Earn Your Position
He does not set out to be a leader, but becomes one by the equality of his actions and the integrity of his intent.
—DOUGLAS MACARTHUR
There aren’t many people about whom you can say that the fate of civilization genuinely rested on their shoulders. Winston Churchill was one of those rare individuals. Churchill is remembered as one of the twentieth century’s greatest leaders. That isn’t because everything was awesome and rosy and prosperous in the U.K. when he was prime minister. It was one of the ugliest times in that nation’s history. At his moment of greatest leadership, 6,000 people a night were dying in the bombings of London. The June 1940 “We shall fight them on the beaches, we shall fight them in the hedgerows, we shall never surrender” speech and all the rest of his great radio speeches, when he used his mighty oratory to bring a terrified nation to its feet to fight the Nazis, were conducted out of a tiny bunker, barely six feet by six feet.
Within the Cabinet War Rooms there’s a little room called the Radio Room. I’ve been inside that room. It’s the most claustrophobic thing you can imagine, more of a cubby than a real room. And Churchill was a large man. I love picturing him in that tiny, cramped place and terrible underground environment, with bombs going off above him, inspiring a nation to rise up against tyranny.
The space didn’t exist for greatness. He created the space for greatness.
The greatest opportunities for leadership typically arise in times and places where it’s needed most. It is often those times when things are troubled or chaotic when you can move light years ahead—if you’re the right person, if you’re prepared, and if you’re the one whom others trust and respect.
Nobody appointed Gandhi to embark on an effort to free India. Nobody gave George Washington a salary, a penthouse, and a pension during the tumultuous years leading up to the American Revolution and independence and said, “Okay, it’s your job to be the one person everyone in this impossible situation looks to for leadership.” People didn’t trust Washington because he was president. He became president because people trusted him.
This is not just the story with great leaders like Gandhi and Washington. This is also how many of the most destructive leaders in history came to power: A vacuum existed, and nobody else stepped forward to fill it. Nature abhors a vacuum. If you don’t fill it, someone else will, and they may not have the organization’s long-range interests at heart as much as you do.
Real leadership is something that happens long before anyone appoints you or recognizes you as the leader. It starts by developing the ability to influence other people toward a goal, even when you’re not their boss. It comes into being as others start saying, “You know this person is the one for the job.” Having a title doesn’t make you a leader. It may mean you have certain responsibilities, a specific job, or a certain salary scale, but the one thing it doesn’t mean is that you’re necessarily a leader. A title is only a title. Leadership is something you earn.
There will come times in your career when you can’t just do what your job description says you’re supposed to be doing. Sometimes, especially during times of hardship and confusion, you have to stand up and do whatever it takes to have a positive influence on the situation.
Real leadership is something that happens long before anyone appoints you or recognizes you as the leader.
You can’t always stand on the beach waiting for your ship to come in. Sometimes you have to swim out there and meet it.
Throughout the decade of the nineties, I did an awful lot of swimming. I just hoped we weren’t going to sink.
By the mid-nineties, the initial terrifying collapse that happened when Art first left had slowed and stopped. Things had more or less stabilized. At the same time, Primerica was still highly vulnerable. We hadn’t yet recovered from the trauma of all that drastic change, and for a lot of our people, it was hard to let go and move into the future.
When Art sold the company, there was a prevailing sense in both the home office and the field that our new corporate team represented almost a repudiation of the past. It was as if they were saying, “Okay, that was then, all that worked for you guys in the eighties—but you have to forget about all that because now we’re going to show you how to really do this business.” And of course, that doesn’t work. You can’t just toss out more than a decade of history and experience. These folks had deep roots in the past, and discarding or discounting the way things used to be felt personally like it was a repudiation of them and not just of their company.
During those early years of the new ownership, some of the people who’d been around a long time spent a lot of time and energy complaining about what the new people were doing. To be fair, there was a bunch to complain about. Their criticism and complaints were not necessarily wrong or without foundation. However, the simple reality was that things were never going to go back to the way they’d been.
There were people who, if they had their druthers, would roll the clock back, who couldn’t seem to get out of the rut of regret and reminiscence. “Hey,” they’d say, “remember that great meeting we had in 1984 …?” A running joke at Primerica during those years was: How many people does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: Two—one to change the bulb and the other to stand there and say, “That’s not how Art did it.”
I don’t believe in sitting around moaning about how everything used to be better in the good old days. Mostly when people do that, they’re kidding themselves. Nostalgia’s a fine thing. But let’s face it, there’s a lot about life in the “good old days,” whichever good old days we might be talking about at any given moment, that wasn’t all that good, and a lot that has since changed for the better. To my mind, that’s the purpose of business: making the world a better place. We’ve been doing it for centuries, and sure enough, the world is a better place in so many ways.
