Craig Kliethermes had an unusual compliment for his own company on October 20, 2026. RLI had produced another profitable underwriting quarter. Premium growth was measured. Investment income was up. The performance sounded familiar, he acknowledged. Then came the line that deserves a small place in the literature of corporate understatement: “At RLI, we think boring is beautiful.”
An insurance customer might reasonably agree. Excitement is pleasant in a weekend itinerary; it is less welcome in the institution expected to pay a claim. Kliethermes’s taste for repetition has a particular setting. He runs a specialty insurer whose work depends on knowing which risks to accept, what to charge and when to leave an opportunity alone.
By then, he had spent two decades at RLI and nearly five years as its chief executive. His route to the office ran through actuarial services, risk and operations. The numbers came first. The job gradually widened to include the people making them, the incentives shaping their decisions and the customers who would eventually test those decisions.
The business reaches customers through agents and brokers. Its product range includes construction, marine, transportation, professional services and surety bonds. These are markets in which the details of a customer’s work can change the coverage required. RLI describes its approach as taking time to understand those requirements and build suitable protection. That puts a premium on expertise and on relationships that survive more than one transaction. For the chief executive, the challenge is to support that detailed work across a company without making every answer travel through headquarters.
The actuary gets a larger problem
When RLI announced his arrival in May 2006, the assignment was precise. As vice president of actuarial services, he would handle pricing, reserving, enterprise risk modeling and the actuarial evaluation of new business opportunities. He reported to chief financial officer Joseph Dondanville. It was a position close to the arithmetic on which an insurer’s promises depend.
Kliethermes came from Lockton in Kansas City, where he had been senior vice president and director of quantitative analysis. Before that, he had held leadership and actuarial roles at GE Insurance/Employers Reinsurance and John Deere Insurance Company. He brought a mathematics degree from Maryville, earned magna cum laude, and professional qualifications including fellowship in the Casualty Actuarial Society.
Those responsibilities contain a useful preparation for management. Pricing asks whether a business is worth taking. Reserving asks whether yesterday’s decisions have been adequately accounted for. Evaluating a new opportunity asks what might be missing from an attractive proposal. Each requires a person to stay interested after the first answer looks satisfactory.
At RLI, his remit expanded. He became senior vice president of risk services in 2009 and executive vice president of operations in 2013. On January 1, 2016, he succeeded Mike Stone as president and chief operating officer of RLI Insurance Company. The progression took him from assessing individual business questions toward responsibility for the operation in which those questions arose.
The final transition was announced in November 2021. Jonathan Michael would retire as CEO at year-end; Kliethermes would take over on January 1, 2022, alongside Jennifer Klobnak as chief operating officer. This was an internal succession, with both incoming leaders already familiar with the company’s working habits. Kliethermes became RLI’s third chief executive.
Ownership, with consequences
A recurring subject in Kliethermes’s public conversations is the difference actual ownership makes to a workplace. At RLI, employees participate in an employee stock ownership plan. The company describes that stake as a reason colleagues take care over customers and the business. For its CEO, it also changes the relationship between people holding different titles.
In his 2025 discussion of culture, he connected that ownership to decentralized authority, access to information and a willingness to learn when an experiment fails. Product leaders have considerable independence, with incentives connected to their businesses. Shared ownership supplies an interest in the whole company. Managers, in turn, have to help employees understand how their work fits into the larger picture.
It is a demanding bargain. Authority without information leaves people guessing. Information without authority leaves them waiting. A financial stake makes the quality of both arrangements more consequential. The management task is to keep those pieces working together when a customer needs an answer and the person who knows the most is several reporting lines from the CEO.
His public recruiting messages make that belief more personal. On LinkedIn, he has recalled arriving as an actuary to lead a team and encouraged other actuaries to see themselves as participants in the business. The invitation carries the weight of his own career: the technical job he took in 2006 eventually opened into the company’s largest operating responsibility.
“it’s OK to fail, but you don’t want to fail without learning something.”
