“Advocacy without exposure keeps talented people safe but invisible”
Parul Kaul-Green on belonging, opportunity and who gets ahead in insurance
As parts of the insurance industry step back from public commitments to diversity and inclusion, Parul Kaul-Green argues that inclusion is ultimately determined by whether leaders act when the moment demands it.
With more than two decades of experience across insurance, asset management and banking, Parul has led transformation, M&A and digital initiatives at firms including AXA and Aviva Investors. Currently founder and CEO of her strategic advisory firm Eudaimon Consulting, Parul is also a keen advocate for more diversity in financial services.
In this interview, she discusses the insurance industry’s retreat from DEI, the everyday behaviours that determine who gets listened to, and why changing insurance requires patience, credibility, and an understanding of how institutions work.
In past conversations, you’ve said the move away from DEI is “palpable” in parts of the insurance market. What are you seeing that makes you feel the industry is stepping back?
The clearest signals are institutional rather than anecdotal. The FCA and PRA dropped plans for mandatory DEI reporting and disclosure in financial services.
Lloyd’s has announced that the Dive-In Festival – twelve years old, the industry’s most visible commitment to inclusion – will end after its final edition this September. Neither decision came with much fanfare, which is itself telling.
When regulators retreat and flagship initiatives close, companies that were already uncertain about their public DEI positioning take it as permission to pull back.
Many UK firms with US parent companies have become cautious, mainly due to a sharply changed political environment in the US where DEI action has become a liability. The public ambition of such companies has contracted, and in my experience, this ambition is what keeps the internal pressure alive.
You’ve said everyone has a natural desire to belong and not be singled out. How does belonging – or the lack of it – affect someone’s ability to perform, contribute and do their best work?
Belonging is the condition under which people bring their full capability rather than a stage-managed version of it. When someone feels like an outsider – spoken over, excluded from important projects and conversations, uncertain whether their perspective will be taken seriously – they redirect energy from contribution to navigation.
They self-censor. They calibrate rather than challenge. Over time the cost compounds: either they leave, or they stay and narrow what they offer.
Companies rarely see this on a dashboard. It shows up instead in the quality of decisions, in the attrition of people who needed slightly more encouragement than they received, and in the gradual homogenisation of the perspectives available to leadership – creating a cohort of “yes-people” divorced from the reality of wider world, including that of their diverse customer base.
The people most likely to bring a genuinely different angle are also the most likely to disengage first when they conclude the angle is not wanted.
In our previous conversation, you gave examples of two leaders at previous workplaces who intervened when someone was being talked over or treated badly. What does that tell us about the role leaders play in making inclusion real day to day?
That policy is largely irrelevant without behaviour, and behaviour is set in small moments rather than formal statements. In one case, during an executive committee meeting, a senior colleague raised a hand to stop an overtalker and said they would like to hear from the person being spoken over. Nothing more than that-no drama, no policy reference.
The effect was immediate and lasting. Everyone in the room understood whose voice was considered worth hearing.
In another situation, a very senior leader made a comment in a strategy discussion that linked the validity of my argument to my country of origin. It was a non-sequitur – my nationality had no bearing on what was being discussed – but the effect was to position my perspective as less legitimate. A second leader addressed it directly and followed through with action. Leaders calibrate every room they are in, whether they intend to or not.
The question is never whether they have an inclusion policy. It is whether they act when the moment requires it, and whether the people around them see that they do.
One of your previous bosses responded to a difficult experience you had not by shielding you, but by giving you more exposure and bigger opportunities. Can you tell us more about this, and why exposure is so important to inclusion and career progression?
After the incident I described – where a colleague used my country of origin to dismiss my strategic argument – another leader came to me privately. He said he had noticed what had happened, that it was wrong, and that he intended to give me more opportunities to speak, present and demonstrate my thinking in senior forums.
He followed through. I moved onto more strategically significant work and was eventually promoted into a global leadership role with responsibility for corporate development. What he understood was the difference between protecting someone and backing them. Advocacy without exposure keeps talented people safe but invisible.
Exposure builds credibility that advocacy alone cannot manufacture-and in companies where credibility determines who gets heard and who gets the next opportunity, that distinction matters enormously. Being shielded from difficulty would have changed nothing. Being given the platform to demonstrate capability changed everything.
You’ve said before that you had to develop the muscle of asking for bigger opportunities. What happens to talented people who do not ask, or who do not feel safe or confident enough to ask?
They get passed over, repeatedly and invisibly, and the organisation interprets their silence as lack of ambition rather than lack of safety. Asking for bigger opportunities requires a prior belief that you are the kind of person who gets them-and that belief is not evenly distributed.
People who have consistently been told, directly or through the texture of how they are treated, that they belong at the table tend to ask. Those who have received the opposite signal tend to wait.
The system rewards the asking, sees nothing unusual in the waiting, and produces a leadership population that looks reassuringly like the one before it. The talent is there. The mechanism that surfaces it is not.
You told me before about a time when you led a diverse global team where no single nationality, gender or background dominated. How did that change the way the team collaborated, competed and made decisions?
It changed the starting point of every conversation. Rather than arriving with a solution and managing buy-in, the team began with the problem – genuinely, because each member read it differently. On a global transformation programme, that meant drawing on operating experience from multiple regions rather than exporting one model and expecting adoption.
