Build on Your Strengths
Over the years, I’ve learned that a confident person doesn’t concentrate or focus on their weaknesses—they maximize their strengths.
—JOYCE MEYER
One blazingly hot day in the summer of 1990, Loveanne and I took the boys to the University of Georgia for Picture Day. It’s an event held a few weeks before football season where you can bring your kids out onto the field and have their picture taken with the team mascot. As two-year-old Tyler and five-year-old Kyle stood there watching the proceedings and waiting their turn, I checked my watch for the umpteenth time. They were having a blast. I was nervous.
My problem didn’t have anything to do with Picture Day. It had to do with the fact that our company was going through an upheaval.
Actually, calling it an “upheaval” is to put it in the mildest terms. “Seismic event” might be more like it. Thirteen years after the founding of A.L. Williams, the unthinkable had happened. Art was no longer in charge of the company. The next few years would be a trial for our company, a time when its ability to exist without its founder would be sorely tested. I didn’t know it yet, but these years would also serve as a crucible for me, forging my career into something with a clear and distinct shape to it.
One thing that makes real leaders great is that they are keenly aware of their own strengths and weaknesses. Everyone has a vein of genius running on the inside, but real leaders learn how to tap into it and allow it rise to the surface. They seem to have a sense of their own path. They understand what they were put here to do.
Me, I didn’t really have a clue. At this point in my career, although I’d been moving up through the ranks and had learned a tremendous amount, I really hadn’t learned the most important part yet. I’d found a great job. But I hadn’t yet found my calling.
Of course, I wasn’t thinking about that as I checked my watch on Picture Day. I was focused on the more existential question of my family’s financial future. After Kyle was born, Loveanne decided to stay home to be a full-time mom. Earlier in 1990 she had started going to class at night and on weekends to get a master’s in social work. In the meantime, my career had taken off like a rocket, with salary increases to match. Our family depended on that salary. Now we had a full-blown household that depended on my income, which was suddenly in jeopardy.
Because while we were standing there having pictures taken with Uga the Bulldog, the company’s new owners and the top executives were having a meeting in Duluth to decide who would stay and who would go. Smart money said as many as one-third of the home office employees would be out by day’s end.
I didn’t know whether I still had a job.
Partway through the event, I excused myself to go hunt down a payphone and call my boss, Rick Mathis.
“So, Rick,” I said when I got him. “What’s going on?”
“You’re going to be in charge of licensing,” he said. “And, yeah, you’ve got a job.”
So that was a relief. Still, a lot of good people were gone. Those who were left were a bit shell-shocked. When Art walked out the doors for the last time, you could have split the Duluth headquarters into kindling with a lightning bolt and I don’t think it would have stunned the people there any more than they already were. The reverberations of that day would echo throughout our company for years.
It was a long and complicated series of events and acquisitions that led to this turning point. In the early eighties our underwriter, PennCorp, was bought by a large company named American Can, which later changed its name to Primerica Corporation and was in turn eventually acquired by an incredibly talented and ambitious New York City entrepreneur named Sandy Weill. Our agency now had a shining new underwriter behind it, run by a brilliant Wall Street businessman. But the tide of change hadn’t finished rolling in yet.
To Sandy, who was used to the chrome-and-glass skyscraper world of Manhattan high finance, our home-grown Georgia operation at A.L. Williams was a whole new experience. He fell in love with it. He loved the excitement of the sales force and the mission of helping middle-income families with their finances. He recognized both the company’s uniqueness and its tremendous potential.
A year later, Sandy bought the A.L. Williams agency too.
At first, the plan was that both Art and Sandy would be there. Art would be the elder statesman, leading the charge for the field. But I knew in my gut that no matter how big this company got, it would never be big enough for these two outsized personalities. The reality was that the company had a new owner. It didn’t take long for that reality to become clear. In the summer of 1990, a year after selling the agency to Sandy, Art Williams left the company.
It’s hard to convey just how total the change felt to those of us who were still standing after that summer’s purge of corporate staff. Overnight our company went through as dramatic a transformation in culture as anyone could have possibly imagined.
Art ran his company like a football coach. He never wore a tie if he didn’t absolutely have to. He did business in a golf shirt. And it wasn’t just Art. Long before the days when “business casual” became cool, we all wore golf shirts with A.L. Williams’ logos on them to work. At A.L. Williams, it was no unintended metaphor when we referred to the sales force as the people “out in the field.” That was Art’s ball team out there, and we were playing for a championship.
When this group of suits from New York showed up, it was like our office had all of a sudden been invaded by a species from another planet. You couldn’t have come up with two more radically different views of business if you’d tried. Art’s view: you build a company the same way you build a football team. It’s all about helping them win out on the field. In the guys from New York’s view, you build a business like a business. It’s about the shareholders’ bottom line.
Our new CEO, Don Cooper, was a good guy and I liked him. But Don was an actuary by training. His skill set lay more in dealing with numbers than dealing with people. Don’s focus was on finding ways to manage the insurance company to maximize profit. How do we make this more and more profitable and drive the stock price? Those were his marching orders from the top. Like everyone else on the new executive team, he had no experience whatsoever with a sales force like ours. They were used to running brokerages full of people who came in to work at their jobs every day.