Craig Kliethermes, on workplace learning
Permission to let business go
Employee discretion becomes easier to understand when the choice involves turning away revenue. In July 2025, Kliethermes explained that RLI was becoming more selective in some vehicle-related exposures and declining property business where the balance between risk and reward was unattractive. Flat overall premium growth could coexist with opportunities elsewhere in the portfolio.
On the same call, Klobnak described the operating rule behind that approach. RLI did not impose top-line goals on product leaders or a predetermined mix of property, casualty and surety business. Specialists could grow when conditions supported profitability and contract when they did not. The portfolio would change with the opportunities available.
That freedom puts a different question in front of a manager. A larger number of policies is easy to count. The quality of a commitment takes longer to reveal itself. Letting a customer or broker take a particular risk elsewhere may disappoint today’s growth chart while protecting the company from an obligation priced too cheaply.
For a former pricing and reserving executive, the connection is straightforward. The sale and its eventual cost belong to the same decision, even when they arrive in different reporting periods. Kliethermes’s language about patience has an operational expression: underwriters need room to decline business without treating every lost premium dollar as a managerial failure.
A record he inherited, a business he must renew
RLI ended 2025 with $264.2 million in underwriting income and an 83.6 combined ratio. It was the company’s thirtieth consecutive year of underwriting income. That record began long before Kliethermes became CEO, and before he joined the business. His responsibility is to extend a habit established by several generations of colleagues.
A company record spanning several leadership tenures.
The combined ratio adds claims costs and expenses relative to earned premiums. Below 100 indicates an underwriting profit. It is a useful antidote to the instinct to read growth as the only score. A business can collect more premium and still make poor promises; it can also produce an underwriting profit with modest growth.
The details matter here. RLI’s 2025 result benefited from $87.4 million of favorable development in prior years’ loss reserves. Storm losses reduced underwriting income by $26.5 million. Insurance results contain revisions to earlier estimates as well as the experience of the current year. An actuarial career is good training for remembering that the past continues to submit paperwork.
The third quarter of 2026 offered another set of results to interpret. RLI reported $58.8 million in underwriting income and an 86.2 combined ratio, compared with $60.5 million and 85.1 a year earlier. Gross premiums written rose 2%. Favorable development in earlier loss reserves added $20.1 million to underwriting income.
The segment figures show why a diverse portfolio matters: property recorded a 60.1 combined ratio, surety 79.8 and casualty 99.6. A single company average contains very different businesses. Keeping the specialists close to their markets gives the leadership team a way to respond to those differences without pretending they all face the same conditions.
Kliethermes had put the company’s institutional memory to work on the April 2025 earnings call, recalling earlier soft markets and the financial stress of 2008. The point was that changing conditions were familiar territory for RLI. The executive who joined in 2006 had experienced some of that history from inside the organization. His argument for continuity therefore reaches beyond the leadership succession: employees can draw on earlier experience while deciding what the next unfamiliar market requires.
A company address can be a commitment
Kliethermes is based in Peoria, as RLI is. In a September 2025 interview, he described the importance of local talent, bringing new colleagues to headquarters and preserving connections across offices. He also discussed investing in technology and helping teams share information. His ambition included leaving a business that another generation could take forward.
That gives his succession story a longer horizon. The first promotion is about what a person can do. Later promotions bring responsibility for what other people can do, including colleagues the executive may never meet. A company that relies on specialized knowledge must keep making room for people to acquire it and use it.
His connections extend into that work. RLI’s 2026 proxy lists board service with the Maguire Academy of Insurance and Risk Management at Saint Joseph’s University, The Institutes and Heart of Illinois Big Brothers Big Sisters, alongside insurance industry responsibilities. Education, professional development and a Peoria community organization sit beside the public-company role.
There is a pleasing modesty to the business ambition that emerges. Improve the judgment. Keep the promises affordable to make and possible to honor. Give people enough reason to care and enough authority to help. Then do it again next quarter. Kliethermes has already supplied the adjective for what that might look like when it works.