When things are changing rapidly and feeling like they’re veering out of control, you’ve got one of two choices. You can leave and go find something else to do. Or, if you believe in what you’re doing, if you believe in the cause of the business, you can stay and find a way to help put things onto the right course. But you can’t straddle the fence. You can’t stay on but at the same time stay stuck in the rut of how things used to be.
It was a delicate equation. You couldn’t say the company’s first 13 years didn’t matter. They mattered a lot. At the same time, it wouldn’t work for us to live in the past either. We needed to build on that legacy, not stay mired in it. We needed to respect the past, operate squarely in the present, and focus wholeheartedly on the future. We had to move forward. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t make it to the new century.
Nostalgia and discontent among some members of the home office and sales force weren’t the only problems facing us. We still had a major disconnect between the company itself and the people who were now at the top running it.
For a company with a huge, diverse, volunteer sales force spread out over 50 states, the relationship between the field and corporate team was already challenge enough. This relationship is not like the typical one between employees and management, or workers and bosses, or enlisted troops and officers. It isn’t just a difference of position, authority, or role in the company. I don’t know of anything else you can really compare it to. These people are independent representatives. In a field of thousands or even tens of thousands of people, each individual is running his or her own business. To someone used to a conventional command-and-control sort of corporate structure, working with a huge field of volunteer salespeople can feel like herding cats. Even in the healthiest of environments, it takes a lot of care and attention to make sure the two elements are hearing each other and that you’re not letting friction get a foothold.
For us in the early nineties, it was that times a hundred. We had a field that had grown up organically with Art’s football coach style and an executive culture straight out of the skyscrapers of Manhattan.
What’s more, the messages coming down from that management kept shifting and changing on us. Sandy ran his businesses something like the way George Steinbrenner ran the Yankees. He’d throw a chief executive at it. If that guy didn’t get the job done to Sandy’s satisfaction, then by mid-season he’d pull that manager and put in another one. Throughout the nineties, while those of us in Duluth worked to keep things running smoothly, there was a fairly steady turnover at the top as Sandy replaced CEO after CEO. After Don Cooper we had Pete Dawkins, who helped us make it through that super-critical time in 1992 and 1993. But stepping into that position, at that time in our history, was like walking into a buzz saw. After Pete was there for a while, Sandy brought in Ed Cooperman, and so it went.
And it wasn’t only a matter of turnover in the office of CEO. There were also constant changes in the composition of the executive team in general. Any time someone new stepped in, they naturally would want to have their own vision for the operation.
All of which meant that:
We were being run from the top by people who, despite their good intentions, really didn’t understand what made our operation tick.
That group, their policies, agendas, and tactical goals, were in a state of constant flux.
Underlying all of that, there was still a very strong current within the field of people missing Art and the “good old days,” mourning the way things used to be.
The combination of losing Art together with total culture clash created a queasy environment of uncertainty that prevailed more or less right through the nineties.
The “freedom of choice” doctrine that brought Horace Johnson to join my class in Ficquett Elementary School in 1966 lasted another three years. In October 1969, the United States Supreme Court ordered the immediate desegregation of public schools. This put an end to the “all deliberate speed” doctrine that had been in place since Brown v. Board of Education and that had amounted to little more than ten years of foot-dragging and evasion. Now the schools had no choice. No more white schools and African-American schools and all that hogwash about “separate but equal.” Now the schools had to get serious about integrating.
In Newton County they rearranged things so that the junior high classes, which consisted of grades eight and nine, would all be going to R.L. Cousins, which had been the region’s African American high school. Newton County High School, which was the nearly all-white school, would now become the high school for everyone.
Not everyone was happy about this. Some of the wealthier white families got together and founded their own all-white private school. Similar schools sprang up in county after county. Clear across the South today you’ll still find a swath of private schools that all say in their brochures, “Founded 1970.” That’s not a coincidence.
Sure enough, that year, the year I entered eighth grade, a lot of the white kids’ parents pulled them from the Covington public school system and enrolled them in private school. My parents certainly had the means to pay the tuition. They weren’t wealthy by any stretch of imagination, but my dad made good money at the mill and we were very much a middle class family. And a bunch of my friends were going there.
Not me.
Shortly before that school year began, my mom sat me down and said, “Look, son, I know you have friends going over there to that new school, and I know you want to be with them. But it’s important to understand, the world is changing. You can’t run and hide from a changing world. You’ve got to be part of it.”
