Description: Leadership interview with Karen DeToro to discuss her career journey and share leadership wisdom.

Description: A discussion of why so few actuaries break through the “math ceiling” to emerge as true business leaders. Certain skills and behaviors necessary for effective leadership are not innate in people drawn to the actuarial profession.

Description: A real life situation is posed involving a management, leadership, or other business decision, and readers are invited to submit their responses to "What Would You Do?" This issue’s case study involved choosing between two actuarial candidates in a hiring decision.

Description: Executives often tell subject matter experts such as actuaries, “You should think more strategically!” But the executives never define what they mean by “thinking more strategically”. This article defines the skills actuaries need to be perceived as being more strategic. It will provide practical steps actuaries can take to gain more strategic influence and escape the trap of being perceived as only a subject matter expert who provides limited strategic value.

Description: Practical application of Marine Corps leadership in a corporate setting. This article covers the objectives of Marine Corps Leadership and 14 leadership traits identified by the Corps and how they relate to an actuarial setting.

Description: Read the September 2020 issue of The Stepping Stone published by the Leadership & Development Section. Newsletters provide practical information for the working actuary articles on trends that impact sections and news about section activities.

Description: Read the November 2020 issue of The Stepping Stone published by Leadership & Development Section. Newsletters provide practical information for the working actuary, articles on trends that impact sections and news about section activities.

Description: Applying Agile Methodologies to Manage Work and Drive Value is intended as an overview of the SCRUM, Kanban, and Lean methods of managing work in constantly changing environments. The value it provides is to draw awareness to the various methods that exist when the goal is to perform work with agility. There are three main sources of information within this version: scrumalligance.org, kanban.university, and lean.org for reference.

Description: The article describes principles for optimal sub-tasking of a project goal. Two experiments each one comparing different approaches are presented. A summary of principles for optimal goal setting presents seven key points: i)levels of outcome goals should be recognizable and lack ambiguity; ii) each subtask should be atomic, i.e. not be capable of being broken up into further subtasks, iii) the subtasks should be uniform, lacking ambiguity, so that any new trainee could master it without the need for further guidance; iv) each subtask should be attainable in a reasonable amount of time; v) mentor feedback should be provided during the initial stages of learning or training; vi) upon mastery of each subtask trainees should be encouraged to maximize their overall score; vii) after mastery of individual subtasks, while attempting to maximize scores, trainees should be provided with a mixture of easy, intermediate, and difficult tasks.

Description: Read how to combine people management and mentorship to create positive and open environments and improve employee engagement and productivity.