“Ready. Set. Go.” The business strategy enabling us to serve clients and advisors during an historic event.

The phrase “ready, set, go” should be instructive to every business. No leader or firm – not even the best – can wake up one morning, snap their fingers and evolve their organizations in an instant. Every team in history has needed vigorous conditioning, planning and flexibility to win. 

This is a time when customer loyalty and conviction can be easily won or lost. The COVID-19 outbreak is causing a global economic disruption across all sectors. Organizational leaders across the world are working hard right now to serve their customers and frontlines. It’s on us to ensure that our key stakeholders have the support, clarity, systems and more they need to solve challenges and get back to what matters most to them as soon as possible. They are depending on us to deliver an exceptional level of service.

Northwestern Mutual is the leader in customer satisfaction among individual life insurance providers in 2019 according to J.D. Power, but like many companies, the pandemic is testing our ability to serve our clients, our workforce, and our financial advisors. Financial planning is a people business, and suddenly, our advisors could not safely sit across the table from their clients. Documents requiring signatures could no longer be hand-delivered. Business-critical mail was being sent to offices that were mandated to close. At the same time, calls to our advisors and customer service representatives were skyrocketing, all while the stock market was headed in the opposite direction. In tandem, our thousands of employees, advisors and staff across the country began to work remotely and meet virtually from home.

Rising to these challenges is not easy and we are learning and adjusting each day. As I think back on the business strategy that is enabling Northwestern Mutual to continue delivering exceptional service today, I can boil it down to three words: “Ready. Set. Go.”

Get ready.

To build the future, business leaders need to learn from the past. As a company more than 160-years old, Northwestern Mutual has an exceptionally robust history to learn from. We’ve endured recessions and depressions, the U.S. Civil War, two world wars, 9/11, and even the 1918 worldwide flu epidemic – but we’ve never stopped learning and growing.

One critical component has always been exceptional financial strength. Having sufficient funds set aside in reserves for the unexpected – good and bad – remains to be a key to Northwestern Mutual’s success. As our CEO John Schlifske and our CIO Ron Joelson have said, our healthy surplus combined with the strategic plans we set years ago are setting us up for strength.    

Uniquely, Northwestern Mutual’s long-standing infectious disease emergency response team (IDERT) has been helping our company imagine how we would react to a theoretical pandemic event for generations. This team and our senior leaders have considered how today’s outbreak will impact our clients, advisors, employees, the markets, our technology, our community – and inspired how we would act, both reactively to challenges and proactively to opportunities. These learnings didn’t gather dust in some binder on a shelf. We regularly review and refine them.

Get set.

Whenever we discovered gaps in our abilities to serve our millions of clients and advisors, we expeditiously worked to close them. Sometimes, that meant upgrades in systems, or staying in touch with regulators to ensure that our processes are in compliance before we release any changes. In an event like this, we knew that we would need the technical capability to shift our workforce from brick-and-mortar locations to virtual. We knew that hard-hit states would request some leniency for clients deferring their payments in times of hardship. We knew that call volume to our customer service representatives would spike. That meant we would need reliable systems that could withstand the sudden surge.

Go.

Planning ahead put Northwestern Mutual in an ideal situation operationally and financially, but even with all of that preparation, there were new challenges we had not imagined.

Sensing the urgency, we pulled together war rooms of key leaders across our company, including our advisors. We organized stand up calls with leaders across the organization. This new structure enabled us to hear our clients’ emergent challenges and our advisors’ insights – and then act decisively, developing and deploying solutions.

Our senior leadership team is focused on scalability. With thousands of questions, we didn’t have time or capacity for one-off answers. We focused on the way data and technology could solve a wide array of problems. So, we expanded our online capabilities, drove adoption of digital tools, used data to inform and expedite our underwriting processes, helped thousands of employees and advisors launch digital workplaces, and rapidly rolled-out new processes to fulfill contractual and regulatory obligations. Most importantly, we focused on our clients and their needs right now – extending grace periods for premium payments for those with financial challenges due to the virus.  

We are focusing on each other – supporting, informing and inspiring our people. Senior leaders hosted virtual town hall meetings for advisors and employees, and leaders organized videoconference calls with teams. Long hours were celebrated during virtual happy hours. Conference calls featured our best-laid plans alongside our kids, dogs and cats. Through it all, we stuck together.

The most important business lesson anyone can learn from today’s pandemic is the importance of planning ahead, conditioning, and adapting. It is also important to put your best team members in charge and get out of the way. You are there to support their decisions and back them up so execution can happen at a more rapid pace. Companies that have the business expertise and foresight to plan ahead are best-positioned to endure the crisis. Those who took those learnings and made rapid and responsible decisions are the organizations that will emerge from the pack in this new normal. It’s unclear how the COVID-19 situation will play out and as a result we need to continue to champion and cultivate an adaptive mindset.

Moving forward, the tenets of “ready, set, go” remain critical for business leaders. We must continue evaluating our organization’s exposure to risks, monitoring the stability of our suppliers, and tracking signals for emerging issues. To all of my colleagues leading operations across the world, I wish good health and good fortune to you and your teams.