She was so right. With the benefit of hindsight, I’m so grateful that they kept me in the public high school. It was an adjustment, suddenly being with so many kids who were different from me. Having Horace as a friend was one thing, but that year our entire school population was suddenly about 50 percent African American. If you’ve ever seen the film Remember the Titans, you may have some sense of what it was like. The film is set at that same point in time and conveys exactly the same feeling and tensions as we saw going on at our school. In fact a lot of that film was shot in Covington, too. The final football scene takes place downtown at Homer Sharp Stadium, located right off the Covington town square.
I was now 13 and had a more conscious understanding of what was happening around me than I had when I was five and watched my mom insist on standing behind the woman in line at the grocery store, or even when I was nine and Horace joined our class at Ficquett. I quickly found that it was easy for me to get along with the new kids who were unlike me in so many ways and had come from a different world than mine.
You can’t run and hide from a changing world. You’ve got to be part of it.
I also soon realized that making this shift wasn’t nearly so easy for many of my classmates. That was the year I began to understand that there are a lot of people in the world who are only comfortable when they’re around others who are similar to them, who think like them and like the same things they like. When they’re thrown in with those who are unlike them, it makes them uneasy.
In later years, I would also come to understand that being intolerant and judgmental is an enormous handicap in life. Not everyone is motivated by the same things you are or wants the same things you want. That doesn’t make them wrong and you right. It just makes them different. If you’re going to be successful, in business as in life, you have to be able to get along with people who are different from you, sometimes very different from you.
Probably the biggest thing I’d absorbed from my mom was how to put myself in another person’s shoes, get a good sense of how they were experiencing the situation, and understand that it may not be at all the same way I was experiencing it. I learned the habit of trying to understand and appreciate the other person’s perspective, even if I completely disagreed with it.
You can disagree without being disagreeable. When you do have disagreements, make sure it’s over issues that matter, and not based on the ways you simply happen to have different preferences or a different viewpoint from the other person. As you work with different people, you’ll find plenty of excellent times to keep your opinions to yourself. What my mother showed me was how to find the things we have in common, and move on past the places where we differ. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, they just don’t matter.
Out of all the challenges of that transitional time at Primerica in the nineties, the biggest was the company was dominated by two radically differing viewpoints. It wasn’t about which one was right. From each of their perspectives, they were both right. It was about each embracing the other and all of us moving forward together. And clearly, that was not going to be easy.
During these difficult years, I started forming a close relationship with another guy who’d been there since the A.L. Williams days.
Back in 1982, when Gerald Tsai, the CEO of American Can, first bought PennCorp, he hired two bright young analysts to conduct his due diligence and help him be sure of what he was buying. One was Jay Fishman, who today is CEO of Travelers and one of the most respected financial individuals on Wall Street. The other was a young Wharton grad, a financial whiz kid named Rick Williams. When Sandy Weill came along and bought the company in 1988, Sandy and Jamie Dimon were so impressed with Rick that they were determined to keep him on board and find something big for him to do. When Sandy bought Art’s agency in 1989, a strong chief financial officer in place was needed, so Rick relocated to Atlanta to serve as our CFO.
At that point, I was much further down in the origination’s hierarchy than Rick was. I was one vice president among dozens, somewhere between mid-level management and upper-level management. Rick was much more senior than me. We interacted only occasionally, but I could see that he was financially brilliant. Far more importantly, he was also a solid guy with his head on straight.
One of our first real conversations happened in early 1991, at the point where sales had fallen off so steeply that we weren’t sending any checks to the field and I was genuinely concerned about the company’s survival. I went over to Rick’s office one day, sat down, and said, “Hey Rick, I have to tell you, things are not good. We’re not paying anyone anything. This thing is taking on water bad.”
Rick was present at that “Hindenburg at Lakehurst” meeting a few days later, along with my boss, Rick Mathis, and Mike Adams, our resident IT wizard. He was also part of that emergency meeting with Bob Lipp a week after that, where we came up with some immediate tactics to help stop the freefall. Out of those experiences, Rick and I started having regular conversations. The conversations weren’t formal meetings—not set or formal, not on the calendar or anything like that. Rick would just wander over into my office, or I’d amble over to his, and we’d talk about things.
One thing that was clear right from the start was how different we were.
Rick has an almost superhuman ability to process and organize information. He is without a doubt the most organized person I’ve ever met. And while he’s too polite to say so, I have no doubt that I am the most disorganized person he’s ever met. When it comes to the numbers side of things, hey, I got a degree in economics. I have an MBA. I understand how income statements and balance sheets and all that stuff works when I have to. But the reality is that I would be terrible at his job or mediocre at best.
And Rick? I’ve seen him speak at our events many times and he always does a great job of it, but it’s not something that comes to him naturally. He’ll spend hours to prepare a 15-minute talk. With me, just wake me up in the morning and stick me up on the stage, and I’m good to go. I’m more comfortable in front of a few thousand people than I am around a conference table.
