Management Principles reviewed

Good interaction between our managers and staff is imperative if we are to achieve our strategic objectives. For Hannover Re, leadership in the spirit of our Management Principles has long been of high importance and it favourably influences the dedication of our employees and the overall working atmosphere as it is experienced within the company.

Drawn up back in the late 1990s, the currently valid Management Principles have now been revised; they constitute the basis for actions taken by our managerial staff and have come to form part of our personnel development tools alongside management feedback and our management seminars.

For the first time since their adoption, the Management Principles were subjected to detailed scrutiny in 2012. This was prompted, among other things, by the strategy review conducted in 2011, which put even greater emphasis on the importance of the Management Principles worldwide. The opportunity for this review was presented by the Global Management Forum 2012, at which Hannover Re Group managers from around the world explored in depth the topic of leadership. The purpose of their deliberations was to revise our Management Principles in order to ensure that all managers worldwide could commit to them. In this way, complementary to the existing Management Principles, two additional values were defined that had not previously been explicitly put down in writing: firstly, the aspect of appreciation as the basis for our daily actions and our mutual trust; secondly, diversity in professional, personal and cultural terms, which we consider to be an enrichment and which gives rise to fresh impetus for extending our commercial success. Going forward, then, these two aspects will therefore precede our Management Principles as the higher-order values of “appreciation” and “diversity” and they will henceforth constitute the foundation of these principles.