Pauline Blight-Johnson has a cup of tea, and barely time to touch it. The actuary and chief executive of the country’s largest lenders mortgage insurer is explaining that business, leadership and even schooling isn’t about the numbers. It’s all about people.

“It was only about 10 years in [working] that I joined the dots that behind every single one of those numbers was a human being,” she says, seated in Genworth Mortgage Insurance’s North Sydney boardroom. “And that human being was probably interacting with us at a scary and vulnerable time in their lives.”