Elevate wins Training and Development Award at the British Insurance Awards

Co-Founder Michelle Minnikin (in green) collecting the award with the AND-E Team.

We're thrilled to share some big news: Elevate, the leadership programme we co-designed and co-delivered with AND-E (Aioi Nissay Dowa Insurance Europe), has won the Training and Development Award at the 2026 British Insurance Awards.

The win was announced at the Royal Albert Hall in London on 8th July, in front of around 1,400 leaders from across the UK insurance industry - the sector's most prestigious awards evening.

Elevate (the in-house name used for our Rise Above programme) is a 12-month leadership programme for mid-senior women at AND-E, and it's the first of its kind in insurance. It was built to tackle a problem the industry knows all too well: losing talented women at exactly the point they're ready to step up.

Co-designed and co-delivered by our co-founder, organisational psychologist Michelle Minnikin (author of Good Girl Deprogramming), and Pamela Avornyo, AND-E's Head of Organisational Development, the programme goes beyond the usual leadership training playbook. Instead of just building skills, it addresses the behavioural, gendered and systemic factors that quietly undermine women's authority, progression and retention long before a skills gap ever shows up.

That distinction is at the heart of why Elevate works. As Michelle put it:

"The unrealised potential of women is the greatest untapped resource in business today. Most leadership development stops at skills - confidence, visibility, strategic thinking - and never asks why so many talented women still over-deliver, under-negotiate, and step back from opportunities they're more than qualified for. That's because the problem was never the women. They're doing their best inside cultures and structures that were never built with them in mind. Fix the woman and send her back into the same environment, and you haven't developed her; you've just handed her better coping mechanisms for a broken system. Until we tackle the conditioning and the culture together, the talent pipeline will keep leaking exactly where it always has. This is the work we're doing at AND-E."

Pamela Avornyo echoed that sentiment on the night: "Winning the Training and Development Award at the British Insurance Awards means a huge amount to everyone involved in Elevate. Most women's leadership development builds skills; Elevate goes beneath skills to address the systemic factors that undermine authority, progression and retention. To see that approach recognised on the industry's biggest stage - and, more importantly, to see the difference it has made to the women who took part - is incredibly rewarding."

Michelle (in green) with her BFFs Alan Carr, Gemma Robinson and Pamela Avornyo !

The results back it up. Elevate was recognised specifically for delivering measurable change in confidence, leadership and retention - not just warmer feedback scores, but real career movement.

Sarah Brown, who was promoted to Head of Claims Support and Control after completing the first cohort, put it simply: "Elevate has played a significant role in my recent promotion by giving me the confidence and clarity to advocate not only for myself, but for my colleagues and my team. It fundamentally reshaped how I think about leadership and, more importantly, who I am as a leader."

Alice Wilson, IT Business Analyst and a member of the first cohort, described a similar shift: "Elevate has changed my life. Inside and outside work. I am doing things and having conversations that I was previously not confident enough to have. I feel more sure of who I am and my self worth has increased. I feel more able to face professional and personal situations with assertiveness, but I am still kind to myself. I've learnt more about myself in this short time than I have in my whole life and I am a different person because of it." She added: "I would say all senior women should have the opportunity to complete Elevate, it will change the business for the better. There will be a cultural shift, burnout will be reduced, teams will be more supported, and progression and retention will be the norm."

AND-E's UK CEO, Warren Hetz, sees the programme as part of a bigger ambition for the region: "Our ambition is to make Newcastle a national hub of digital and insurance expertise, and that only happens if we invest seriously in developing our colleagues - whether through Elevate, our Excellence Framework in claims, or the hundreds of new opportunities we are creating this year. Elevate not only equips participants and our wider leadership team with the skills they need; it also fosters allyship, collaboration and mentorship, empowering everyone to uplift others."

Following the success of the first cohort, Elevate's second cohort began in April 2026, with 13 colleagues joining from across AND-E's European operations. For us, the award is a welcome recognition of an approach we've long believed in: that developing women leaders means changing the system around them, not just coaching them to survive it.

If you're a business wondering whether your own leadership pipeline is leaking talent for the same systemic reasons, we'd love to talk about what Elevate-style deprogramming could look like for your organisation.

Talk to us about our Rise Above programme - email us info@deprogramming.company