during your career. So be under no illusions, those who succeed in a commercial environment do so because generally they are very good at what they do. They have to make decisions and show leadership all the time because the speed of the commercial environment is so fast now, and you’ll probably see the outcome of your actions very quickly.”

So the skills are very similar but they just have to be applied in very different situations. The two things that are different is that firstly there is clearly a physical element in the military. The military does train and test your ability to think, lead and act when under physical duress and hardship. When you’ve been out on the ground for three weeks, invariably in bad weather, you’re often cold, wet and physically tired, you’ve still got to retain the mental capacity and the resilience to be out in front, project your character and make good decisions, which is where all the training is focused. An often-used quote is “train hard, fight easy.”

The second thing that is different is that in the military you are often making decisions from a very incomplete picture of what is going on around you. I think in a commercial environment your business’ performance and those of your competitors is much clearer. The difficulty is in making decisions that make a difference to that dynamic. But generally the information is all there. In the military there is often only a partial picture of what is going on around you, and very often there is confusing or contradictory information. Decision making in that environment is one that is all about being decisive but making decisions that factor for the unexpected. A great quote by a 19^th Century Prussian General, von Molkte, was “No plan survives contact with the enemy”. Military leadership is all about providing clarity and direction in circumstances that will undoubtedly change quickly and unexpectedly.

In the military how you engage with John Adair’s model as you get more senior and get exposed to more complex and difficult situations changes and develops, but that same model is still really at the heart of everything that you do and I think the same applies in the commercial environment as well. You have a problem, whether it’s a military or a commercial one, and you need to come up with a solution and a plan of what you’re going to do to tackle that problem. In both environments you need to be fully involved and steering the analysis that breaks down the problem and creates options or solutions – ‘the task’, and in both environments it’s then all about driving those solutions via ‘the team’ and ‘the individual’ – which is where day to day leadership needs to be evident and effective.

Q3. In the military environment, how do they select people who have got potential leadership capabilities?

Leadership potential is identified and developed in a very thorough manner at all levels in the Army (and is the same for the other Services as well). From my own personal experience, as an Officer you have to go through an Army selection process for Officer selection. It may well have changed in recent years but you would initially select the Regiment you wanted to join and if, after a series of initial general tests they agreed to assess you, you would attend a 3 day assessment centre run by that Regiment called a pre Regular Commissions Board, involving a series of interviews, presentations, physical and written tests, with a lot of focus on identifying your character and what makes you tick.

There is also an element of ‘does he or she fit’. If successful, you would then be put forward for the Army’s Regular Commissions Board which is another 3-day selection process run centrally at an establishment in Wiltshire. Similar in nature, but with a lot of emphasis on leader led and leader less command tasks to see how you perform against your peers. Both courses were designed to put you under a degree of load or stress to find out what sort of person you are and understand your character. They want to see how you interact when lots of people are involved, who are all trying to have their say and the assessors just want to see how you react and perform. When is appropriate to take charge, pipe up? When do you decide actually there’s already a good plan, I just need to tuck in behind and act as a team? The intent is to identify if you have the right attributes and ‘potential’ and, if you’ve got that, then you effectively get selected for entry to the 12-month course at Sandhurst which is the Officer training college.

Q4. Once you get selected for Officer training or into a leadership role, how do they assess you in terms of your performance, whether you’re doing a good job or not?

In the Army that is a very formal process that has been tuned and refined over the years and goes into a lot of depth. In a commercial environment I have observed it being done at much more varying levels of quality. Some businesses do it very well – in others it is woeful considering people are our main resource.

In the Army there is a very robust annual grading process. This will tend to grade you across 15 to 20 attributes and will result in a specific number or grade being awarded. Where the Army grading process is quite prescriptive is that when it compares you to your peers in the Army, at whatever rank you are, the scoring system orders everyone by their result which will then highlight if you are top 10%, top third, middle third or bottom third.

If you imagine a standard deviation bell curve, if you assess any sample size of 100 people in detail you will end up with everyone being prescribed a score and from that you will have to have a top 10%, a top 30% and middle 30% and bottom 30%, irrespective of the group’s overall quality. It explicitly requires you to say to the person who you are grading, “you scored xx points and you are in my top ten per cent, top third, middle third, or you’re in my bottom third.” The same applies to Officers at all levels. You then have to explain to that individual ‘why’ and substantiate that statement. If done correctly, it makes sure that good quality is identified, or remedial and supportive action is put in place, or lower performers are managed out if, after a number of similar grades, they don’t step up. It is specifically designed to identify who is ready for promotion but also who has the longer-term potential.

In addition to your annual assessments, before you can go to the next grade or rank, typically you need to have sat an exam to qualify to attend a promotion qualifying course. Some of these courses are really quite significant. The course to promote from Captain to Major was 7 months long. At Major level, a small percentage of Officers were selected for a 2-year course designed to prepare you for roles at a more senior rank. Each of these courses were continuous assessment, the output of which dictated your immediate future roles.

Q5. Have you used any of that training for the appraisals for leaders in your own teams?

In all the companies I’ve worked for there’s never been as formal a process as that and certainly at one previous insurance company we introduced an appraisal process, but it was such a change of culture it proved quite hard to bed in. There will always be growing pains introducing any appraisal system whereas the military has been doing it since year dot. It’s just something that everybody was accustomed to and its openness, its transparency, but also its candidness and frankness was just accepted.

When you don’t have that process already and you try and implement it, unless there is a mechanism that forces a degree of candidness, there is always the danger that people will shy away from having difficult conversations.