Rick is brilliant. I don’t mean kind of brilliant. I mean brilliant. I don’t care who’s at the meeting. Rick is always the smartest person in the room. He is tremendously analytical and will listen patiently to every detail of every scenario. I’m more of a ready-fire-aim type of person. Sometimes he has to force me to sit down and listen.
In fact, in just about every way you could think of, we were different, which turned out to be one of our greatest strengths.
It’s easy to surround yourself with people who all like the same things you like, listen to the same music, have the same political views, and share the same general skills as you. Ball players like to hang out with ball players. French horn players go out for coffee with other French horn players. Birds of a feather. … That’s fine, but it will only take you so far.
It is critically important to surround yourself with people who are good at all those things that you’re not good at. You need people on your team who complement your skill set, people who have a passion and a talent for those areas that leave you scratching your head. If you build on your own strengths and you have people in your life who are good people, people you like being around who have strengths that are the opposite of yours, then you’ve got a good chance of doing something far greater than you could ever have done on your own.
That’s what started to happen with Rick and me. We couldn’t be more opposite in how we approach a problem. Our personal styles, tastes, and professional skill sets are practically opposites of each other. Yet we not only complement each other, we also genuinely like each other and enjoy hanging around each other.
It is critically important to surround yourself with people who are good at all those things that you’re not good at.
Even with all those differences, it wasn’t what was different about us that drew the two of us together. It was what we had in common. We were unlike in so many ways, but underneath all those superficialities of personality and style, we were very much the same in the ways that count most. Our shared vision for our company, which came out of our shared values, drew Rick and me together
No, he wasn’t from Georgia. Yes, he was a northerner who grew up in New Jersey and went to Wharton, one of the most prestigious business schools on the planet. So you might assume he’d have come across as an outsider at the Duluth office. That short bio isn’t the sum of who he is. Rick was raised on a dairy farm (There’s more to New Jersey than Atlantic City!) and knew what it meant to work hard. He clearly was not some snooty prep school guy who believed his own press and thought he was hot stuff. He was sincere, honest to a fault, and one of the straightest shooters I’d ever met.
The thing I appreciated most about Rick was that he had figured the company out. He got who we were and what we were doing, both for families and for our sales force, and had quickly become a true believer in what we were all about. That, even more than anything about our particular personalities, was what drew us together.
There was also another force that drew us together during those years, a force larger than either one of us. As I said, nature abhors a vacuum, and so does leadership. It is especially during times of chaos and adversity when you may be called on to stand up and do whatever it takes to positively influence the situation. That was exactly the kind of vacuum Rick and I were drawn into together during the nineties.
It’s no accident this chapter started out with a few paragraphs about Winston Churchill. I’d always loved studying history, especially the lives of great men and women. I’d enjoyed reading about Churchill in college. During the late nineties and early 2000s, I really began delving into the details of his life and career. Primerica was exploring the idea of expanding into Europe during those years, and I was over in the U.K. a good deal. During those trips, I made it my business to visit and become familiar with all the major Churchill landmarks. Taking these trips helped give me a more vivid sense of his life and accomplishments.
There are many things I admire about the man, including the fact that he had so many personal hardships and strikes against him that he had to overcome to reach the position he did. The greatest thing about Churchill is that he served in a time of absolutely unbelievable difficulty and was able to face those trials and grow even greater within them.
Great leaders aren’t remembered for what they do when everything’s going along fine. Great leaders are remembered for what they do when things are tough, which is the same reason I also admire Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and their compatriots. The people who founded our country, our free enterprise system, and our Constitution bet it all. Most of them were wealthy men, landed gentry. They were doing well in America. It would have been very easy for them to just go with the status quo. But they risked everything, up to and including their necks, to found this country. It’s those people, the ones who take a stand even when it’s not convenient, who inspire me.
Real leaders don’t accept adversity. They don’t manage adversity. They embrace adversity. Challenging times are what they thrive on. In fact, the only way to genuinely survive adversity is to embrace it. Those who try to manage, side-step, or just wait out the bad times, typically don’t make it.
Great leaders aren’t remembered for what they do when everything’s going along fine.
During those first few years after Art left and the company went through such rocky times, Rick and I forged a sort of foxhole relationship. Before long that friendship had become a close bond. We not only liked each other, we also respected and trusted each other. Each of us viewed ourselves as protectors of the franchise, of what lay at the heart of the business and made it work. It was a good thing that we did because it needed protecting.
For example, the credit life insurance battle.