But that wasn’t what we had here at A.L. Williams. Our folks weren’t people who saw themselves as working at a job. They were people who saw themselves as part of a cause. And you can’t run a business like that as if it’s an organization because it’s not just an organization. It’s an organism. It’s something people are drawn to because they want to do something great with their lives. It’s a movement. The day you start running it like an organization with org charts and lots of functions all neatly defined is the day it starts to die.
This isn’t just about business. It’s about a living, breathing culture. It’s about being part of a burning mission that people buy into and believe in with all their hearts.
And that’s the reason I’m telling you this story—because it’s not just true of A.L. Williams. It is a fundamental truth of leadership that applies to any business.
You can find companies with structures completely different from ours that understand that they are a group of people who are drawn together by the fact that they are all part of the same cause. That’s one of the factors that made Apple great. The same goes for Southwest, Toyota, Zappos, and a thousand other companies, some famous and some no bigger than your local coffee shop.
If a computer company, an airline, an auto manufacturer, and an online shoe store (a shoe store!) can be driven by a powerful mission, then any company can find and champion that kind of mission. This isn’t just about business. It’s about a living, breathing culture. It’s about being part of a burning mission that people buy into and believe in with all their hearts.
What Art had created in A.L. Williams was a movement to transform the life insurance industry from being something that took advantage of people to being a force for good. He wanted to make a company that did good things for families and changed people’s lives for the better.
Sandy’s enthusiasm notwithstanding, the people from New York did not really grasp how central to the company’s existence this mission was. Because of that, they did not fully appreciate the role Art had played in the company’s operation. They saw him as a great sales leader and motivational speaker, but certainly not essential to the company’s success. Sure, they figured, there’d no doubt be a few bumps in the road during the transition, but we’d all get along fine without him. What they didn’t realize was that our field wasn’t going to behave like your typical sales force of full-time “professional” salespeople. And Art wasn’t just the founder. He was the electromagnet at the heart of the thing. Cut off the current and the whole thing would start to drift apart.
When I talk to stock analysts and other professionals in the finance world, it floors me how they just cannot get the concept at the center of how our business works. I tell them to picture a health club.
Every January, everybody in the country says, “I’m tired of being a fat tub of goo. I am not going to be the chubby old me of last year. I’m going to get in shape.” Then they all go out and join a health club. For about a month and a half, you can’t find a machine that doesn’t have somebody on it. By April you could shoot a cannon through the place and not hit a soul. Why? Because it’s voluntary. If their boss said, “Your fat tail needs to lose twenty-five pounds in the next six months, or you’re fired,” they’d be down there on the treadmill every day. But their boss doesn’t say that. And in our company, the salespeople don’t even have a boss.
These people are not W-2 employees. They’re 1099 folks, independent contractors. That means nobody can tell them what to do. They aren’t hired. They join. It’s a volunteer army. They didn’t come here for a job, and they sure didn’t come here for a boss. They’re here to be independent. They don’t have to come to the meetings. They don’t have to do anything if they don’t want to.
Again, this is a fundamental truth of human nature that operates in any business. When a company’s people stop being inspired, when they lose that crucial connection to the company’s mission and start being just part of a work force, that company is in trouble. Even if all its vital signs still look good on the outside, if its heartbeat isn’t strong then it’s already on its way to the emergency room. In most companies, as long as people are on the payroll they at least keep going through the motions. In our company the impact is a little more dramatic and immediate because everyone in the sales force is there on a pure commission basis.
Here’s how people join our business: They say, “I’m in.”
Here’s how people quit our business: They say, “I’m out.”
That’s it. When people quit, they don’t notify anyone. They don’t come into the office and announce that they’re resigning the way I did at Life of Georgia. They just don’t show up at the meeting next week. And that is exactly what was about to happen.
One day that summer, not long after our family outing for Picture Day, Don Cooper held a meeting in a giant conference room at the office for all the executives and management. I was sitting with my friend and colleague Chess Britt. Chess exemplifies the expression “still water runs deep.” When he has something to say, I know I need to stop whatever I’m doing and listen. Over the years, Chess would become one of my anchors at the company and eventually run all of marketing.
Don was going through a presentation from the Harvard Business Review, describing what happens when companies go from the entrepreneurial phase to the established business phase. “When you go through that transition,” he explained, “you’ll go through some bumps, some little ups and downs. That’s normal.” He had a chart up there that showed the classic line of upward growth, with some little squiggly lines here and there showing the bumps in the road.
Chess looked over at me and in his wonderful dry way said quietly, “I think these lines may be a little more squiggly than he thinks they are.”
Truer words were never spoken.
For the first few months, things looked like they might be okay. The numbers held through the early fall. By late fall, sales were slipping.
Remember, this is an all-commission sales operation we’re talking about here. Nobody had any specific quotas they had to reach. In fact, strictly speaking nobody had to do anything. And in an all-volunteer sales force, if people aren’t inspired to go out there and sell, they don’t.
December was seriously down, but then, December is always a slow month. January came, and suddenly it was like everyone who was gone for the holidays stayed gone. By February, our sales numbers and the size of the sales force decreased by half. Those lines were getting squiggly, all right. We were dropping like a rock.
