Oritse J. Uku believes that anyone who becomes a leader should view it as a “calling,” not just an advantageous job opportunity.
That’s why he brings so much passion to his role at Northwestern Mutual, where he serves as business information security officer for wealth and investment management and vice president of governance, risk, and compliance enterprise-wide.
Uku has been honing his leadership craft for more than two decades. Prior to joining the financial services firm, he had various roles at different organizations, such as editor in chief at Becoming Cyber and senior vice president of cyber threat management at Citi. And before all of that, he served as a captain in the U.S. Army.
At Northwestern Mutual, Uku guides a team dedicated to “security culture” — a term that he believes holds significant meaning.
“Security culture really gets to the heart of what we’re trying to do,” he explained. “We’re not trying to do ‘check-the-box’ training.”
“We’re not trying to do ‘check-the-box’ training.”
According to Uku, Northwestern Mutual strives to ingrain security into every aspect of its operations, from its decision-making process to its relationships with vendors. When seen in this light, risk begins to feel like “the language of business,” woven out of a universal etymology that bridges together all of the different areas of the organization.
Uku believes that anyone who becomes a leader should view it as a “calling,” not just an advantageous job opportunity. His passion for leading others is palpable, reflected in his position as dean of Northwestern Mutual’s School of Leadership and the high scores his team members submit on employee engagement surveys.
Fueled by his enthusiasm for his role and his passion for the security, governance and compliance space, Uku is ready to steer his team toward an even brighter future for Northwestern Mutual — one in which security is a way of life, not a rote requirement.
Read on to learn more about the work being done on Uku’s team, his approach to leadership and what he’s most excited to tackle with his team over the next year.
What are some of the projects your team has been working on to strengthen Northwestern Mutual’s security, governance and compliance efforts?
Uku: Nobody likes an annual 30-minute course for security training. I’m a security leader, and I don’t like doing them. It creates this opportunity for someone once a year to just try and get through it as quickly as possible. If they’re not a security professional, it’s easy enough for it to go in one ear and out the other.
Instead of that annual requirement, our team has developed micro-learnings. Just like the name implies, these little courses that are five to 10 minutes long are very targeted toward a specific subject. People fly through them because they are relatively short, but you can layer those on at whatever sort of frequency without burning out your viewer base, and that has been super effective. People engage with it a lot. I have personally had people tell me that they caught scams or phishing attempts in their personal email because of the micro-learning training they had at work, so the team is very intentional about the way they’re building that program. I haven’t seen anyone in the industry doing anything similar.
“I have personally had people tell me that they caught scams or phishing attempts in their personal email because of the training that they had at work, so the team is very intentional about the way they’re building that program.”
What else stands out is that we’re developing what I’ve started referring to as a ‘governance stack.’ Just like many companies, we have a corporate committee that would focus on cybersecurity, or in our case, IT in general. A corporate committee is — well, it’s an expensive meeting. It’s a bunch of very senior folks, and there are a lot of governance issues that would need to go to that sort of body. But the thing is: there’s a lot of governance that doesn’t need to go to a group that is that high-level.
So in the course of the last year or so, we’ve rolled out subcommittees. Instead of this corporate committee focusing on the entirety of everything that needs to be done at the enterprise level, we started with a couple of subcommittees and said that the parent committee can focus on strategic governance, and the subcommittees can focus on their lanes of tactical and operational governance.
We did that for about a year. It got a lot of work off of the plate of the parent committee, but still put it in formal governance channels, which is important, especially in IT, where you’re making decisions that affect a regulated enterprise. And then we thought, what if, below the subcommittee, we can break out formal working groups that could be chartered for a year or two. That means the subcommittee is now responsible for that operational level of governance, and the working group is responsible for that tactical governance.
Now we have what I’m referring to as that governance stack [made up] of a corporate committee that focuses on strategic governance, subcommittees that focus on operational governance and working groups that focus on tactical governance, so we’re able to make decisions at varying levels that are more efficient, have accountability and reduce time spend, which ideally makes us better prepared to support the business as technology professionals.