As part of our mission to help families gain control of their financial health, over the years we had broadened our product line to include a wider range of financial instruments. At the time our SmartLoan program, which Marge Magner had launched at the start of the decade, was growing strongly. SmartLoans gave you a way to use your home mortgage, wrap in your other debt, get a lower payment on the whole thing, and pay off your credit cards. It was a fantastic program, very helpful to the customer, very successful for the field.
Soon the word came down that New York was interested in seeing us add a credit life package.
The way finance companies work is if you take out a loan with them they also often sell you a specialized life insurance policy, called credit life insurance.
Such a policy is designed to pay off the loan in the event of your death. It’s incredibly expensive and has a huge profit margin built into it.
It certainly wasn’t hard to see why they wanted us to do this. “Hey, we’ve got this sales force and all these clients. We can sell all these other products to our clients too and greatly increase our profit per client.” Credit life was a natural thing to want to add into the mix. It made perfect sense.
But not from the field’s point of view. As far as our guys were concerned, they already sold life insurance. That was our core product line. They didn’t need this credit life thing. They wouldn’t like it, and they wouldn’t want it. In fact, if we had added credit life onto the loans we were doing, our sales force would have gone ballistic. But because of the huge profit in it, there was constant push from New York for us to do it anyway.
This would have been a tough battle to fight on my own. But when it was Rick and me together, the head of marketing and the CFO saying the same thing, it lent our position a little more gravitas and commanded some attention.
We soon figured out that even with all the change happening around us, if the two of us were united on something, either both for or both against it, it was pretty hard for the executive leadership to go against us. What also helped was that Rick and I had both established a good amount of trust among Sandy and his top people. I don’t know if they always liked what we said, but they knew we were honest and that we always had the business’s best interests at heart.
The credit life insurance business was just one example of the things Rick and I were constantly battling to keep the ship from heading off in the wrong direction. We became ongoing strategic allies, helping to provide the company with some kind of constancy and course stability in the midst of all the storms.
There’s a nautical term that works here. During a storm, if your ship is being blown off course and in the direction of something hazardous, you can drop anchors on the windward side of the ship, the side facing the wind, to stop the thing from running aground or getting wrecked.
Throughout the nineties, Rick and I served as anchors to windward.
When I started junior high school, my mom decided it was time for her to rejoin the working world. She took a position as a teacher’s assistant at the local elementary school, which she did right up until I got married and started having kids.
She may have been only a teacher’s assistant, but my mom often advised the school principal, Sam McGee. In a way, she quietly ran the place. At my mom’s funeral in 2004, Sam told us all a story about one cold winter day. We don’t get much snow in Covington, but on this day there was an especially big snowstorm. Sam lived in DeKalb County, way up toward Atlanta. It was close to an hour’s drive from our little rural school on a good day, so it took him a good while to make his way in that morning. When he got there he found the school closed up tight as a tourniquet, with just a few staff people, including my mom, tying up a few housekeeping odds and ends.
Turned out, my mom had decided the roads were so bad that the school shouldn’t even open, so she got the word out that school was shutting down for the day.
“Ruth, what in blazes are you doing?” Sam asked her.
“Well,” she said. “These kids can’t be out on those roads today, Sam. It’s just too dangerous.” And that was that.
Even though she never held any sort of position of authority, Mom was very influential in our little community. She wasn’t wealthy, or politically connected, or in a place to wield any power. Title and position never seemed to be the point. Miss Ruth was who she was. People deferred to her because they trusted her. She had a great sense of humor and a strong moral compass. People found her incredibly easy to talk to. People would call her with their problems, sometimes telling her things they wouldn’t tell anyone else. She would never judge them, just listen quietly and then give them advice. It was always good advice. I never once heard her say the word hate. She could talk to anyone and often did. I don’t think I ever met a soul who didn’t like her.
People will often wait to get into a leadership position before they lead. But you don’t always have that luxury. Sometimes, especially if you’re part of an organization that is struggling, you have to create your position. I found that happening at Primerica throughout the nineties. I was shaping the message at conventions for years before I was actually placed in charge of conventions. I developed my influence on marketing long before I was placed over marketing.
Leadership, at its heart, is more about influence than it is about position. Leadership is about learning how to be a force for the positive. If you want to be a leader, you have to be that leader before you have the title.
I know that all doesn’t sound that hard. Not when it’s just a bunch of words on a page. In the confusing, high-stress, moment-to-moment experience of reality in the trenches it can be excruciatingly difficult because sticking your neck out always comes with risk. The bigger the chaos and challenge of the times, the bigger the risk.
If you want to be a leader, you have to be that leader before you have the title.