Strangely enough, it didn’t look that way to the executives in New York due to a curious aspect of the insurance business. A lot of companies are cash-driven. If sales suddenly drop 50 percent, then earnings drop 50 percent. But that’s not the case in our business because an insurance company has a huge book of in-force business, which defers a lot of your costs early on. This meant that even though our sales force was collapsing and new sales weren’t happening, earnings at the company were not down dramatically. To Sandy and the rest of them up in Manhattan, it didn’t look like the disaster it was.
My vantage point was different. While they saw things in terms of impact on earnings, I saw things in terms of impact on the field. I was in charge of compensation to the sales force. And suddenly there wasn’t any compensation to be in charge of.
The way our business works, we advance commissions to the agent on new sales when they happen. When you write a sale, we collect one month’s premium from the new customer and put them on a monthly automatic bank draft for their ongoing premium payments. Meanwhile, we advance nine months’ worth of commissions to you, so that you get significant compensation for the sale right away. In effect, this creates a loan against your account, which then earns out over the course of the next nine months as the monthly premium payments come in. This was a revolutionary idea for the insurance business. Plus we were advancing new commissions not just once or twice a month but twice a week, so that our people were getting a constant flow of immediate cash-in-hand rewards for their efforts. This was another Art Williams innovation. This created a debit balance, which would normally be earned back by future premium payments as well as by additional new sales.
Now, with sales dropping so dramatically, suddenly there were barely enough new premiums coming in to offset the debit balances. That February, we had one pay period that actually amounted to a net chargeback, meaning that not only did the agents not get paid, but the “earnings” coming from their organization amounted to a net negative. Being in charge of compensation I could see the numbers, and I knew what was going on the moment it happened.
There were no checks going out.
If you woke me up in the middle of the night by blowing a Klaxon horn and shining a 10,000-watt light in my face and shouting at me, “Addison! Explain in complete detail exactly what the people at the top of this thing need to watch in order to run this company effectively!” you’d get an immediate response. I wouldn’t have to think, I’d just blurt out four words:
“Checks to the field!”
That’s it. The earnings and commissions going to the members of the sales force are the life blood of the organism. If checks are going up, life’s okay. If checks are going down, life’s not okay. It’s really that simple. And right now, checks weren’t just going down, they were gone.
But up in New York, they didn’t see that. They were using the conventional metrics to assess the state of things. The conventional metrics weren’t giving them the right answers. The troops on the ground knew we were in trouble, but the generals weren’t asking the troops.
I knew this was bad. If we didn’t get some cash flow going out to these guys, they were all going to quit. There’d be nobody left. Once again, I wasn’t sure how much longer I’d still have a job. Only this time, it wasn’t because I thought I might get fired. It was because I wasn’t sure how much longer we’d still have a company.
By this time, our family had settled well into our little three-bedroom ranch house in Snellville. In fact, Loveanne had just ordered a new entertainment unit for our den, with a place for our TV, stereo, and bookcases.
I called and cancelled the order.
That month Sandy came down to Georgia to have a meeting, a sort of review-of-the-troops to see how things were going. He brought his two right-hand guys with him, a man about my age named Jamie Dimon and another gentleman named Bob Lipp, who was Sandy’s most trusted lieutenant. Today Jamie Dimon runs JPMorgan Chase. Bob Lipp eventually became the CEO of Travelers Insurance. Me and a handful of other guys who’d been around a good while were brought in.
So there I was, in the room with Sandy, Bob Lipp, Jamie Dimon, and some other top executives. Sandy was sitting at the head of the table, chewing on a cigar, going around the room and asking each one in turn how he saw things. Were things getting better, were things improving?
Now they were asking the troops on the ground. What would the troops say back?
Sandy is a brilliant, self-made man, and he can be a very intimidating presence. A lot of jobs had been cut when New York took over. The A.L. Williams veterans in the room were as worried about their own necks as they were about anything else. Nobody was about to go negative in front of Sandy. One by one, everybody was saying things like, “Well, it’s been challenging, but I really think we’ve made a lot of the right moves, and things are going better, blah, blah, blah.” People talked about what projects they were working on, how they saw things improving in their particular area, and so forth. It was coming around to me. I was sitting there thinking, “Oh, this isn’t going well.”
Finally Sandy got to me. “John?” he said. “How do things look to you?”
What was I supposed to say?
In the half-year since Sandy’s team had taken over the company, there’d been this feeling around the office that these Wall Street guys were coming in and saying, “Here, let us show you country bumpkins how a real business is run.” I didn’t get the feeling that any of these guys were going to take too kindly to this particular country bumpkin telling them their business. But I just couldn’t see sugarcoating things. There’s a time for diplomacy and a time when you have to put caution aside and be candid. I knew this was one of those times. I figured this might be my last chance to have any influence here.
It was that fork-in-the-river thing again. When you see the path ahead of you dividing, all you can do is take the direction that looks and feels like the right one and trust that consequences will sort themselves out.
Okay, I thought, here goes.
“Look,” I said. “With all due respect, the situation here’s not bad—it’s worse than bad. It’s a disaster.”
