Insurance Professional Skills Development Series

The Power of Brand Storytelling & Building Community

Great marketing isn’t just about selling a product—it’s about telling a story that resonates. In this session, we’ll explore the psychological and emotional impact of storytelling in marketing and how it builds trust and loyalty. Learn how to craft compelling brand narratives using the StoryBrand Framework and the four key components of a stellar story. Discover strategies for fostering a sense of community, turning customers into passionate brand advocates, and leveraging social media, content marketing, and events to create lasting connections. Walk away with the tools to make your brand’s story unforgettable!

Ethical Use of Persuasion Principles in Sales & Marketing

Persuasion is a powerful tool in marketing and sales, but in the insurance industry, trust is everything. This session explores the principles of ethical persuasion and how to apply them responsibly to build credibility with customers. Learn to recognize and address common industry biases that fuel skepticism, identify potential ethical pitfalls in marketing strategies, and avoid manipulative tactics. We’ll also cover key regulatory considerations and compliance best practices to ensure your marketing aligns with industry standards. Walk away with actionable insights to create transparent, trustworthy messaging that fosters long-term customer relationships.

AI Tools for Marketing and Creating Content

AI is transforming marketing, offering powerful tools for content creation, personalization, and strategy development. But how can insurance marketers leverage AI while maintaining trust and ethical integrity? This session explores AI-powered content creation tools and their applications in insurance marketing, from persona development to storytelling and persuasive messaging. Learn how to develop an AI Code of Ethics and Standard Operating Procedures that ensure a balance between automation and human oversight. Discover best practices for using AI responsibly, avoiding ethical pitfalls, and fostering transparency. Walk away with the knowledge to integrate AI into your marketing strategy—ethically and effectively.

Project Initiation

In this session, you'll gain insights into the capabilities companies develop and deploy to ensure project work is authorized, monitored, and delivered within a cohesive portfolio. By understanding how projects fit within broader enterprise efforts, you'll be able to define project value more effectively, gain visibility into related initiatives, and leverage enterprise capabilities for successful project execution. Additionally, you'll explore the critical steps in initiating a project, along with the essential tools and techniques to set it up for success.

Project Planning

In this session, you'll gain a clear understanding of Work Breakdown Structures (WBS) and Project Plans, along with the fundamental concepts of project planning. Learn how a well-constructed project plan serves as more than just a task list—it’s a critical tool for guiding execution and ensuring project success. Explore essential tips and techniques to develop a plan that keeps your project on track while understanding its key components and how to select the best approach for your specific needs.

Project Execution

Successful project execution requires a strong communication strategy and proactive management. In this session, you'll explore the key factors that keep projects on track, with a special focus on the importance of a well-defined Communication Plan. Learn how to effectively communicate with stakeholders, report project status, and avoid common pitfalls in status reporting while incorporating best practices to ensure transparency and alignment throughout the project lifecycle.

Project Monitoring, Controlling and Closing

In this session, you'll explore the balance between controlling what you can and influencing what you cannot in project management. Discover the critical role Change Management plays in adapting to shifting project dynamics and ensuring smooth transitions. Additionally, learn how to identify the right moments to close project phases and bring a project to a successful completion, ensuring all objectives are met and stakeholders are aligned.

Leading with Confidence, Creating Credible Teams

Teams routinely struggle with issues of trust, and it is important for every team member to arrive to the organization confident with their best ideas, experience, and role. This session focuses on concrete steps to create confident communities, where active participants thrive with positive input in team settings like meetings and key brainstorming sessions. These same organizational members understand and mentor, can answer the key leadership whys others want to know, and are focused on values and achieving goals. Participants learn how to make these thriving spaces, all the while displaying their continued confidence made stronger through leadership tools and technology like AI. Takeaway skills: leadership confidence guide, credibility inventories with AI, creating team charters, and team meeting agenda setting

Problem-Solving and Framing through Leadership Storytelling

To achieve goals and relay influential solutions, its vital to dialogue efficiently and effectively in formal and informal leadership communication. This session focuses on powerful frames that enable organizational leaders to reach audiences quickly around their big ideas. Focus will be given to ten strong narratives that enable leaders to quickly communication with others in messages that audiences keep 7 times greater than other methods. The ability of the problem-solvers in the organization to ‘work smarter, not harder’ in achieving goals and reaching others in key moments will be abundant in this fun session. Takeaway skills: effective direct communication, leadership narrative frame-making, problem solving, values leading