How has it been to see your team make progress so far with these projects?
Uku: Honestly, the bit that’s exciting is to see the progress [we’ve made] quarter over quarter in how we execute that governance. Because once it becomes part of the culture, it just kind of blends into the background. People start to forget the word “governance” and just say, “Oh, this is how we do things here.” And even though you are talking about governance, it just becomes part of the culture. It doesn’t require an enforcer, because all your people are enforcers. So it’s been exciting to see that change and to see it be effective in a pretty rapid manner.
“Because once it becomes part of the culture, it just kind of blends into the background. People start to forget the word “governance” and just say, ‘Oh, this is how we do things here.’”
How do you strive to cultivate a culture of honesty and communication on your team?
Uku: For one, I hold monthly office hours for an hour. It is not a mandatory event, but I tell people that I’ll be on the Zoom for an hour. If you ask me a question, I’ll be transparent: I’ll tell you what I know, I’ll tell you that I don’t know, or I’ll tell you I do know, but I can’t tell you. What I won’t do is lie to you or give you some answer that is disingenuous.
“If you ask me a question, I’ll be transparent: I’ll tell you what I know, I’ll tell you that I don’t know, or I’ll tell you I do know, but I can’t tell you. What I won’t do is lie to you or give you some answer that is disingenuous.”
Secondly, I do hold quarterly skip levels with all of my managers, and I’m very intentional when I engage with them. When I engage with the managers, it allows me to understand what they’re going through. They can certainly ask questions about how I see the organization, both as a function and within the context of Northwestern Mutual. So I try to do so in a manner in which I’m speaking to everybody quarterly. Everyone’s hearing from me at the same interval.
Thirdly, I have a quarterly extended leadership workshop, and that’s an hour-long meeting with all of my people leaders. And the goal there is to provide a safe environment for people to discuss the ups and downs, and to offer techniques and advice. I mean, they’ve got access to me in those office hours, but it’s tough to talk about people leadership when your people are on the call. So that’s also been pretty successful.
Uku's Leadership Philosophy
“I’m certainly a product of my environment,” Uku said. Referring to his time in the U.S. Army, he sees his role as a leader to be one in which he steps back and lets others take the wheel. “My job is to get smart, talented and ambitious people in the right seats, provide them with strategic goals and priorities and a way to measure success as they pursue those goals, provide them the support they need to achieve them, clear obstacles out of their way, and then get out of their way,” Uku said.
What is the greatest lesson you’ve learned during your time as a leader at Northwestern Mutual, and how does this lesson inform your day-to-day work?
Uku: I would say humility, because as the leader for my function, there are certainly a lot of activities that I’m involved with. I think the single most important thing I do is get the right people in the right seats, and that includes both hiring, promotions and lateral moves. It certainly requires some humility to understand that you don’t know it all, and to take advice from others, even when that advice is contrary to what your assessment was, or at least incorporate that advice from trusted partners. It’s very easy to think that, because you’ve been doing this for a while, you have more of the answers than you do. But enlisting the feedback of trusted partners — that’s a lesson learned in the last couple of years.
“It certainly requires some humility to understand that you don’t know it all, and to take advice from others even when that advice is contrary to what your assessment was, or at least incorporate that advice from trusted partners.”
Is there anything you’re especially excited to tackle with your team over the next year?
Uku: I am working on a group of priorities. When I rolled into the end of 2024, I sat down and started trying to write some 2025 goals, and it just felt very incremental. And I don’t want incremental — I want a big bang. So, instead of writing 2025 goals, I wrote 2027 goals, and they’re big and ambitious, and it isn’t immediately obvious how we will accomplish them. I’ve got seven in total.
Focusing on that three-year horizon rather than the next year allows us to dream a bit bigger, to have this vision in our head of what a really high-functioning governance, risk and compliance shop should look like … The way I tend to approach goals like these are to give individuals ways to measure success, but that’s it. I’m not hiring smart, ambitious people so that I can tell them how to be smart and ambitious. Give them some runway to do exciting things, and they will surprise you with what they come up with.
