Five Years at WEFRA LIFE: What Have I Learned and What Changed in How I Lead?

The past five years at WEFRA LIFE delivered valuable experience and lessons I could not have gained elsewhere. After completion of my Executive MBA at Frankfurt School, I have had the experience of tackling many challenges from P&L management to raising talents, from speed of innovation and how to have an impactful leadership. So, I decided to document what I've learned for others facing the similar questions in their roles.

Key Takeaways

• Admitting you're behind on learning is more honest — and more useful — than performing constant expertise.
• A "no" is timing information, not a verdict — every rejection sharpens the idea it challenges.
• Data shows what broke; only conversations with people reveal why — rigor needs empathy to aim it.
• Over-managing produces compliance, not safety — young talent needs room to question, test, and fail early.
• Building inside a 90-year company means earning trust before proposing change, since decisions stay visible for years.

What Does It Mean to Be Behind on Learning as a Leader?

Being behind means admitting the tools, frameworks, and AI capabilities I mastered five years ago are already incomplete. It's uncomfortable to say out loud, but it's honest. The alternative — performing expertise you don't have — is worse. My father taught me to know more than required; that habit still exposes the gaps I'd rather not see.

I am behind. Not on a project, not on a deadline. Behind on learning. Looking back what I have known technically or theoretically 5 years ago feels incomplete and it is too scary to admit.

My father, a professor of architecture, taught me very early "Know more than you're required to know". This always pushed me to map the gaps of my knowledge. The most expensive mistakes start with blind spots you have not identified.

Our world came to a point where every week there's a new AI capability, a new framework, a new tool, a new approach... and someone on LinkedIn, who definitely had ChatGPT write the post, already calling themselves an expert in it.

That FOMO is a specific kind of anxiety, and I think only the people genuinely trying to understand the technology actually feel it. The ones most publicly confident about a topic, and lately about AI, are usually the least curious about it. My learning process has always been relatively manual, lots of reading and hands-on practice. AI accelerated my learning by making practice and experimentation faster.

Something I read recently made me think: people who lean on AI to learn end up understanding less than people who work through the material by hand. That is not an argument against AI. It's an argument for knowing the difference between using AI to think and using AI instead of thinking.

To every human reading this post of mine: keep thinking. Otherwise, we converge on the same output, constrained by the AI model’s understanding rather than our own.

Why Should a "No" Be Treated as Information, Not a Verdict?

A "no" almost never ends an idea — it signals timing, not defeat. My first year in healthcare media brought more rejections than I could count, and each one exposed a weak assumption or missing piece of evidence. The real skill is knowing which rejections to examine and which to simply let go.

My first year in healthcare media produced more rejections than I care to count. The industry was solid on its own and new ideas and approaches were cautiously approached by many partners and clients.

What took me embarrassingly long is to understand: a "no" to a new idea is almost never the final word on that idea. It's timing information. It usually means one of us in the conversation wasn't ready.

Getting a "No" is more rewarding than getting a "Yes".

Every no sharpens the idea. It exposes constraints, weak assumptions, and missing evidence. A yes only confirms that the current version of the idea.

The real skill is deciding which rejection to examine and which to accept. No framework makes that call for you. Judgment comes from specific failures, repeated often enough to recognise the pattern.

Sometimes I reframed the idea, waited, rebuilt the case and eventually got the yes. Other times I kept pushing when I should have stopped. Both taught me to stay consistent on the ideas I believe in.

Why Do Numbers Only Tell You What Went Wrong, Never Why?

P&L data and dashboards show the fact of a problem — a team's output drops, a segment underperforms — with precision. What they can't show is the conversation two floors down: the manager who stopped listening, the person who felt invisible. Empathy is what tells rigor where to point itself.

My Master's education taught me something it never set out to teach me: You spend the program building a rigorous relationship with financial data, with P&L logic, with the language senior leadership actually speaks. That is genuinely useful and I use it constantly. But here's the line I keep coming back to:

P&L and data can tell you what is wrong. They can never tell you why.

