2012 NAFE WOMEN OF EXCELLENCE – P&L EXECUTIVE OF THE YEAR

NAFE has named MetLife’s Robin Lenna as our first P&L Executive of the Year for her career success and her concerted efforts to move more women into the profit-and-loss (P&L operations) positions that determine what services a company offers and what products that it makes. Robin runs a major MetLife division with $27 billion in sales and $166 billion in assets that includes pensions, group annuity and investment products, corporate and bank-owned life insurance, and post-retirement benefits.

She joined MetLife eight years ago as Chief Risk Officer and played a key role in helping to steer the company past the shoals of the 2008 real estate debacle. “I came from banking, where cycles are short and lessons learned quickly,” she says. “Insurance companies made the same mistakes, but they hadn’t discussed them. So I took a forensic look at the mistakes of the previous cycle and did stress tests of major risks and liquidity. We found a lot of real estate risk exposure and reduced it.” MetLife did not take TARP money, and in fact, managed so well through the crisis that it recently acquired a piece of AIG.

Robin is a major booster of women. NAFE finds that it’s still rare for women to get mentored into P&L positions, so we were excited to learn that Robin has taken that issue head-on. She finds that women stay in staff jobs—those that support operations positions—“because this is a safe zone, especially after they have their first child. I will meet with them and ask if they want to run a business, and then talk about what that will mean, and coach them about their aspirations.” Women and men approach opportunities differently, she says: “Guys overspin. They say they can do stuff… and then they figure it out. But women do the underspin, saying ‘I have this gap and that gap, but I can do this and this,’” and so don’t land the job. Robin is coaching women to grab the stretch opportunity because it clearly worked for her: “I didn’t know everything when I took this job. But I’m a risktaker. I’ll dive in and figure out where the gaps are and then get the help.”

Robin advises women to get visible inside and outside the organization and not to be modest about accomplishments. “We’re doing ourselves a disservice with our modesty. This is simply a communication skill that women can learn.” She is working with MetLife’s head of diversity and inclusion to put supports and training in place for women. For her trailblazing efforts as a P&L executive and her work to ensure that women who follow can move to the top, NAFE honors Robin Lenna.