Deanna Strable and the three-times rule

An actuary ought to appreciate a manageable number. For Deanna Strable-Soethout, it was three. As a young senior vice president at Principal Financial Group, she sat in meetings with colleagues who were mostly men, many of them 20 or 25 years older. She had earned the promotion. Getting a sentence into the discussion remained another matter.

She talked with her boss and set a requirement: contribute at least three times in each meeting. A question counted. So did a brief observation or a useful recap. There was no obligation to deliver the sentence that would change financial services forever. She simply had to participate, then do it again.

The charm of the exercise lies in its modesty. Corporate advice often arrives dressed for a keynote. This came with a tally. Over several months, speaking became more natural. Confidence followed practice, on a schedule that allowed for awkward beginnings.

By January 2025, the former actuarial assistant was Principal’s president and chief executive officer. In September, she added board chair. The young executive who had once needed a participation target now had responsibility for the whole discussion. Her career offers a useful question: what happens when the person learning to speak becomes the person everyone waits to hear?

The way home ran through Northwestern

Strable grew up in Prole, south of Des Moines, and left Iowa for Northwestern University. A first-generation college graduate, she studied mathematics and economics. Her parents had made education a priority long before she chose a profession. The distance to college was measurable; the distance from her parents’ experience was harder to put on a map.

She considered becoming either an attorney or an actuary. Employment prospects helped settle the choice. There is something pleasingly consistent about a future financial executive weighing the job market before choosing the discipline devoted to weighing uncertainty. The decision was practical, and she has described it that way.

A Principal internship gave her a reference point for the offers that followed. She considered other cities, including Hartford, Minneapolis and St. Louis, but kept comparing the alternatives with her experience in Des Moines. She joined full time in 1990. Returning also had a domestic logic: living near family would leave vacations available for travel elsewhere.

That is a less theatrical origin story than a lifelong vow to become CEO. It is also more recognizable. She chose a promising first job, in a place where she could build a life. The company kept presenting reasons to stay.

Belgium, without a familiar room

In 1992, she took an assignment in Belgium. It was her first trip outside the United States. The opportunity brought professional experience and the less glamorous problem of finding people to spend a weekend with. Arriving abroad for work does not automatically supply a social life.

She has described feeling isolated in a small office where her colleagues were far from her own age. Her response was specific: find an English-speaking church, meet someone, make a dinner invitation. One connection could lead to another. As with the meeting rule, she gave herself something she could actually do.

The assignment matters to the longer story because staying at one employer can sound like staying in one place. Her early career included leaving the country, working in an unfamiliar setting and learning how to establish herself among strangers. A single company could contain several kinds of departure.

Years later, she would draw on that experience when encouraging other people through difficult transitions. There is no need to romanticize loneliness to see the value of the lesson. She had discovered a way to move through it: make the next conversation possible.

One employer, many apprenticeships

Principal’s current biography records more than 15 roles across her career. The sequence includes technical work, operating responsibility and enterprise finance. She helped build the Specialty Benefits business and bring it together with life insurance operations. In 2015, she became a business unit president; in 2017, she became chief financial officer.

Those changes required different kinds of attention. Running a business means answering for its customers, people and results. Overseeing company finances brings questions about capital, reporting and the relationship between individual operations and the larger enterprise. Experience in one can make the other more concrete.

The CFO invitation initially surprised her. Much of her experience had been in business leadership, and she questioned her fit for a position associated with finance specialists. The board and CEO wanted a partner who could understand the numbers in the context of operations and long-term strategy. Her operating background had a use at the finance table.

She became president and chief operating officer in August 2024. The CEO appointment followed, taking effect on January 7, 2025. It was a succession built over decades, with several substantial changes of job along the way. Staying had required her to keep becoming a beginner.

Make someone else ready

One of her stated leadership lessons, while CFO, was “Work yourself out of a job.” It is a slightly alarming instruction until you reach its purpose: prepare other people to take responsibility. A career with repeated internal moves needs colleagues who can move, too.