A team's output drops. A segment underperforms. A process breaks in ways the numbers document with precision. The data shows you the fact of the problem. It doesn't show you the conversation two floors down that explains it: the manager who stopped listening six months ago, the person who left because they felt invisible, a young talent that never received good enough explanation from a line manager. Every financially literate leader hits that gap eventually. The ones who don't notice it confuse measuring the problem with understanding it.

Empathy isn't the opposite of rigor. It's the thing that tells you where to point the rigor. I practice over the last 5 years to use empathy to understand where to point that rigor.

How Do Leaders Avoid Becoming the Ceiling for Young Talent?

Leaders avoid becoming a ceiling by involving young talent early, before tenure data or exit interviews force the conversation. Over-managing feels like control but produces only compliance — people doing exactly what's asked instead of what's needed. The fix is structure without suffocation: clearer expectations, real feedback, and genuine room to fail.

The conversation about young talent starts too late. Tenure data, engagement scores, exit interviews all measure what has already happened. The better approach is to involve young talent earlier, while they can still shape the work and the institution.

A leader might have an instinct is to tighten everything because having the control is what keeps you calm as a leader. However, a better onboarding, clearer expectations, more structured feedback would go beyond a control. Make the environment more predictable. And here's the part I'm a little uncomfortable saying out loud:

it is scary, as a leader, when people do exactly what you ask. Because it means you have become the ceiling of what they can do.

The most valuable thing a young person brings is the thing you didn't ask for: the reframe, the question that exposes an assumption you stopped examining, the decision to do it differently because nobody told them they couldn't. When I over-manage, I don't get safety. I get compliance. And compliance feels like control, right up until the organization needs to change and finds out it forgot how.

Genuinely letting people fail is rarer than most leaders admit. A lot of "psychological safety" is really about looking tolerant of failure while quietly engineering it out. The honest version is harder, and it's the one that works.

Give young talent a voice early. Create room to question, test and fail. They will build your team, your company with their own peers for the next decade. Leadership should preserve curiosity and the confidence to act. The world already gives young talents enough reasons to hesitate. Don't feed into that.

What Does It Take to Build Something Lasting Inside a 90-Year-Old Company?

It takes patience and humility: understanding what the company values before proposing to change any of it, then earning trust at that pace. As an outsider without the generational experience that built WEFRA LIFE's 90-plus years, I learned that decisions made this year stay visible five years out — a slower, steadier accountability.

I came into WEFRA LIFE as an outsider: a guy who came from another industry with some geeky skills. I do not yet have the generational experience, which is surely required, to keep a company relevant and leading for decades. That position is certainly earned through continuous reinvention and a long record of right decisions.

Building something lasting inside a house someone else built is its own kind of work. You have to understand what the company values before you propose changing any of it. You have to earn trust and be right about that pace of innovation.

What I didn't expect was how much it would come to mean to me. Being part of a family company and seeing your fingerprints in the heritage is more fulfilling than any corporate life I've had.

I've seen places where the goal was always one more quarter, one more cycle, one more "reorganisation" away. Here the math is different. The decisions I make this year are still going to be visible five years from now. In the relationships we keep, the capabilities we built, the people who grew up inside this structure. That is a slower and more demanding kind of accountability than any quarterly review.

And none of it was solo. Five years of this is five years of a team that work alongside me, a company that backed ideas before they were proven, and people who pushed me further than I would have gone on my own. I'm grateful to all of them.

Five years in, I am still learning how to learn. Still doing my best to help anyone. Still closing the gap between what the data says and what the room is actually saying. Still figuring out when to shape the work and when to get out of its way.

At WEFRA LIFE, we dare to reimagine our work, who we are, and how we help our clients and each other. We have done it for more than 90 years. We will do it again on the way to 100, being the driving force in healthcare business.

Stay curious.