Good morning! Linda McMahon is Trump's pick for Department of Education secretary, Comcast's spinoff plan gives Donna Langley a higher position, and Fortune’s Alicia Adamczyk sat down with Principal Financial Group's first female CEO.
- Principled leadership. As a math and economics major at Northwestern, Deanna Strable took an actuarial internship at Principal Financial Group in the late 1980s. An Iowa native, Strable felt at home at the Des Moines-based insurance and benefits company; when she graduated, she kept comparing potential employers to Principal and finding them lacking. She stuck with Principal, moving up the ranks over the past 35 years from intern to actuarial assistant to COO and CFO, with about a dozen other roles in between.
Starting in January, the former intern will be 145-year-old Principal’s first female CEO and president. Strable is succeeding Dan Houston, president and CEO since 2016, a close friend, mentor, and colleague she has worked side-by-side with for years.
Strable is a fount of business knowledge, meeting with the Fortune team earlier this week to discuss everything from her advice to early-career workers—"For your hard skills, lean into your strengths. For your soft skills, lean into your weaknesses," she says—to the growing trend of CFOs becoming CEOs.
But one of the most striking parts of the conversation was her reflections on all of the men who have stepped up to support her throughout her career. Houston reconfigured his own career and retirement timeline so that she could be in the running for the top spot. Her husband, who was also an executive at Principal, will retire ahead of her promotion (he would have reported to her, which Principal does not allow). Other bosses throughout her three-plus-decades at the company pushed her outside of her comfort zone and told her she was capable of more.
"I needed a little nudge most of the time" says Strable of taking on increasingly senior roles. And when she did move on, "it was never about a particular job. It was more about, do I continue to feel challenged? Am I learning every day when I come to work? Do I enjoy who I'm working with, and do I see us, me, contributing to the company in a positive way?"
Strable also emphasized the importance of finding a work environment that encourages—and helps facilitate—employees to move around and try new things. She was given the opportunity to transition from technical roles to leadership ones, and worked in different departments across the company throughout her career, including a stint abroad in Brussels. All of those teachings have helped propel her to becoming the CEO of a Fortune 500 company (Principal is currently 310 on the list).
Of course, Strable owes just as much credit to her own work ethic and strategic thinking. Over time, she created a leadership mantra for herself: "I’m going to try to work myself out of a job." Much like the mentors who pushed her, that meant preparing her team to take over for her while solving as many problems as she could. By doing so, she could signal to more senior leaders that she was ready for the next opportunity, whatever that might be. But it has other benefits for Principal as a whole.
"It really helped me reinforce how I was leading my people, how I was delegating to them, how I was teaching them," she says. "It did help me be considered for opportunities, because if the organization can see you have a good successor, they're going to be more willing to move you to another role."
Strable has plenty of plans for her time as CEO, but one of her priorities will be to continue to mentor the next generation of workers at Principal. After all, the next transformative executive just may be the current intern.
Alicia Adamczyk
alicia.adamczyk@fortune.com
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