During those years Sandy and his team could easily have run out of patience with me and said, “Who is this loud-mouthed Southern guy with his noisy opinions? Get rid of him! Toss this guy out on the sidewalk!” And I mean, very easily. Sandy is not a shy man. You look at anyone who has achieved the kind of phenomenal successes he has, and you’re not looking at a timid person. This is not a guy who is afraid to show the door to someone he thinks is getting in the way. Plenty of others in Duluth had been let go during the transition.
At the time, I don’t think I fully appreciated just how far out on a limb I may have gone in some of those battles. I always tried to take an approach where I wasn’t rude. I would be very strong in my opinions, but also do my best to act and speak in ways that would show people I still respected them. I was also careful to frame things in a way that wasn’t threatening but would make it easy for others to say, “You know, he may be right.” Still, I took some awfully risky positions.
It paid off. During those years I went through a series of promotions that reflected my increasing stature in the eyes of the executive team. From vice president of agency administration, I went to senior vice president, then executive vice president.
One day near the end of 1993, months after that that critical leadership meeting where I gave my first real motivational talk, we were in a meeting going over our budget for 1994, when my boss, the group vice president, was called up to the executive suite.
“John,” he said, “Take over the meeting for me, would you? I’ll be right back.”
He wasn’t right back. In fact, he never came back.
About 40 minutes later, I got called up to the executive suite too. There I was informed that I was now interim head of marketing. Within a month they dropped the “interim” part and made me group vice president.
While those earlier promotions were more or less incremental, this one was dramatic. All at once, I was in charge of events and conventions and running most of the company’s marketing. I was regularly being brought up to New York to take meetings with our CEO and the executive leadership of our parent company.
For the first time, I now officially had the same level of stature in the company as Rick did. That was when our friendship really began to flourish as a partnership.
Sometimes negatives can turn out to be huge positives, depending on how you respond to them. When you’re in a fairly comfortable environment, you’re more likely to do just what you need to do to get by but never really grow to the extent that you’re capable of. It’s those times of the most chaos and the biggest challenges when you really have the ability to shine—if you see the moment, seize the moment, and are willing to make things happen.
It’s not the circumstance; it’s what you do about it. Sometimes what looks like bad luck is really just the adversity that allows you to flourish. Sometimes a situation that looks like the worst thing that could happen to your career can wind up being exactly the blessing your career needs.
How I responded when things were in terrible shape in many ways determined how I wound up where I did. During my first eight years at A.L. Williams, Art didn’t really need me to take any kind of leadership role. If the company hadn’t gone through the hard times it did after he left, I’d probably never have been anything more than a well-paid, mid-level executive taking care of his little corner of things. As it turned out, every new crisis worked out to push me higher.
When Art left the company in 1990, I was managing a department, a mid-to-upper-level manager among dozens of others. Over the next few years, I was moved up rapidly through the ranks to have a key executive position in the company.
And in 1995, I was promoted to president.
President. It sounds like a big deal, and in many ways it is a big deal. Everyone knows the story of Harry Truman and the sign on his desk, “The Buck Stops Here.” That’s a pretty good description of what my role became at this point. Everything that had to do with marketing, sales, our product offerings, our compensation and incentives, rewards and trips and events, conventions … all of it ultimately landed on my desk. If it had to do with the flow and management of finances and the company’s financial statements, all roads led to Rick. If it had to do with anything else, those roads led to me.
Except that in some very crucial ways president is not quite as big a deal as it sounds. Being president of a company is not the same thing, for example, as being president of the United States. The president of our country is the nation’s chief executive, the number one top decision-maker. This was not quite the case for me. Yes, I was president, and yes, I had a lot of decisions to make. But we also had a CEO.
Joe Plumeri, who had run Smith Barney for Sandy, was the CEO who promoted me to the position of president. Joe was one of the most memorable people I’ve ever encountered in my career. A true force of nature as CEO, Joe was a great speaker and was very hands-on in his executive role. He had very distinct and strong views on how he wanted things done. Having Joe there was like having Frank Sinatra as our CEO. Joe didn’t simply have the title; like Sinatra, he just was the Chairman of the Board. He commanded authority simply by walking into the room.
Joe had run Shearson Lehmann’s and Smith Barney’s sales forces for years, and he knew the sales and brokerage industry inside and out. During his tenure at Primerica, Joe engineered a series of innovations aimed at professionalizing the operation. For example, he implemented our Financial Needs Analysis, a fantastic tool for assessing a family’s unique financial situation that the sales force uses to educate potential clients and help them choose the products that serve them best. We’d had this tool for years, but under Joe we updated, modified and improved it, and made it center stage of our whole approach. Joe also brought in a lot of cross-selling of new products, including variable annuities and property and casualty insurance, which proved to be very successful products for us.