There’s a time for diplomacy and a time when you have to put caution aside and be candid.
As I pulled out a few pieces of paper I’d brought in with me, I still remember the silence that rolled around that conference table like a blanket of fog socking down an airport. I briefly ran down the numbers and walked through how things had crashed in the past six months.
“The bottom line is,” I said, “we’ve got no checks going out. I don’t know how long these folks are going to hang in there with you all, but if they’re not getting a check, it won’t be long.” I set my papers down, looked around the conference table, and summed up with an image that had been running through my mind for days.
“Guys,” I said, “this thing is on fire. It’s burning. It’s the Hindenburg at Lakehurst.”
For a moment, there was that dense fog of silence again. I couldn’t read anyone’s expression. Then there was some more talk. Before long the meeting broke up. As we left the room, the guys from New York were all murmuring to each other.
Well, I thought, what’s done is done. Had I opened my big mouth and put my foot in it up to the knee? Maybe I would get fired after all, regardless of whether or not the company pulled through.
The next day, I got a phone call from New York.
“John?” asked the voice. “Jamie Dimon.”
Oh boy, I thought, here it comes. I figured the chances were good I’d be clearing out my desk right after this phone call.
I said “hello” back.
“Listen, John,” said Jamie, “I just want to thank you for being so honest and for being the guy in the room who spoke up and told us how you really see it.”
Apparently they’d talked after the meeting and decided that maybe this guy from Georgia had a ticket on the clue bus. I was not being fired. Even better, I was being listened to.
That right there is one thing that sets leaders like Jamie apart from the rest: not only asking the right questions of the right people, but also listening to the answers.
About a week later, Bob Lipp came to Atlanta to have an emergency strategic and tactical session with a handful of us. Bob started out at Chemical Bank in his twenties as a teller and worked his way up to president before being tapped by Sandy to help create what was at this time the rapidly expanding empire of Primerica Corporation. Bob is a wonderful human being, brilliant businessman, and remains a very good friend to this day.
Bob met with me, my boss, and a few other long-timers, and we suggested some ideas about things we’d tweak with compensation. We knew we had to infuse some excitement into the sales force. At the moment, the only thing that was going to produce excitement was a little cash. We came up with an idea to create a bonus system without doing a lot of damage to the company’s bottom line, something based on monthly production that would put more money in our reps’ hands.
About that same time Sandy sent a new CEO down to Atlanta to run things. Pete Dawkins had an unbelievable reputation. As a highly decorated Vietnam veteran and Army general, Rhodes Scholar, and Heisman trophy winner, Pete was a Renaissance man and the picture of an American hero. Having him on board was a great injection of much-needed inspiration to the sales force.
Once he was in Duluth and working with the company, it was obvious that his reputation was well deserved. Pete had tremendous integrity, character, and energy. He and his wife Judi threw themselves into the task of reinvigorating the company and for the next months they were flying around the country doing a ton of work with the field.
Between the innovations we brainstormed in that emergency meeting with Bob Lipp and Pete and Judi’s hyperkinetic activity, things at A.L. Williams slowly began to stabilize. It wasn’t as if we started seeing strong new growth or anything like that. But at least that sickening downward plunge slowed and stopped. We were pretty sure we were no longer heading straight for the ocean floor.
Still, we’d taken on a lot of water. I didn’t know if we could bail fast enough or hard enough to stay afloat long.
The new challenges kept on coming. Later that year, Primerica changed the name of our agency. A.L. Williams became Primerica Financial Services. Suddenly, for the first time since the company was founded, our name was gone and our people had a new identity.
For some of our folks, this was actually an exciting thing. We were now part of a Wall Street giant, which added a sense of big-league credibility to our business. For others it was a huge negative, especially for those people who’d been around for a long time and considered themselves A.L. Williams to the core. For these people, losing the name A.L. Williams was almost like losing Art all over again.
The name change also made an enormous amount of fresh work for me. Changing a company name sounds simple enough. You just change the name, right? Of course, it’s a whole lot more complicated. Just on the level of pure logistics, all your materials have to change—your forms, your bank accounts, all your legal documents—everything. For us, though, it was even more complicated because we had a whole licensing process in every state, unique to each state. For months afterward, I was traveling all over the country, making sure that we had our name change done legally and completely in each state.
Meanwhile, back at the home office, the executive team was scrambling to get a handle on field morale and find a new path back to the kind of growth we’d had in the past.
That summer, the summer of 1992, we were going to hold a big convention in Fort Worth, Texas. Everyone knew this was going to be a critical moment. It would be our first convention since Art left and we had gone from being A.L. Williams to being Primerica Financial Services. How well it came off, or didn’t come off, would have a huge impact on field morale.
In most companies, conventions are a nice break from the routine. Honestly, they don’t have a heck of a lot of impact on the normal operation of the business. They can be boring or a lot of fun, depending on the nature and culture of the company. Either way, they are basically an extracurricular thing, like a paid vacation. For a company like ours, conventions are practically the heartbeat of the business. They are a time for people to renew their passion and commitment, their visceral sense of why they’re here doing what they’re doing. It’s something like plugging in your cell phone to recharge its battery. Every now and then you need to plug in the field so they can recharge.
