Karine Le Metayer, Global Director, Talent, Inclusion & Engagement at Chubb Fire & Security

In today’s fast-moving and competitive environment, it’s more critical than ever that businesses invest in developing their people. At Chubb, Building Great Leaders is our enduring purpose and deeply embedding a leadership development culture within each business is a day-to-day priority. We truly believe that Leadership is the single biggest differentiator between average and excellent and that everyone should have the opportunity to develop as a leader, deserving our support when making this choice. Therefore, allowing our employees to grow personally and professionally are core aspects of our leadership approach. Ultimately, having the right people in the place will allow our organization to achieve our goals.

Recognising talent

At Chubb, we are all about our homegrown talent and are focused on investing in our people to nurture and build the skills they need to succeed and reach their full potential. We have a strong people development strategy to assess talent performance and to plan for career development and future succession. Our approach is based on the three pillars of our leadership development framework. The first one is leading self. This starts with Chubb encouraging effective self-leadership behaviours. The second, is leading others at the individual level, positively influencing the development of each team member by our behaviours and actions. The third one is leading teams and businesses; guiding extraordinary teams that move in the same direction and creating an environment where each of us can perform at the best for the success of our organization.

Another critical aspect to recognising and investing in talent, is ensuing that our leadership development and a recruitment process is fair and non-biased. For example, our teams are trained to provide a transparent and open interview process that is reliable, and experience based.

Building and investing in a strong and diverse bench of talented leaders help us prepare teams in terms of skills set and leadership practices to fill critical positions in the near, medium, and long term. Our Chubb Senior Leaders own the responsibility for creating a culture in which all their team members can behave and develop as a leader, allowing them to grow in the organization, and be fulfilled with the career development opportunities offered to them. Great Leaders develop Leaders. This mindset helps us to recruit effectively and understand where to promote the development of skills internally and when to hire externally.

Transforming leaders of tomorrow

To identify gaps in career development and to find solutions to the problems businesses face, you need to be able to challenge the status quo and transform processes that aren’t working. Through our Performance Management process, we ensure supervisors and employees meet at the start of the year to define goals for the twelve months and have regular meetings to discuss goal completion and to assess achievements and development opportunities. This process allow us to align individual contributions with Chubb global goals and constantly answer career development needs based on delivered performance and expectations.

We are always looking for ways to improve. As a result, we always look at improvement opportunities in our HR processes and leadership practices in support of Chubb strategies, remaining focused on building out our key areas and developing even more great leaders. This can sometimes mean supporting colleagues that want to move into different practice areas within Chubb to explore their potential. It’s all about being flexible and open-minded – you never know where someone’s potential might lie! We achieve this by creating an environment of trust and collaboration, encouraging employees to clearly indicate their career development expectations and to see how we can best support them. One example is the Chubb Individual Development Plan (IDP) which is created in true partnership between employees and supervisors to define short- and longer-term career goals, including educational and training opportunities such as projects to lead and classes and seminars to enrol in.

Realising and adopting best practices

To help our colleagues realise their potential, leaders must engender a culture that encourages good practices and leadership. This includes adopting talent management best practices and evolving our leadership style to drive empowerment and accountability and entrenching this throughout our organisation. This must filter the whole business and become part of workday features and capabilities. Having these structures and lines of communication in place is essential. When you don’t take care of your people, they aren’t fulfilled, and you cannot build a successful organisation.

Our enduring purpose is Building Great Leaders. We want all Chubb employees to understand that leadership is a choice, rather than a position. Our investment in our people goes beyond high quality eLearning and in-person leadership courses. We work with the leaders of each of our businesses to create a leadership development system that provides a holistic development experience. We consider Leadership to be about positively influencing our own success and the success of others. To support this journey, in June 2022 we launched the deployment of the “I am a Leader” course to all employees of Chubb, to serve as an introduction to our Building Great Leaders philosophy and to begin a conversation that we will continue to build upon overtime. As of today, more than 5000 Chubb employees already completed the course.

Business leaders must assess and invest in their people and culture with the same rigor and focus used to address financial or business strategies. We believe that the best people leaders make proactive talent management a critical part of their daily activity to drive engagement and to build the strongest teams. This is our approach, and it empowers us to build and nurture the strongest bench of future leaders.