Her approach also includes assuming good intent, a habit she credits to her parents. It asks a manager to delay the hostile interpretation long enough to understand what happened. That is a useful discipline in any office where a short message can produce a surprisingly long misunderstanding.

Her public accounts contain lighter evidence of how she likes to interact. At an employee happy hour, she noticed a long queue and helped serve drinks. The impromptu assignment made conversation easier. An executive behind the drinks table gives people a rather different opening than an executive behind a desk.

There are connections outside the formal organization chart as well. At a social gathering, she and Principal colleague Kathy Kay discovered they were both Delta Zeta alumnae. They had executive roles in common already. A casual introduction supplied a connection their titles had managed to miss.

“Work yourself out of a job.”

Deanna Strable, on developing others, 2023

Family was allowed into the conversation

As she advanced, Strable made a point of speaking about family at work. She let colleagues see that children’s sports and concerts had places in her schedule. Other women later told her that the visibility mattered. Someone more senior had made an ordinary part of life permissible to mention.

The distinction is practical. Employees learn from calendars and conversations as well as policies. If the person with authority speaks openly about commitments beyond the office, everyone else has one more clue about how the workplace actually operates. Quiet examples can travel farther than their author expects.

Strable also co-founded Principal’s first women’s leadership group. Her support for advancement has included making room for people who do not see themselves in the established image of an executive. The point runs through her own account of the meeting room: an unfamiliar style need not disqualify a useful contribution.

In 2026, the personal details she volunteered included a love of reading, travel and college sports. Her office candy jar favors Cherry Sours and Hot Tamales. Financial services contains plenty of discussions about appetite for risk. The confectionery department appears comfortable with a little heat.

A different problem at the head of the table

The CEO role brought a surprise even after 35 years at Principal. Familiarity with the company did not make the experience of leading it familiar. She had a team, but her immediate circle no longer supplied the same community of peers. She sought connections with other CEOs and industry leaders.

Information changed, too. People filtered what they said to the chief executive. Her task became finding ways to hear what was happening throughout the organization. The old participation rule had a new counterpart: ask questions, hear the team’s answers and notice who has not contributed.

This reversal is the most interesting turn in her story. Early on, she had to prevent her own silence. At the top, she had to consider how her own voice might produce silence in others. The same concern - getting useful knowledge into the room - now required a different behavior.

Her stated priorities evolved during the first year to include focus, growth mindset, team and speed. The strategy had been developed with colleagues before she became CEO. The job now involved helping people execute it, including a greater willingness to test ideas and make progress without waiting for a perfect rollout.

A financial future needs an open door

Strable’s business agenda connects retirement, asset management and solutions for smaller and midsize employers. In discussing the industry’s future, she has emphasized the challenge of making financial services relevant and easy to use. A product can be carefully designed and still struggle to earn a place on someone’s daily list.

For advisors, that means adapting how they engage with customers, including digital and more personalized interactions. For Principal, technology has to address actual business and customer problems. The measure of usefulness is what it helps someone accomplish. A financial product still has to find its way into a human decision.

Her April 2026 essay on financial inclusion extended that argument. Participation increasingly depends on digital infrastructure, alongside financial knowledge and trust. Expanding the menu of products cannot by itself reach people who lack the means or confidence to use them.

She assigns responsibility across government, employers and financial and technology companies. Each has a different part in making participation possible. The ambition is broader access to financial security, with the tools and understanding that let access become useful. It brings her current work back to a familiar concern: who gets to take part?

Leave room for the next voice

Her community commitments remain tied to Iowa. They include Simpson College, United Way of Central Iowa and the Greater Des Moines Partnership. The reach of her corporate role is global; much of the work outside it remains close enough to home to involve familiar institutions and neighbors.

The scale has changed since the actuarial assistant arrived in 1990. So have the obligations. Becoming Principal’s first woman CEO is a visible milestone. The habits underneath it are less photogenic: asking a question, making an introduction, preparing a successor, hearing someone through before announcing a view.

Three contributions per meeting was a rule one person could follow. Creating an organization where other people can contribute is a much larger assignment. Strable’s career makes the connection between the two unusually clear. She once counted her own turns. Now she has to make sure the room has room.