Deanna Strable has decades of experience working at Principal Financial Group, but she said she still found her first year transitioning into the company’s top leadership role to be an “unexpected” experience.

“I’ve been here 35 years, so I knew the strategy, I knew the people and I’ve worked alongside multiple CEOs, and I think in doing that, you really think you know what the job is. … But until you move from that office to this office and sit in the chair, you don’t have a concept of what the job is. Even when the prior CEO explains it all, until you’re really in the seat, living it, feeling it, it’s unexpected.”

Strable, a native Iowan, was named president and CEO of the global financial services company in November 2024. In September, she also became chair of the company’s board of directors.

Unexpected moments showed up across different parts of her role, she said.

One was that for the first time in her career, she does not have a team of peers around her. 

“I have a team, but I don’t have a team of peers that I ultimately can share my frustrations [with], share the good, share the bad, so that frame of reference has changed,” she said. 

In the last year, she’s looked to other CEOs or industry leaders to build a community of support and mentorship.

Being a leader who prioritizes building honesty and transparency in relationships, she said the “filtering” she received in conversations internally was also a new challenge.

“What you learn is, as they speak to the CEO, there’s a filter on it, and so you have to find new ways to have your pulse on things around the organization,” she said.

Strable said the first year also gave her a new perspective on the extent of Principal’s community and external involvement. She said the company’s reach is at a level that is “hard to comprehend.” 

Becoming more involved in external initiatives also opened her eyes to the role business leaders play externally. 

“It’s an interesting time for our country. It’s an interesting time for our state, and ultimately, being a business leader puts you sometimes in the light of those [discussions],” she said.

Locally, Strable this year co-chaired the United Way of Central Iowa campaign and Habitat for Humanity’s Women’s Build, and soon she will join the board of the Greater Des Moines Partnership, she said. 

Strable said she navigated these and other new experiences by striving to remain authentic, a core principle of her leadership philosophy.

“I continue to hear I’m very authentic in how I communicate, but you had to lean into those in different realms and understand it doesn’t change how you approach leadership or communication, but you have to think about your approach and your voice in a little bit different way.”

Through the unexpected and the familiar, Strable’s first year as CEO has centered on following through on commitments and priorities and building on business momentum and performance strengths as she looks ahead to Principal’s future.

“First and foremost, you need to be making sure the team is delivering on promises to all our constituencies, whether that be our shareholders, our customers, our employees, our partners,” she said. “I’d say in the last six months, [I’m] really getting much more of a cadence to ensure I’m doing that to the highest level that we need to be doing it.”

The four priorities: Focus, growth mindset, team and speed

After an initial six months full of travel and being introduced globally as the company’s new leader, Strable said she was able to turn more of her attention to gathering feedback around strategic priorities in the second half of the year.

In April, Strable shared with the Business Record her three guiding principles for Principal: growth, focus and team.

Those areas were top of mind when someone asked her early in her role what she would like to focus on, she said, but they also stemmed from the company’s strategic plan, which she and other members of the executive team developed throughout 2023 and 2024. 

Now as she leads that strategy, she said her job is about bringing the priorities to life.

“Coming into this role, it was less about redefining the strategy. It was more about how, as a company and a team, do we increase our probability of success in executing on the strategy?” she said. “And as I talked to people, as I listened, as I reflected, it was less about the what, and it was more about the cultural enablers or the how that was really going to set this apart.”

Feedback also helped evolve the priorities. Growth was redefined as growth mindset and Strable added a fourth priority — speed. 

She said adapting the growth priority is meant to help employees think of growth as a process.

“Growth is an outcome, but what we really wanted to do is change how people were thinking about things so that they were leaning into” growth in various forms, she said.

She identified speed as a priority after reflecting on areas she wanted the company to improve on and the reality of fast-changing external factors that businesses face everyday.

“It’s the combination of the four that is going to be so critical,” Strable said. “We could have a growth mindset, we could focus and we could work as a team, but if we didn’t have that speed element, it wasn’t going to link to our ability to be more successful.” 

The next step has been the multifaceted effort of instilling the priorities across the company culture and putting teams in a good position to accelerate progress.

“This isn’t going to be a 2025 effort, this is going to be a multi-year effort … but ultimately this is getting 20,000 people focused on what they can do everyday individually, with their team, with their areas to move these things forward,” Strable said.

She said it includes some efforts coming from the top, including adding some new roles to help two teams work more effectively together and supporting changes to governance that can help move projects along “at a quicker pace.”

In the realm of speed, Strable is also working to foster a culture that gives teams permission to focus on progress over perfection and engage in testing and iterating an idea to decide if it works.

“I’d say in the past, we strove for perfection and we strove for big rollouts of things, and as fast as things are changing, you need to be really parsing them up, trying things and moving on,” she said.

Principal leaning into strengths, monitoring customers’ growth 

So far in 2025, Principal has seen strong financial performance while also closely monitoring the health and confidence of its customers.

The company’s third quarter results were driven by enterprise net revenue growth, margin expansion and strong cash flow, according to leaders, with Strable specifically noting the retirement ecosystem, small and mid-sized business solutions and global asset management as strengths.