In our business, we have an expression: “Leaders are born at events.” Not only that, momentum is born at events. People come away from the convention saying, “Oh, right, that’s who we are!” There are always a good number of people at an event who get so fired up that they make a powerful renewed commitment to their businesses. For our folks, going to convention isn’t a vacation. It’s a pilgrimage. Like a convention for a major political party, it defines who we are at that point in our history, and its impact can last for months and even years.
When Art was still there, our conventions were virtually a one-man operation. He had people who ran things for him, but Art knew what he wanted to do with an event and he knew how he wanted to do it. He knew how to pace the thing, how to paint an inspiring picture for people, and create huge excitement. Art is a man who knows how to put on an event and make it a memorable, even life-changing experience. But Art was long gone, and neither Pete nor anyone else on the executive team had the faintest idea how any of that convention magic worked. They were used to boring corporate conference-style events. There were a lot of different opinions and viewpoints about what should happen at that convention. I wound up being pulled into one of those meetings with Pete and his top people as they were trying to figure out what to do.
A few months earlier, Sandy had sent an executive named Marge Magner down to Duluth to pull together a small team to work with her on focusing the company’s marketing and message. Because of my little “Hindenburg at Lakehurst” speech I was one of the people selected for that group. Marge later wound up running the global consumer business for Citigroup. These days she’s a major player in the world of private equity. Marge put me in front of Pete to share my views about where we were off track in our message and what we needed to be focusing on. Now I had been brought in to help advise Pete on how to put together this convention.
Just as when I’d been pulled into meetings in the mid-eighties to help collect marketing data for Art, this was way above my pay scale. I oversaw compensation and licensing. Nobody involved in planning events reported to me. I was nowhere near the C-suite level as were the others in the room. But hey, if they wanted to hear what I thought, I’d tell them.
After listening to them talk about their ideas for a while, I said, “I’ve got to tell you, if you do what you’re describing, they’re all going to either go to sleep or stand up and walk out. That just isn’t gonna fly.”
I started outlining a few ideas and ended up helping them organize the event and working closely with Pete on the content and overall message of his talk.
We all approached Fort Worth with a great deal of trepidation. There was still an enormous amount of feeling in the field that we had never recovered from losing Art and perhaps never would. While some were excited about moving forward, there were many who still mourned the “good old days” of A.L. Williams and who had a pretty strong my-arms-are-folded attitude about the new regime. There was a huge undercurrent of allegiance to the past and a sense that the jury was still out on whether this “Primerica thing” was really going to work or not.
Happily, the convention came off well after all. Maybe not the kind of knock-your-socks-off event we’d have had if Art were there, but still a success. The mere fact that it hadn’t bombed served as something of a calming, stabilizing force. People started saying, “Okay, maybe this thing isn’t going to go out of business after all. Maybe we have a chance here.”
After Fort Worth, Pete and the other top executives started relying on me as the behind-the-scenes guy helping design the events and craft the message. Pete took to having me work with him every week on his TV broadcast to the field. Without intending to, I was more or less gaining control of the message apparatus of the company.
Was this part of my job description? Not even slightly. It wasn’t the reason I’d been hired in the first place. It wasn’t what I’d been trained to do, and it wasn’t what my nominal position called me to do. But it needed doing, and I was the one who spoke up and showed up.
Growing up, I had no particular interests or skills that pointed in any clear career direction. In school, I was always a good student, but there was no specific area where I excelled or had a clearly defined skill set. In this way, I was very different from my father.
Dad was, and is, one of those incredibly handy guys who can fix anything. Anytime something needed replacing, repairing, or building from scratch, Dad could do it. He could draw as well as any draftsman or architect. He has a beautiful singing voice and often sang solos in church. He is so talented in so many ways.
I inherited none of that. My skill set, if you want to call it that, is about as opposite from my dad’s as you could get. I am dangerous with a power tool. I couldn’t carry a tune if you put it in a bucket and handed it to me. I’ve never been very creative or versatile or talented, the way my father is. As much as I love him, I did not take after him much. I take more after my mom, with her voluble, sociable, personable style, and who may have been the only person on earth with a worse singing voice than me.
There was one time, though, that the hint of a specific ability briefly poked its head out, like Punxsutawney Phil’s snout on a cloudy Groundhog Day. I didn’t grasp its value or significance till many years later.
In fifth grade one of our teachers, Miss Harper, assigned us each to do an oral book report on the biography of a famous person. Later that year, we all did another report. I chose Rockefeller. For this first report I was assigned the task of reading a book about Napoleon Bonaparte and preparing a 20-minute oral report on his life.
One Thursday a few weeks later, I was sitting in class. My mind wandered wherever it went. Miss Harper was up there talking. Suddenly I heard her say, “… and now Mr. Addison will give us a twenty-minute report about the life of Napoleon. Mr. Addison?”
You ever get that feeling where your gut just sinks down to your feet?
I just don’t think in a linear way. My brain heads off in this direction and then that direction. Sometimes you just can’t tell where it’s headed, and neither can I. As I said, when I speak I never use a script. It just wouldn’t work. Instead, I handwrite all my notes on sheets of paper in big bold letters. Sometimes I end up using those notes. Other times I head down a completely different path. Organization is not an item on my inventory of personal strengths.
