Goals, pivots and passion: A CEO’s leadership lessons
Avant Mutual CEO Natasha Fenech explains how key moments from a career in financial services shaped her as a leader
When a 10-year-old Natasha Fenech vowed she’d be a CEO by 40, she was already relying on leadership lessons that would define her career – such as the power of intentional goal-setting. Now on the other side of those goals, she looked back recently on the pivotal moments leading to her current role heading Avant Mutual, giving aspiring leaders a roadmap to achieving their own goals with intention.
Ms Fenech, an AGSM alumna who is now Managing Director and Group CEO of the diversified medical indemnity organisation, spoke at a recent AGSM Director’s Lunch event, sharing insights from a career that, while always goal-oriented, took a few unexpected turns along the way. However, each need to pivot inherently came with a valuable lesson and, ultimately, forward progress.
Growing up in the 1970s in Malta, Ms Fenech developed an early taste for leadership, deciding she wanted to be a CEO one day and “make a difference by inspiring people to achieve goals they never thought possible”, she said. Having this objective led her to set some ambitious goals.
“Here I was at 10: I had decided what I wanted to be, and I went about setting myself what, at the time, may have been unrealistic targets of what success would look like in my career,” she said. “I’d set the goal that I wanted to be a manager by the age of 25, a general manager by 30 and a CEO by 40. To put this into context, this was now the ‘80s – only 3% of CEOs at the time were female, so it was a really bold aspiration.”
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Looking back on that decisive moment, Ms Fenech touched on the first key leadership lesson she has learned in her career. “You’ve got to believe in yourself, even if you’re pushing all the stereotypes. If you don’t, how will others believe in you and follow you as a leader? You’ve got to have that strength and resilience to do what you believe in, and you’ve got to be passionate about it,” she said.
Plan to pivot
To achieve her goals, Ms Fenech realised she’d need a real plan, beginning with choosing a field. Her strength was in maths, and she thought a career in financial services would provide substantial opportunity. After some research, she opted to train as an actuary, aiming to work in insurance and confident that she’d found a career she could be passionate about.
She attended the University of Adelaide, doing a double degree in Economics and Applied Mathematics, while taking the actuarial exams by correspondence, as only two universities in Australia offered an actuarial undergraduate degree at the time.
Meanwhile, she also began her first part-time job, working for SGIC as a superannuation administrator. Once she finished her degree, the company hired her full-time as an analyst. Then, two years later, Legal & General bought out SGIC, triggering a new opportunity for the aspiring leader.
“Legal & General needed a person who understood the book to run the actuarial components of SGIC, and they wanted to do all that out of Sydney; I was very lucky because they did tap me on the shoulder for that,” she recalled. “So, I packed my bags and moved to Sydney, sight unseen. I was like the country girl moving to the big smoke – I was so excited; I thought, ‘here I am, on my way to achieving my career objectives.’”
However, within a few months of this auspicious move came another pivotal moment in Ms Fenech’s career, involving “realising when you need to change your pathways”. She’d come to realise she was not enjoying her profession. “I really lacked the passion for it; I hated going to work each day,” she said. “I found doing marginal services valuations monotonous … and it just didn’t fit me.”
But this realisation would prove to be the needed catalyst for a career change that helped reorient her around her long-held goals. “While I was still really dogmatic about wanting to be a CEO – at that point, I was 23 years old and no closer to achieving any of my objectives – I realised that I lacked passion for the vocation that I had chosen,” she added. It was another critical lesson.
“As a leader, you’ve got to make sure you’re passionate about what you’re doing, because your authenticity will shine and inspire others and make you a success,” she said. “If you don’t have that passion, it is really hard to inspire others.”
From ‘quant girl’ to strategist
Ms Fenech then tried pivoting to different organisations and various actuarial roles. “But I was always considered the ‘quant girl’, and I knew I had to try something completely different if I was going to get rid of that actuarial label from my CV,” she said. “I had to do a complete 180.”