Reinforcing Emotional Intelligence: Leading with Trust, Showing Competence

Recent studies show that emotional intelligence (EQ) is the single biggest predictor of workplace performance, with 90% of high performers also scoring high in EQ. This session focuses on how leaders effectively manage these EQ-dependent relationships which are both vital in making the organization perform 22 times higher. To do this, we will explore key warmth factors that help leaders relate to others when it is most crucial. Focus will also be given to pivotal moments of challenge, when our leadership is most on view, and when competency and control of adverse situations are being managed in demanding environments. We’ll discuss best practices for establishing workplace environments that can lead to stronger after-action, key change-goals, higher performing cultures, and leadership self-awareness through AI key for a growth mindset. Takeaway skills: warmth factors, competency cues, EQ-best practices with AI, establishing safe space cultures, goal setting

Leading through Conflict and Crucial Conversations

Many leaders struggle with difficult conversations and getting the tough talk out into the open in a beneficial way. Here, in this session on crucial conversations, we talk openly about positive ways to give and receive feedback in a constructive way. We also account for how leaders openly face audiences who are quite different in style and substance; creating a need to understand themselves, others, and continuously adapt in a busy day. Among all this constant flexing, we will talk about how these differences can be addressed through adaptive leadership style where we create safe places, member realities are heard, and organizational goals unite members towards movement. Takeaway skills: crucial conversations, positive feedback, assessing conflict styles, audience adaption

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Session 3

Session 4

Projecting Confidence into Everyday Leadership Communication

We build upon our previous seminars, to retake up the subject of confidence build from credibility. This time, we discuss common ways that confidence become visible through the verbal and non-verbal communicator. We go beyond the small strategies to take big steps towards communicating in the successful way of influential leadership.

Taking the Unexpected out of Connecting with Others

In this session, we offer leaders key tips and strategies designed to connect more fully with audiences of all kinds. We go beyond simply understanding others to explore the global dimensions of difference that separate leaders and prevent successful communication.

The AI of Influence

Here, we talk about how to get to the point with busy workplace deciders and how Generative AI is quickly becoming the number one workplace partner of so many leaders. In the session, we demystify AI use, demonstrate successful ways it can be used in everyday leadership communication, and further enhance our workplace credibility.

Change as a Leadership Concept

This final gathering will engage the key elements of change necessary to move people forward with winning ideas, big and small. It will explore the common mistakes and pitfalls that leaders make, demonstrating proven concepts to organize others around movement towards action of every kind.

The Strategic Innovation Imperative

Why must mutual insurers innovate — and why is “innovation” not one thing? This session examines the competitive pressures, evolving policyholder expectations, and market dynamics that make strategic innovation essential. Participants will be introduced to a practical framework that distinguishes four distinct modes of innovation, each with different drivers, strengths, and trade-offs. Leaders will assess where their own organization currently stands and begins to think strategically about their innovation choices.

Driving Innovation from Within

How can organizations harness the ideas and energy of their own people to innovate? This session explores two internally focused modes of innovation — one driven by leadership through formal structures and strategic direction, the other fueled by employees through grassroots experimentation and intrapreneurship. Participants will examine real-world examples of both approaches, consider the tension between top-down direction and bottom-up initiative, and identify opportunities to strengthen internal innovation in their own organizations.

Bringing Outside Ideas In

Some of the most powerful innovations come from beyond an organization’s boundaries. This session explores two externally focused modes of innovation — one involving structured partnerships, alliances, and ventures with outside organizations, the other tapping into customers, agents, and broader communities as sources of innovative ideas. Participants will examine how leading organizations manage external innovation relationships and will map opportunities to better leverage their own external networks and stakeholder communities.

Building Your Innovation Portfolio

Innovation is most powerful when leaders think in terms of a portfolio of approaches rather than a single initiative. This final session integrates the four modes of innovation and introduces the individual-level action principles that enable leaders to drive innovation regardless of the mode they are activating. Participants will assess which modes are underdeveloped in their organizations and develop a personal action plan with concrete steps to foster strategic innovation in their teams and areas of responsibility.