He also put in place a lot of compliance systems, which were crucial to bringing Primerica up to snuff in potential investors’ eyes. When you have a company with this many salespeople, especially part-time salespeople, in the business of selling something as tightly regulated as financial services, one of the first questions investors will ask is, “How do you control this thing? How many things could go wrong with this many people selling financial services?” The compliance systems and other systemic improvements Joe put in place would prove invaluable for the long-term health and viability of the company.
On the other hand, they were not always easy for the field to absorb. Joe is not a hidden-agenda type of guy. You never had to say, “Gee, I wonder what Joe’s thinking.” He used to say, “If I’m coming at you, you’ll see the trees moving.” Sandy’s decision to send Joe to Primerica was triggered, in part, by a negative article on the company that had recently come out in the New York Times and gotten a lot of visibility. The article had most of its facts wrong and was horribly unfair, but there had been a run of compliance issues in a few states. Sandy wanted Joe to come down and tighten things up, which he did. Whether his ideas and tactics did or did not ruffle the sensibilities of the sales force was not his top-of-mind concern.
That was my department. Joe had to make some tough decisions and knew that it might take breaking a few eggs to make this omelet. He counted on me to smooth the path and keep things stable whenever we hit any rough spots. During the years from 1995 to 1999, my title was president. For much of time, what I really did was serve as a human shock absorber. Glamorous? Not exactly. Possibly not what you’d think of when you hear the title president, but it was crucial to the health of the company. In the early nineties, I’d developed an ability to navigate between the sales force and the guys in New York. Now that became one of my chief functions.
Those years with Joe were crucial to my career, more so than I realized at the time. Joe helped me develop many of the skills and toughness I would need to see us through the difficult times coming a decade later. In time, I would have to become the rock against which other things broke. I would have to become a force of nature.
Mainly what the title of president meant was that I was working harder than ever.
When you’re a leader, people need to see that no one is going to work harder than you, no one is more committed than you, and no one is taking more responsibility than you.
Too often people think that getting into a position of leadership means that everybody else needs to feed them grapes and fan them while the work is getting done by all the little worker bees. That’s how a boss thinks—not how a leader thinks. There’s a significant difference.
When you’re a leader, people need to see that no one is going to work harder than you, no one is more committed than you, and no one is taking more responsibility than you. Real leaders aren’t the ones who tell others what to do. Again, that’s a boss. Leaders are the ones who inspire everyone else by their dedication, commitment, vision, and work ethic. Just because you have a title doesn’t mean you don’t have to keep earning it.
When you’re in a leadership position, it’s easy to start thinking you’re a pretty big deal and that this thing is all about you. I hate to break it to you—but you’re not, and it isn’t.
I’ll tell you who was a seriously significant person: Benjamin Franklin. The man discovered how to harness electricity, coauthored the Declaration of Independence, helped frame the Constitution, and for years brokered and maintained our fragile relationship with the European powers. Hard to say if this country would exist without him. All in all, a pretty important guy, right? And you know what? I’ve seen his grave.
The cemeteries of the world are full of irreplaceable people. Everyone is temporary. Nobody is that of a big a deal.
Quite often people who get into positions of leadership start thinking they’re the center of the universe. Maybe the most important thing to understand, when you’re a leader, is that it’s not about you. It’s about the enterprise. It’s about helping the cause you’re involved in go further.
At one point, a group of us were taking an overnight flight from New York to Nice on a company trip. On the flight with us was one of our top guys in our sales force, Bob Turley. Not only had Bob been one of the top-earning guys in our company since the early A.L. Williams days, but he was also a Cy Young recipient and World Series winner for the Yankees. Next time you’re talking with a card-carrying Yankees fan just say the name Bob Turley and see what kind of reaction you get. Bob was the 1958 recipient of the Hickok Belt, joining the ranks of Rocky Marciano, Willie Mays, and Mickey Mantle. Bob is still the only athlete in history to win all three of these awards in the same year. If there was ever an athlete with a claim to celebrity status, it was Bob.
As it happened, Ringo Starr was also on this flight. Yankees fan or not, I’ll bet anything you’ve heard of him.
We finally arrive in Nice, blurry from jet lag and less than perfect sleep. I’m at the baggage carousel with my team. Off to my left, there’s Turley, hopping alongside the moving carousel, trying to schlep his bags off the thing, and off to my right there’s Ringo struggling with his bag, trying to drag it off. Everybody’s half asleep. I’m looking back and forth between the two of them, and I say to myself, “You know, nobody’s that big a deal.”
If someone tells you that you’re a big deal, then that someone is either your momma (in which case she’s right) or that someone is not telling you the whole truth. We’ve all got to pull our bags off the belt.
But here’s who is a big deal: the team.