So there I was, frozen in my desk, Miss Harper’s words reverberating in my ears. Me being me, I’d thought that book report was due the following Thursday. Not this Thursday. Not today. Had I read the book yet? It’s fair to say I’d started it. Did I have anything prepared? Absolutely nothing.
Oops.
It seemed to me, I had two choices. I could stand up and say, “I’m sorry, Miss Harper, I’m just not ready. I messed up and wrote the due date down wrong.” But Miss Harper was old school about things like getting your work done on time. I knew that option wouldn’t go over well. Which left the only other choice: close my eyes, pray, and jump.
Story of my life.
Okay, I said to myself, let’s do this. I got up from my desk and marched up to the front of the classroom, then turned around and faced the class. Miss Harper was over to my right looking at me expectantly.
I knew how it all started. I knew he was born in Corsica and rose to power during the chaos that followed the French Revolution. I was also pretty sure about how it ended. There was a battle at Waterloo that he lost, and then he got exiled and died. All I had to do was fill in a bunch of stuff in the middle. In my ten years on the planet, there must have been at least a few tidbits of information about Napoleon, or France, or the nineteenth century, or something relevant, that had seeped into my head and stayed there. Right?
So, I talked. I have no idea what I said. After I’d finished, I sat down. A moment of silence hung over the room. Then Miss Harper spoke up. “Mr. Addison,” she said. “In 25 years as a public school teacher, that’s the best oral book report I’ve ever heard.”
As I sat back in my seat a distinct thought went through my mind: Hey, that’s gotta be good for something.
I’d had a lot of fun up there, talking to the whole class like that. I hadn’t been scared. I’d had a blast. I may have been disorganized and nowhere near as prepared as I should have been. I may not have had a clue what I was going to say as I stood up and turned to face the class. But, I connected with that roomful of kids. By the time I sat down again, they all knew who Napoleon Bonaparte was.
As a 10-year-old, I didn’t see how that could possibly be useful. I knew it meant something, but what? Not the faintest idea. So I filed the thought away somewhere in my brain and forgot about it.
At three and a half times that age, I knew exactly what it meant.
In early 1993, the executive team was planning a meeting in Atlanta with our top sales force leaders to introduce some product modifications and a change in the compensation structure. In the balance, these were going to be very positive improvements for the field, but they were not simple changes and would take some explaining. The mood among the field leadership was not great. This wasn’t going to be an easy thing. Once again, I was pulled into a meeting with Pete, Ed Cooperman (whom Sandy had recruited from American Express), and some of the other top executives.
They’d brought in a gentleman to run marketing named Doug Martin. He was now my boss and was working with Pete on how to present the changes. As the discussion went on and on, at one point Pete turned to me and said, “John, how would you do this?”
I stood up and went through it. “Okay, here are the points I would emphasize. Here’s what I would say, and here’s what I wouldn’t say.” After I’d been going on for a few minutes, Pete and Ed looked at each other, then back at me.
“John,” said Pete. “Why don’t you do this?”
Why don’t I do it? Me?
Today, speaking to an auditorium full of people and connecting with folks at a heart level is one of the greatest joys of my life. But at this point, the only speeches I was giving were to our offices that were undergoing changes in their licensing laws. Those little speeches, if you want to call them that, were not even remotely motivational or inspirational talks. They were, “Okay, guys, here’s what’s changed, here’s how you gotta do it, here’s what’s going on.” I’d sprinkle in a few humorous stories here and there, to keep things fun. That’s all. So yes, I’d stood up in front of little groups and done some speaking—but nothing like this.
Still, I had developed a strong relationship with the sales force leaders. They knew I was a guy they could call if they had a problem and that I’d do my best to get it fixed for them. I knew that, at the very least, we’d have some rapport and they wouldn’t laugh me off the podium.
We held the meeting with about 200 of our top income earners, who were also our senior field leaders. These folks were the key opinion shapers in the field, the guys and gals on the front lines of battle. Whenever the rank and file was having a hard time, senior field leaders were the people they came and talked to about it.
Everyone knows the stereotype about the path to success in corporate America. The way you reach the top, so the idea goes, is to claw your way up there by pushing down and climbing over others. I can’t really comment on how true that is in any other business, or whether it’s true at all. What I can say is that in our business, the only way you get to the top is by pulling a whole lot of other people up with you. This meant that the little group of people sitting in that hotel conference room wasn’t just a collection of 200 individuals. It was 200 men and women who were carrying into the room with them the hopes, dreams, challenges, and bitter frustrations of tens of thousands of people.
As we got started, the atmosphere in the room was not the most relaxed. These people’s organizations had been through a lot of heartbreak the past few years, and their expectations for the meeting clearly were not positive.
After a brief welcome and stage-setting from Pete, I was introduced to give the details. I walked up to the podium, turned to face the group, and talked for the next forty-five minutes.
I started by walking through the details of the changes we were making and why. Then I told them how I saw these shifts, what they would mean to the field, and how I believed they would help change things for the better. I talked about how much I loved our company, about what it stood for, and what it meant to me. I just talked from my heart about our company and what we were doing in the world.