She said those three are areas of Principal’s strategy that the leadership team chose to focus on because each were places “we felt we had a differentiating position,” and second, they are areas where the markets are “big and growing.”

One of the company’s cornerstones is its diversification, in its business lines as well as geographically, which helps offset weaknesses in one area or location.

Looking at retirement as an ecosystem has been a new approach, Strable said. 

“We have a retirement business, but what we wanted to do is say, there are aspects of the broad retirement that we do across all of our businesses, and how do we think of them more collectively?” she said.

Some of the goals are that externally Principal is seen as a participant throughout the ecosystem, not just in its strongest areas, while internally, leaders are “connecting the dots” across business lines.

Strable said the overall strength of the national economy is also a current “tailwind” for Principal.

“The U.S. economy in overall marks is very strong. The equity markets have been strong. We start to see real estate recovering and so we’ve had some tailwinds that have helped us from a market perspective,” she said.

But she added that through the company’s various surveys and research mechanisms, Principal is closely monitoring the growth of its customers in a year marked by economic uncertainty for businesses.

She said their employer customers have been “very resilient” throughout the year, but feedback has shown a slower pace of growth and lower overall confidence compared to this time last year.

How fast customers are growing is a key indicator as the only time in 30 years of data that customers shrank in aggregate were 2008 and 2009, Strable said.

Principal’s approximately 200,000 U.S. employer customers are located across all 50 states and are diverse in industry and size. In aggregate, she said they are growing with some growing faster and some shrinking, and expressing more caution rather than stress.

“I’m really happy to say that overall, we’re seeing caution, but we’re not seeing a huge shift in growth,” she said.

According to surveys, a driver of the caution and lower confidence is more about external uncertainty on issues like tariffs or tax policy while decision-makers remain more confident about their business’ success internally.

“They’re pretty comfortable with their company and how they can continue to be successful, but then if you ask them about their community, they get a little less confident,” she said. “If you ask them about their state, they get a little less confident, when you ask them about the economy of the U.S., even less confident, and so it’s just the combination of all of that uncertainty that I think is weighing on business owners, executives as well as individuals.”

Moving forward, Strable said she feels a strong underlying foundation will help bolster the U.S. economy.

“I think actually that’s why some of the volatility has not felt as impactful is because the underlying foundation is strong. Having said that, our outlook is volatility is going to continue, and, ultimately, we have to be more comfortable with that volatility and what I say to our customers, what I say to our employees is, we have to focus on what we can control and we have to understand the impacts of the things we can’t control, and ultimately putting those two together is really important.”

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Lightning round questions with Strable

We asked Strable a few lightning round questions for some takeaways from her first year leading Principal. Here’s what she shared.

The habits that have helped her transition to and navigate the CEO role:

1. Using a planner. I started using a planner this year and one of the things that really helps is it allows me in one place to not just focus on the week or the day, but have the ability to know one month from now I need to check in on something, and I can just put it in my planner and I’ll remember it when I get there.
2. Listen before you talk. That’s sometimes hard for me. Even in my former job, Dan [Houston] would say ‘You need to talk first and let me listen,’ and now it’s switched. So ultimately, I interact with my team: Throwing out the questions, getting their input, understanding who hasn’t spoken and making sure that input is heard — I’d say those are other things that are top of mind for me as I work with my team because ultimately you’re not going to get everyone’s thoughts if they feel like you already have a position.

Her top lessons and takeaways from the first year:

You have to be authentic. From a leadership perspective, I just come back to you’ve got to be authentic, and it comes with taking the time to understand people, know people.

Be deliberate with time management. There’s only so many hours in the day and I have to make sure I’m being as impactful as I can in the areas I can be most impactful, and so making sure I’m not just being reactive to the things coming across my desk, but I’m also making sure I’m being proactive and strategic about where I spend my time and how I spend my time.

Her top three pieces of advice to new leaders:

1. Don’t try to replicate anyone else. Come back to what makes you good and lean into those places. I think it’s easy to read books about what other CEOs do, and you can take nuggets from all of those, but ultimately, it’s got to be true to who you are and how you have been most successful.
2. Take the time to listen. It’s natural when you move into the role that everyone wants you to be very clear on all your thoughts and expectations. Whether you’ve been at a company for 35 years or you’re brand new to a company, taking the time to listen and then formulate is super important. And a lot of that’s going to depend on the situation you’re in. If it’s a turnaround position, there’s a different accountability there, but if you’re walking into a company that’s been running well, and it’s your job to continue the momentum, taking the time to listen is really important.
3. Find some peers. Find those people that you can use as a sounding board, [that] you can talk about the things that you’re struggling with and get some advice and really find that network of a few people that you can utilize.

Her approach to community involvement:

My approach has been [to] pick a few things and do it well, versus saying yes to everything. It’s picking a few things that are impactful, that I’m passionate about, that our company is passionate about and making sure that I’m leaning in and doing that to the best of my ability. I’d say the other approach is we have a team of great people here, and so there’s ways that we can leverage that team broadly around that external community involvement as well. I think we’re best served by not having one face in the community but having tens of faces out there representing Principal.