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Shifting to Advice: Three Priorities for an Insurance Transformation

By Erin L. Henry, Ph.D. and Brian Schnepff
September 2026
| 4 min read

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Key insights

  • For life insurers, expanding into holistic advice and wealth management requires a fundamental operating model shift, one that depends on strategic leadership, organizational agility and the ability to drive change across complex, legacy cultures.
  • Boards, CEOs and executive teams must fully believe in the advice-driven model and communicate a clear “North Star” for the transformation.
  • Insurers succeed when they frame transformation as building on existing strengths, not fixing something that is “broken.” Leaders need to honor the company’s history while helping employees embrace new ways of working to maintain trust, morale and momentum.
  • The shift requires different approaches to recruiting, training, developing and compensating talent, especially financial advisors and transformation leaders.

Life insurers have broadened from traditional protection and products to more holistic advice. The shift makes sense from a financial and customer perspective, but it’s a difficult transformation — far more complex than simply adding a new business unit or expanding the product portfolio. For that reason, insurers need leaders with strong strategic skills, organizational and cultural agility, and the ability to lead change in complex organizations.

We regularly speak to insurance leaders spearheading these initiatives about their progress, challenges they face, and what’s moving the needle. To test our observations, we recently spoke in depth with senior executives at three large life insurers successfully growing their advisory and wealth management capabilities to learn how they did it. Three priorities stood out: leadership, culture and talent strategy.

Most importantly, the board, CEO and leadership team need to truly believe in an advice-driven operating model. For a traditional carrier to effectively win with holistic advice, a commitment to transformation is required, along with a willingness to invest and disrupt.

You have to get the leadership team. You have to get the right mindset.”
Don Robertson former executive vice president and CHRO, Northwestern Mutual

The most effective industry leaders foster excitement around a North Star — a vision for the company with advice at its core — and inspire teams across the organization to buy in. They also create a communication structure and ongoing cadence to enlist financial advisors and leaders in more formal working groups like advisory councils, to have a voice and ownership of the transformation design and implementation.

“A big step for us was to ensure the leadership team had the right talent to drive change and believed in the refreshed strategy,” one executive told us. Don Robertson, former executive vice president and CHRO for Northwestern Mutual, echoed the point, “You have to get the leadership team. You have to get the right mindset.” The mindset shift extends to board directors, who need to be brought along on the change journey. “We had to go to the board multiple times to talk about how we win in this new model,” another leader emphasized the need for board-level communication.

At many insurers, driving the internal change can be harder than securing the investment. Transforming a business model requires a leader on point with clear accountability — someone in a senior role with the mandate to take bold risks, the authority to make change, and the credibility and savvy to access resources necessary to execute. For this reason, hiring external leaders with different skill sets to enlist respected incumbent leaders as co-sponsors and champions of the change can accelerate results. “I was willing to take full authority and accountability for it, win, lose or draw,” one recently hired executive told us.

Succeeding with an advice-centric model requires a cultural evolution with different risks. Managing this shift is tricky, because culture at insurance carriers is often deeply ingrained. To evolve the culture, leaders need to understand and value the company’s history and current culture. This provides a foundation built on credibility and trust, which enables leaders to garner support for changes to organizational structure, product, distribution (including compensation), technology, customer experience and talent.

“It’s an ‘and’ strategy, not an ‘or’ strategy,” said Paul LaPiana, head of brand, product & affiliated distribution, MassMutual, told us. “When we do training, when we make investments, when we prioritize initiatives, we don’t focus on one business at the expense of the other. We have to raise the value proposition across the portfolio.”

Companies and their employees take a lot of pride in what they’ve built. It’s important to maintain that pride, because it’s foundational to the culture. But you also need to embrace the thought of doing things differently.”
Terri Fiedler president of retirement services, Corebridge Financial

A key factor for success is to communicate the transformation as building on the company’s strengths, rather than positioning it as a fix. In other words, meshing the company’s heritage and past with the future direction. “Companies and their employees take a lot of pride in what they’ve built,” Terri Fiedler, president of retirement services for Corebridge Financial, told us. “It’s important to maintain that pride, because it’s foundational to the culture. But you also need to embrace the thought of doing things differently.”

“You want to take the good things that the company is known for — financial stability, financial strength, consistency, mutuality, noble purpose — and modernize it to match how the world now works,” Robertson said. Effective leaders monitor the organization’s willingness to change and ability to manage the level of disruption. They see the big picture and what needs to happen, while also prioritizing a subset of key tactics and measures to generate momentum without eroding morale or alienating traditionalists.

Once aligned on the future direction, successful transformation leaders build consensus by soliciting input from people at all levels of the organization, early on. During the design phase, getting people to contribute and help shape the future of the company — rather than trying to push changes through executive fiat — gives them a sense of buy-in and ownership, accelerating transformation. “We brought people under the tent early on and did a lot of work to ensure they were going to be supportive of this idea,” a leader told us.

When insurers shift to an advice business model, they need to recruit, train, compensate and develop talent differently. In addition to executive-level leaders, CHROs and CEOs are grappling with how to attract and retain financial advisors with value propositions apart from compensation. “To compete for talent, we provide financial professionals the resources and tools they need to support and grow their businesses and careers, including comprehensive training, practice management resources, products and technology that enable them to offer a modern experience and serve clients holistically,” said Fiedler.

• • •

As the life insurance industry evolves, a key question is less whether carriers should continue to expand advisory solutions and services for policy holders, but how they make the kind of change required to succeed in a sustainable way. It is a complex task. Recognizing the challenge and being intentional about where to invest, realigning the organizational structure and getting the right leaders in place will position insurers for success.

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