The only way you get to the top is by pulling a whole lot of other people up with you.
The presentation got a tremendously positive response from the leadership. For a lot of these guys, all they’d been hearing, day after day, was their people coming to them and telling them how stupid we were at the home office, how we didn’t get it, and what a mess we were making of everything. Some of them told me later that this meeting was the first time they started thinking, “At last there’s someone there who speaks the same language we do!”
After the meeting, we had dinner with the group. During the evening Bob Safford, one of our top field leaders, came over to me and said, “John, I was sitting out there today in that meeting, watching you the whole time. And let me tell you, I believe I was seeing the future CEO of our company.”
I didn’t know about that, but it was clear that my visibility had increased with the corporate leadership. Sandy was there and didn’t miss the fact that our guys had responded to my talk in a way that they hadn’t responded to any other talk since Art had left. It wasn’t brilliant, and it sure wasn’t Art. But it had had a strong impact and a positive one. They saw that I wasn’t just a behind-the-scenes idea guy. I’d had an impact on these people. I could communicate with them in a way that made a difference to the organization.
That meeting proved to be a significant event for Primerica, one that went a long way to help stabilize things and bolster more confidence in our long-term prospects among the field leadership. For me, it was a pivotal moment in my career. Whether it was planned or not (and of course, it wasn’t), something critical had happened.
I’d found my calling.
There’s a passage in the Bible that says, “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.” (Proverbs 22:6.) But exactly what is that “way he should go”?
A lot of parents interpret this passage to mean that you should raise your kids in a strict way, following the path you set for them, being well-behaved, doing all the things you as parents believe they should do. But that’s not really what it means. If you study it in the original Hebrew, what Solomon is saying is not to teach your child to be a good person, or to be obedient, or anything like that. He’s saying, find in that child what his or her unique talents are. Train your children up in the way they should go—not necessarily in the way you think they should go.
Being a real leader doesn’t mean you’re the one who knows how to do it all. It means you’re the one who knows how to get it done.
Loveanne and I have two great boys. Both of them are wonderful kids. They couldn’t be more unlike each other. Our oldest son, Kyle, has always been very mathematically inclined and turned out to be brilliant with computers. He works for the company, managing all kinds of gizmos I can’t even comprehend. He built the computers I use in my office. Tyler, our youngest, has just finished law school and now works at Primerica on state government relations. He’s a words guy, not a numbers guy. They both found their paths, and their paths are totally different.
Every tree is going to try to grow toward the sun, but as they do, some will lean this way, some that way. Each one finds its own unique pattern of growth. Children are the same way. As a parent, your job is to be a student of your children and help them find what they’re naturally good at. To help them find that unique spark within them and fan it into full flame.
As a person, it’s your job to do that for yourself too.
You don’t have to be talented and skilled at everything to be a great leader. In fact, you can’t be talented and skilled at everything. Nobody is. Being a real leader doesn’t mean you’re the one who knows how to do it all. It means you’re the one who knows how to get it done. Two very different things. Being the one who knows how to get it done always means working together with the talents and skills of others.
Real leaders aren’t excellent at everything. But they do have to be excellent in their own personal area of strength, whatever that may be.
If you want to be a successful leader, you need to figure out what you’re good at, and then do it. I know that sounds ridiculously simple, but it’s amazing how many people don’t ever do it. Way too many people spend way too much of their time and energy working to improve on things that they’re frankly just not very good at but wish they were good at. Here’s a formula for success: Find something you’re good at without trying hard—and then try hard.
The truth is that all people are not created equal. In a free society, they should all be equal under the law and should all have the same rights. But people themselves are not all equal. They’re all different. Everyone is born with their own strengths and weaknesses. I could try for a million years and never do what Michael Jordan does in basketball, what Peyton Manning does in football, or what Blake Shelton does in concert. You could send me to Julliard for twenty years to work on that singing voice of mine, and I’d still scare away the wildlife.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t try to get better at those things you’re not good at. I’m not saying you should use “Oh, that’s not my area” as an excuse to be incompetent at basic skills that everyone needs to get around in life. But in an area that truly is not your strength, no matter how hard you work at it, the best you’ll ever be is mediocre. If you focus on the things you have natural ability at and work on those, then you’ve got a chance at being great—or at least, being great at something.
Everybody’s good at something. Everyone has some distinct talent or area of potential excellence. What’s yours? If you don’t know, make it your business to find out. You have to develop a good understanding of yourself, of who you are, what you’re good at, and honestly, what you’re not good at and will never be good at. Most people are incredibly good at lying to themselves. You have to look at yourself with complete honesty.
Maybe you’re a great parent, good with your kids. Maybe you’re good with people. Maybe you don’t see yourself as very brave, but you’re caring and thoughtful. Maybe you’re great at being organized. Maybe you’re funny. Maybe you’re serious. Maybe you can sing. Make a list of every ability and positive attribute of character you can think of.
What motivates you? Are you a good communicator? Are you a good listener? Good with numbers? Good with animals? Good with your hands?
Forget about the “not very good ats” and focus exclusively on the “good ats.” Every one of us has things we were put here on this earth to do. If you don’t already know what that is for you, then find out, and focus on that.