When it came to allocating resources, no single region dominated the budget conversation because every region had credible representation in the room. The practical result was a change management and adoption plan grounded in real process pain, not assumed pain.
People felt understood rather than instructed. Most transformation programmes fail at adoption, and adoption fails most often when the people being asked to change do not believe the people asking to have genuinely understood their situation. The diversity of the team was the mechanism that made that understanding possible.
You’ve spoken about the impact of racist, rude or exclusionary comments when they go unchecked. What red lines do leaders need to set if they want people to feel safe enough to contribute?
The red lines matter far less than whether they hold when tested. Every organisation has written policies against exclusionary behaviour. What people actually watch is what happens the first time a senior person violates them. If the meeting moves on, if the comment is absorbed, if HR processes it six weeks later, the message is clear: seniority insulates. That conclusion travels fast and sticks.
The minimum requirement is that exclusionary comments, particularly those that question someone’s legitimacy on the basis of background, nationality or identity, are addressed in the room, at the time, by whoever has the standing to do so. Not to make a point, but to make clear that it is not acceptable and that the person affected does not have to absorb it alone.
Everything after that – the policies, the training, the reporting frameworks – is secondary to whether that moment is handled correctly.
You tend to prove the value of diversity by first building the team, then delivering results and then explaining why it worked. Is performance the most persuasive business case for diversity? Does it always work – or do some leaders not notice?
Performance is the most durable argument because it is the hardest to dismiss on ideological grounds. My own approach has been consistent: build the team, deliver the results, then explain the connection-in that order.
Leading with the diversity argument invites pushback that has nothing to do with the evidence.
Leading with the outcome shifts the conversation to ground where the evidence is harder to argue with.
But it does not always land. Some leaders attribute strong team performance to the leader rather than the team’s composition. Others assume the same result would have followed regardless.
The business case lands most reliably when the mechanism is made explicit – not just that the team performed well, but specifically why the range of perspectives produced a better decision, a more accurate problem diagnosis, a faster adoption. That requires a leader curious enough to ask the question and honest enough to follow where it leads.
Given that AI systems can amplify existing assumptions in data, how important is diversity in the teams designing, governing and challenging those systems?
It is a quality control requirement, not a cultural preference. AI systems are trained on historical data, and historical data encodes historical decisions – who was insured, at what price, on what terms, assessed against what risk proxies.
Teams that share the same professional and analytical habits are poorly positioned to recognise which assumptions are embedded and which are simply invisible to them. The person who asks why a model performs differently across demographic groups, or what a particular variable is actually proxying for, is doing risk management.
That question is more likely to surface – and to be taken seriously – in a team where different lived experiences make this assumption visible in the first place.
From your own career, what traits have you seen in people who are actually able to drive change inside insurance – not just talk about innovation, but make something happen?
Three things. The first is the capacity to hold an ambitious vision before the organisation is ready to endorse it – to be genuinely clear about the destination without needing institutional validation to proceed.
The second is patience with operational reality: understanding why previous programmes failed, what they broke, and why the organisation remains defensive before pushing a new agenda. The innovators who stall most consistently are those who treat that history as irrelevant.
The third is the ability to translate – to take a commercially ambitious idea and make it legible to risk, compliance, underwriting and finance in terms they find credible rather than threatening.
I have drawn on all three at different points: setting a digital distribution strategy that required the organisation to move faster than it was comfortable with, spending considerable time understanding why earlier transformation efforts had not held, and integrating two distinct cultures post-merger into a single operating direction that delivered a profitability turnaround.
The people I have seen fail at innovation inside insurance were usually strong on one of these and impatient with the other two.
What kinds of talented people struggle to innovate inside insurance, and why?
People who are genuinely sharp at diagnosing what needs to change but have little interest in understanding why it has not changed already.
Insurance is technically deep, heavily regulated, and carries long institutional memory about what happens when things go wrong – in underwriting, in claims, in capital management. That produces a conservatism that is not simply obstruction. It is the accumulated consequence of consequential decisions.
Talented people who read it as ignorance, or who treat risk and compliance as friction to be managed rather than stakeholders to be persuaded, consistently underestimate the system. They build momentum and then lose it at precisely the point where the organisation needs to move with them. The analysis was often right. The execution failed because the trust required to move an organisation of that weight had not been built with the people whose cooperation was essential.
As someone who has experienced being treated as an outsider in parts of the industry, do you think outsiders are better able to see what insurance needs to change – or do they often underestimate how hard the system is to move?
Both, and often at the same time.
Being outside the dominant culture of an organisation – by background, nationality or professional formation – does make certain assumptions more visible. You are not inside the logic that produced them, so you are less likely to treat them as inevitable. That is a real analytical advantage. But it can generate overconfidence about pace.
The system carries the weight it does for reasons – regulatory, actuarial, financial, cultural – that are not always visible from the outside and are not all irrational. I have had to learn more than once that being right about what needs to change is not the same as being able to change it.
The harder skill is building enough credibility within the system to make the change viable, and that takes considerably longer than the diagnosis. Outsiders who do it well combine their external perspective with genuine respect for the operating logic they are trying to shift.
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