It was now the late ‘90s, and Ms Fenech was working for Zurich as an actuary and analyst on a project about reimagining the company. “A.T. Kearney was the strategic consulting firm running the project for Zurich, and I loved the way they thought,” she recalled.
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“I was also so in awe of what they were doing in their work on the strategy of turning Zurich around that I decided to go for a strategist role at A.T. Kearney,” she added. “It was the complete opposite of everything I had learned up to that point; the actuarial profession is very structured and assumption-driven and quite accurate, and I was moving to a completely different thinking style.”
While it took “courage and resilience” to leave something she knew, the move enabled her to learn a great deal, Ms Fenech said. “I would challenge anyone who is not passionate about their current career choice to consider doing something you are passionate about. In my mind, passion equals success. People who are really passionate, no matter the knocks they get, they lift themselves up, go on, and do big and wonderful things,” she said.
Mentors and big moves
While shifting off the actuarial label at A.T. Kearney, Ms Fenech was also completing her MBA at AGSM. The experience “just reinforced how much I loved leadership and reinvigorated my desire to be a CEO one day,” she said. “It gave me the confidence I needed to go out and continue my journey of achieving that original target I had set myself.”
This was also a pivotal time as Ms Fenech encountered a series of exceptional mentors, leading to a deep appreciation of “finding the right mentors and sponsors that can help you learn how to fly”. They connected her with projects where she was able to work with some of Australia’s top CEOs, observing how they operated and worked through challenges.
One of these mentors moved on to Suncorp a few years later and hired her as general manager of strategy for insurance. At 32, she had achieved her second milestone, after attaining the first just two years earlier, by becoming a people leader. This was key to another of Ms Fenech’s leadership lessons.
“Sometimes, it’s okay to take a step sideways, or even back, to leap five steps forward,” she said. “Taking on that role at Suncorp and having the title of general manager meant that I had to give up quite a lot. I know that a lot of people don’t like taking those risks, but I think, sometimes, you do need to take them to leap forward.”
Flying solo with strength
At Suncorp, Ms Fenech was promoted to executive general manager of strategy for the commercial business, helping to lead its recovery after the global financial crisis. She then moved to personal insurance, Suncorp’s largest business line at the time, as executive general manager of customer, product and pricing, a role that gave her substantial growth opportunities.
However, another pivot would still be necessary for Ms Fenech to achieve her goals fully: she would need to learn to “fly solo”. “In about 2010, we were having a lot of successes, but I started to think, ‘I need to find out whether I can do this on my own,’” she said.
She decided to return to her roots in superannuation, taking a role leading AMP’s startup in the self-managed super fund (SMSF) space. “I’d moved into a CEO role at the age of 41 and so had achieved my final objective, and I was able to help AMP take their SMSF offering from just 1% market share when I started, to become the largest SMSF administrator in the marketplace when I left five years later, with 10% market share in a really fragmented market,” she said.
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This led her to a final career pivot and epiphany about leadership – “a realisation that you have to play to your strengths at all times of your leadership journey”. Having realised that her true professional passion was insurance, she ultimately made the move to Avant Mutual, a diversified doctors’ company and the largest medical indemnity provider in Australia, as well as a health insurer, mortgage broker and non-bank lender.
“By this stage, I’d turned three businesses around, so I knew I could do it; I’ve done it in an ASX top 20, and I’ve done a startup, but I’d never worked for a mutual,” she said. “I thought it would be interesting, and it’s something close to my heart because I’ve got a real passion for strong customer ethos.”
Closing out her presentation, Ms Fenech revisited her key leadership lessons, including the importance of setting goals. She shared an apt saying she had encountered recently: “A goal without a deadline is a fantasy; a goal with a deadline is an objective; a goal with a deadline and a plan is an intention; and a goal with a deadline, a plan and a consistent action is success.
“But a personal, meaningful goal with a deadline, a plan and constant action equals fulfilment,” she continued. “I must admit, that’s where I feel I’m at in my career.”