Building Bench Strength™ Programs

The Katie School Building Bench Strength (BBS)™ programs are designed for insurance industry practitioners, across all functions, who have been identified as having potential to assume greater responsibilities within their organizations. BBS participants hold management titles across various functions including claims, underwriting, sales, compliance, public relations, human resources, and actuarial. All of the programs are tailored to the insurance industry.

The course principles, learning objectives, examples, exercises, and case studies are all developed from real-world insurance industry experience. The industry-applied focus enables participants to understand direct relationships between the courses and their jobs and enables them to make immediate use of their learning.

Leading Organizational Excellence

This one-day program is designed to:

• Give participants an executive level perspective of organizational performance
• Help provide tools and suggestions for improving organizational performance practices and capabilities
• Facilitate communication and understanding of best practices
• Serve as a working tool for understanding and managing performance, strategic planning, human capital development, and knowledge management

The program facilitators use real-world, insurance industry examples that require program participants to apply critical thinking to address organizational challenges. At the end of this program each participant, regardless of position, should walk away with a list of specific ways in which he or she can lead efforts in organizational excellence. The program provides only a sampling of critical issues and is designed to stimulate discussion on which areas may need more attention.

This program should be viewed as a starting point rather than a completion point. The program content covers:

• Industry issues and challenges
• Leadership and strategy
• Customer and market focus
• Attracting, retaining, and developing human capital
• Process improvement
• Measuring business results

This intensive course requires some pre-work activity. It also involves completing a diagnostic instrument to help the facilitator focus on the specific needs of the audience.

Financial Decision-Making in Insurance Organizations

This is a one-day program with three interrelated parts. The first part builds the foundation making sure participants understand important industry financial terms, financial statements, and ratios. The second part uses a computer simulation to show how various business decisions affect financial statements and ratios. The third part requires participants to consider how to develop financial information that goes into making a business decision.

Developing Ethical Fitness in Insurance Organizations

This is a series of half-day programs that deal with ethical issues faced by people in the insurance industry. The cases, examples, and activities are based on real-world issues facing people working in the insurance industry. The purpose of this program is to

• Create awareness of situations that have ethical and legal issues in insurance
• Provide a framework for ethical decision-making
• Provide guidance on how to communicate potentially ethical issues facing people in insurance