At A-Plan we are introducing a more formal appraisal process, but interestingly for us where we see the biggest benefit is not just making sure we identify talent, but due to our recent growth, ensuring we find the most appropriate role for every employee to make sure that we get the most out of them and they get the most out of their job and career.

Q6. How do you assess what it looks like to be in the top ten per cent and what are the metrics? Is it easier to do in some roles than others?

Bear in mind the military is typically a unit based on a fairly large number of people doing a similar role. You could score most people on a similar type of grading matrix. In a commercial environment, you probably need to score people in an IT department slightly differently from, say, a business development function. But that said, there are also some core attributes which will be the same across any role. So you will find that half the attributes may be the same, and the other half specific to role.

But as long as within each group the same grading mechanism is used and as long as there’s a calibration session to make sure that nobody’s been unfairly judged, then generally it works. It forces you to give honest feedback to people and it also forces you to do something about it as well because if you’re having to say to somebody “You’re bottom third because of XYZ” and they say, “Well I’m not happy about that” it forces you to have that follow on conversation. “I can help you, but you’re going to have to help me help you as well”, and it just stops people languishing.

It doesn’t need to be blunt or harsh and everybody works for different reasons. You will have some people who are very motivated to climb the promotional ladder. Other people are what you might call journeymen. They are very comfortable in what they do and they enjoy it. They may well have other drivers in life which influences what they want to get out of their job.

Therefore if you said to them “You’re middle third, you perform very well, but you’re never necessarily the first person to put your hand up and therefore if you haven’t got that drive to improve, it might limit you to some extent in terms of how much we’re prepared to load you and give you different experiences” and some people say, “I didn’t realise, help me get there”. And other people might say, “I’m comfortable with that actually as I want to walk out the door at 5.30 on the dot every day because of other commitments”.

Q7. After 17 odd years in the military, how did you get into the world of insurance?

Like a lot of people will say, almost purely by circumstance than design, but I’m very glad I did. I had a sort of waking up moment after coming back from a seven-month tour in Iraq. Inclusive of pre-deployment training I had seen very little of my family for heading on for ten months. I had a four-year-old daughter and on my post-tour leave was having a chat with her while she was drawing a picture of the family, which I found out I wasn’t in! It was a very innocent four-year-old’s reason as to why I wasn’t part of the family so literally about five minutes later I thought, “That’s it, time to leave!”

From my perspective, I made the decision to leave before I knew what I was going to do because it was a bit of an emotional reaction. I tumbled into a job as an Operations Director at First Group, transport – buses and trains. The job was enjoyable and it was a good company to work for. There were twelve of us, internal and external appointments, who were being given 12 months training and orientation, including courses at the IOD, before potentially taking over subsidiary business units. They effectively recruited a bunch of people to inject a different perspective into their senior management structure. It was well managed and delivered but to be honest, probably wasn’t the sector I saw as long-term.

But then a friend of a friend had bumped into Peter Winslow at BGL group and he was looking to recruit, and the conversation had got onto perhaps trying somebody ex-military who had recently left and was in a commercial environment. They suggested a couple of names of which I was one. So not head hunted – as in so many cases it was timing and circumstance, but I will always be grateful to both people for the contact and opportunity. I fitted the bill and life in insurance started at BGL Group which was just a fantastic place to land.

Q8. What does the term leadership mean to you?

I see myself as being very fortunate and lucky. Aside from the military, I did 4 different ‘Head of’ roles at BGL Group which gave me a great grounding in broking in a fairly short period of time (7 years). I then went to Capita, initially as MD of their specialist classic car broker Lancaster Insurance Services, which was a turnaround job as well as taking it to market where it was bought by Markerstudy. I then returned to Capita as MD of a portfolio of specialist medical businesses that provided services into the insurance sector – again Capita was in divesting mode of what it deemed more ‘non-core’ businesses and these were sold. Although the Capita roles were a great experience, I vowed I wanted to ensure the next role was in a company where insurance broking was its sole focus, the company had something unique or different to offer the market, was of a size where it had scale but was still very agile and with real growth ambitions. I was very fortunate to pick up the COO role at A-Plan working into Carl Shuker and, more recently with our expansion as a Group, as MD when Carl stepped up into the Group CEO role.

The lesson I’ve learned in those roles has reinforced in my mind that a leader for me is somebody who needs to be a number of things, but it actually goes back to that John Adair model. It’s somebody who in the first instance has got to have the mental ability to understand the problem and the challenges and able to find a route to producing a solution to getting there – ‘the task’. That solution might be something they come up with, or just as likely, they are capable of using the resource around them.

They have got to be people who can form and develop good teams around them so are good at recruiting the right people or bringing the right people together – ‘the team’. They are not afraid to get people who are very good and, in some ways, better than them in certain skillsets to create the best and most effective team. Once you know what the solution is and you have your team, it’s somebody who can provide clarity and direction to that team. Fundamentally I think that’s what people want. The clarity, direction and consistency and once they know what to do, then it’s somebody who is able to judge, monitor and understand when they can just let people go and crack on and when they need to perhaps intervene and just tap the tiller to make sure it keeps moving in the right direction – making the most of ‘the individual’.

Please look out for part 2 coming soon!

Right International have a proven track record of identifying and sourcing the top talent across various niches of the insurance market. If you are looking to add to your team now or in the near future, I would welcome the opportunity to help – please contact me.

If you have any ideas for future articles and would like to be involved, please let me know and I would welcome any feedback.

Please look out for more leadership blogs!

All the best,

Gary Pike

Founder & MD

Right International Insurance Headhunters