Page 128 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

Focusing on Results 117

can be the difference between success and failure, not only for your orga-
nization or team, but also for your career—and theirs. The reality is that a
track record of producing results will open up new opportunities for you
more than anything else on your résumé.
To show you what it means to focus on results, we’ll use the case of
Seraina Macia, during an earlier phase of her career when she was CEO of
XL Insurance’s North American Property and Casualty Business. (She is
now executive vice president at AIG.)

Focusing on results at XL Insurance

When Seraina Macia (then Seraina Maag) was recruited to become the
CEO of the XL Insurance Group’s North American property and casualty
(P&C) business in 2010, it was, in her words, “an underperforming and
shrinking business” with just under $800 million in premium revenues
and a mediocre combined ratio (a measure of insurance company profit-
ability). Macia’s vision was not just to improve profitability but also to cre-
ate a self-sustaining growth business that could win a significant share of
the P&C market in North America, both of which would require an intense
and unrelenting focus on achieving results.
Macia knew that she couldn’t do this on her own; she needed to get her
team focused on achieving better results as well. But many of them had been
at XL for a long time, felt that they already were doing the best they could,
and were skeptical that rapid growth was possible. Furthermore, the insur-
ance experts worried that the unbridled pursuit of new premium revenue
would require them to take on more risk, something that they felt strongly
was the wrong thing to do. So her first challenge was to get her own team in
sync with her expectations—and her results-driven way of thinking.
To get started, Macia brought her team together to analyze the data of
the business. Its work revealed that the national market share of one of her
units was higher than the others, which gave Macia hard evidence that sig-
nificant improvement was possible. If one business could do it, then others
could as well. Macia then established an aggressive, companywide, market
share stretch goal based on this analysis.