Bob Turley was a big deal because he was part of a team called the Yankees and A.L. Williams and Primerica. Ringo Starr was a big deal because he hooked up with a team called the Beatles. I was fortunate enough to become part of a team called Primerica.
There came a time later on, when the company was doing really well, when one of the top executives in New York asked me, “Hey, what kind of jet are you going to get now?” The truth was, with as much as I travel (I’m a three-million-miler with Delta) we could have easily justified the expense of having a company jet. But I never gave it a moment’s consideration.
For one thing, I didn’t want to send the wrong message to our investors. In some ways a plane is a terrible investment, and nothing says “executive extravagance” like having your own plane. I also didn’t want to send a bad message to our own people, both our employees at the office and our sales force in the field.
Above and beyond those other reasons, though, I didn’t want to send the wrong message to myself. I’ve watched people in business become successful to the point where they decide they need a jet, and a handler, a security crew around them, and all the other trappings of stratospheric importance. It’s easy to lose perspective.
So, no, I never did get a jet. But I do travel a lot, and when I do I am typically picked up at the airport and driven around in a car the company rents. I love talking with these drivers. I try not to reinforce the gossip channel, but sometimes they’ll tell me some pretty revealing stories about the celebrities and other highly important people they’ve driven around who behaved like complete jerks to them. Usually, at some point in the course of our ride, they’ll tell me, “You seem like such a normal guy.”
It’s the highest compliment I can think of.
If you want to be an effective leader, it requires that you embrace a high degree of humility. Don’t take yourself too seriously because as long as you do, no one else will.
Throughout the nineties, as Rick and I deepened our friendship and worked to help keep the ship steered safely through its various sea storms, Sandy’s financial empire continued to expand.
In 1993, Primerica bought Travelers, the venerable Hartford insurance pioneer (Travelers was founded the same year Abraham Lincoln won reelection), and Sandy took the name Travelers Group for the whole enterprise. At the time, there was a good deal of debate about whether we should become Travelers Financial Services. (Another potential panic in the field!) Good thing that didn’t happen. At that point, the last thing the sales force needed was yet another shake-up in their identity. So while Primerica Corporation, the parent company, became The Travelers Group, we remained Primerica Financial Services.
Don’t take yourself too seriously because as long as you do, no one else will.
The Travelers merger was what brought us many new product offerings, such as Travelers variable annuity, and property and casualty. Notwithstanding the battles Rick and I had to fight over issues like credit life, this was an overall positive thing. We got new products, the company’s stock went up, and since a lot of our senior sales force leaders were by now stockowners themselves, their stock went up.
In 1998, yet another round of ownership changes was under way. That year Travelers merged with Citibank, forming what would be known as Citigroup. With this new merger, Sandy had bitten off a seriously big chunk to chew on. The transaction resulted in a gargantuan operation that would take a ton of his and his people’s time and attention to make it work smoothly. Another vacuum was about to be created.
The following year, as the decade came to a close, there was one more big change. In 1999 Joe Plumeri was tapped to run Citibank North America, leaving us once more in need of a new CEO for Primerica. This time, though, Sandy and the other top executives did something different. This time, they did not bring in a new executive from the outside to be put in charge of the operation. Instead, they decided the best thing for the company might be to let it be run by the people who were already there, people who knew the company from the inside and had for years.
On the eve of the new decade, Rick Williams and I were promoted together to co-CEO. From this point on, we would be sharing the chief executive’s office and running the company ourselves.
The anchors to windward were now stepping to the helm.
Earn Your Position
People often wait to get into a leadership position before they lead, but you don’t always have that luxury. Sometimes, especially if you’re part of an organization that is struggling, you have to create your position. You can’t always stand on the beach waiting for your ship to come in. Sometimes you have to swim out there and meet it.
The greatest opportunities for leadership typically arise in times and places where it’s needed most. It is often those times when things are troubled or chaotic when you can move light years ahead. Sometimes a situation that looks like the worst thing that could happen to your career can wind up being exactly the blessing your career needs.
Find people to work with whose skill sets complement yours. As important as it is to build on your own strengths, it is just as important to surround yourself with people who are good at those things you’re not good at.
Embrace adversity. It’s where you have the greatest opportunity to flourish. Strong leaders thrive on challenging times. In fact, the only way to genuinely survive adversity is to embrace it.
Real leaders are the hardest workers. When you’re in a leadership position, people need to see that no one is more committed and working harder than you.
Don’t take yourself too seriously. If you do, nobody else will. No matter what your position is, you are not a big deal.
ACTION STEP
In your present business or career, is there a vacuum crying out to be filled? List at least three things you can do to serve the team that go beyond your job description