When I gave that little talk to that group of 200 leaders in Atlanta, I was 35 years old. It had taken me that long to figure this out for myself.
Over the years leading up to that moment, I’d put an awful lot of energy into trying to be better at stuff I would never be good at.
Back when I was first in college, I got books on how to be organized. I went to a Franklin Covey Planner seminar to learn how to master time management and get all my tasks and priorities lined up and in order. Set ’em up, check this one off, move that one forward. Brilliant idea. All I ended up with was a planner full of yellow sticky notes that I never used. Linear organization simply is not one of my strengths.
Right now, I’m sitting at my table with folders all spread out in front of me, filled with half-written-in notebooks. Pages with notes for my talks, in no particular order, and when I say “notes” I don’t mean a sequential outline, I mean a constellation of single words, topics, and phrases that to anyone else would look like a jumble of chaos. This is how it always is when I’m working on a speech. I’ll start writing words and pretty soon I have pieces of paper spread out all around me. It’s not actually a mess. It all makes sense. Just not a linear, classic-logic kind of sense.
I’ve spoken at events where I see the other speakers reading their script from a teleprompter. I have no concept of how that can possibly work for them. I can’t do this with a computer. And I sure don’t want a printed-out script. I just need a stand for my handwritten sheaf of papers and thoughts, and I’ll go from there.
I am the textbook definition of disorganized. I work in spurts. I have projects I fuss at for a while, and then I move on to something else. Maybe I’ll come back to it later, and maybe I won’t. (And I was planning a career as a “management consultant” and “efficiency expert”?)
Going through college, I knew I loved history, economics, and philosophy. I went on to get my business degree. But even then, I honestly had no clue what I was going to do. How could I? I still hadn’t sat down and figured out where my strengths lay.
One thing I did not do in college was join the extemporaneous speaking society or the debate club. I didn’t have the slightest thought about going into public speaking.
Yet it’s something that just comes to me naturally. I grew up in a little country town with gregarious, outgoing parents, in a community full of people like my uncle, A.W. Dalton. He was a classic Southern raconteur. A.W. and Aunt Lois lived just down the road from us and were part of the family. His storytelling wit and fun-loving style became an integral part of who I am. My strongest childhood memories are of going to Roy and Helen Moore’s general store and listening to the old men sit around in chairs telling stories, with all their homey adages and folksy expressions and colorful colloquialisms, holding forth on any topic, for any length of time, to anyone who’d listen. There were always a bunch of anyones listening. Relating to people, getting up on a stage and story-telling, connecting with people? It’s in my pores. I just never thought about it.
Never, that is, until the day in 1993 when I stood up in that Atlanta hotel conference room and talked to those leaders about how much I loved this company, and why, and where I saw us all going as we created our future together.
Yes, I had learned how to calculate the time value of money. I had that TI business analyst calculator and actually knew how to use it. I had my graduate degree and could read a business plan and pore over a spreadsheet if I had to. But those things were not my area of strength.
This was.
What I was good at was standing up in front of a bunch of people and getting a message across to them so that they got it in their bones and not just in their heads. I was good at knowing how they felt and what they needed to hear. I was good at speaking to them, not talking at them.
As I said earlier, luck happens. Or maybe it’s really nine parts luck and one part fate. Or the other way around. However it works, events unfold themselves in your life. And it just so happened that I answered a newspaper ad for a “business analyst” and took a job with a company that turned out to be a leadership incubation system where public speaking was a central and revered part of the business. I had the opportunity to spend years working around Art Williams, as well as a bunch of our great leaders in the field, most of whom were tremendous public speakers themselves. I’d been able to study them, to figure out what they were doing and how they did it.
By the time I was standing up in that Atlanta conference room to talk, I didn’t fully realize it, but I was ready.
I don’t want to give the wrong picture here. It wasn’t as if I was a polished, completely accomplished speaker right out of the chute. Like any skill, it was something I would have to work at for years to get better at it. That was okay. What mattered was that I was good enough at it to be able to bridge a delicate gap and help us make it through an incredibly difficult juncture we were at as a company.
It’s a good thing it worked out that way because we were not out of the woods yet. Not by a long shot.
Build on Your Strengths
Every one of us is born with our own unique talents and areas of potential excellence. The best you’ll ever be at a weakness is mediocre. Why waste your precious time trying to do what others are already far better at? Instead, search out those areas where you have a natural proclivity, and then build on those.
Find something you’re good at without trying hard—and then try hard.
As a parent, your job is to be a student of your children and help them find that unique spark within them and fan it into full flame. As a person, it’s your job to do that for yourself.
Don’t let your job description define who you are and what you do. Sometimes you have to be the one who speaks up and shows up.
Being a real leader doesn’t mean you’re the one who knows how to do it all. It means you’re the one who knows how to get it done, which always means working together with the talents and skills of others.
ACTION STEP
Give yourself a natural-strengths inventory. Write out a list of everything you can think of that you are naturally inclined to be good at. Ask yourself, “Okay, what are my strengths, and what are my weaknesses? What am I naturally inclined to be good at?” Forget the “not very good ats” and focus exclusively on the “good ats.”