Leadership Traits: Be a Lighthouse On the roof of our country house up here in Clermont, we’ve got a cupola with a big rooster weathervane jutting up on top. When the wind blows, that thing spins around like crazy. On the coast, not too far from where we live, there’s an old lighthouse. When the wind blows, that lighthouse doesn’t budge. It just sits there like the rock it’s built into. Weathervane. Lighthouse. I’ve made it my business to know which is which, and to never forget the difference, not even for a day. Most “leaders” are weathervanes. Whichever way the wind blows, that’s the way they turn. That just doesn’t work. If you want to accomplish something great, something real and effective, you’ve got to be that lighthouse. You’ve got to be embedded in the rock. When times are hard and things get ugly, you’ve got to be that person others look to and see only strength. The one people look to and know they don’t have to wonder where you stand. I believe one of our country’s deepest problems is that we have a lot of leaders who change their minds like they change their underwear. Change jobs, change marriages, change friends, change convictions. The problem with the “If it isn’t perfect today, I’m gone” attitude is that you never have the chance to apply your efforts and give them the time they need to compound. Greatness doesn’t happen in a day, or a week. It’s the result of growth and maturation, and that can only happen over the course of time and committed constancy. I’ve seen companies where the leadership qualities were so volatile, people would arrive to work in the morning and say, “What kind of mood is he in today?” That’s a company that has to fight just to stay standing, even when there aren’t big challenges coming from the outside. I’ve seen it happen, many times, and it’s incredibly destructive to the organization. If you’re a leader, you can’t afford the indulgence of having moods. You can see this sometimes just walking into a store or restaurant. The employees are edgy, irritable, sullen, or tentative. When you see that, I guarantee there’s a manager, owner, or someone else they’re all looking up to, who is throwing them all off kilter with his or her moods. We all have our good days and bad days. I understand that. It happens to me too. We may have challenges in our personal lives. Something’s happening at home, our child has a problem in school, something upsetting is happening in our neighborhood, we’ve got an especially troubling hangnail. Whatever. Let me tell you a hard truth. It doesn’t matter. If you’re a leader, you can’t afford the indulgence of having moods. You’ve got to be the one who, when people come to work in the morning, they already know exactly where you stand. You have to be the one they can count on. You have to be their rock. Sometimes It’s Brightest Before the Storm In August of 2007, we held our most amazing convention to date, packing the Georgia Dome to nearcapacity with some 35,000 people. It was an electric, magical moment, both for the company and for me. The company was turning 30 (“Year Thirty” was a big theme at that convention) and, as it happened, I had just turned 50. Great things were happening at Primerica. Rick and I had had a tremendous run for the past seven years. When we first took over in 2000, the company was paying
out a little more than $400 million in compensation to reps. By 2006, compensation to reps had grown to $631 million. In mid-2007, it was approaching $700 million. In all my speeches at the time, the big goal was to hit $1 billion in annual compensation by the year 2010. Compared to the struggles of the nineties, it was like we were in a perfect little world, almost like a fairy tale. At this convention we recognized Bob Safford, that wonderful field leader who’d been so encouraging to me that day back in those difficult times in the early nineties when I gave my first real motivational talk to a hotel room full of leaders. We recognized him because his personal income had hit the $4 million mark. I don’t mean cumulative: that’s $4 million over a single 12month period. We also recognized Mike Sharpe, who had hit $5 million. From the field’s perspective, things had never been better. Cash to the field was at record levels. So were growth in recruiting and growth in sales. Citigroup stock, which many of our field and home office leaders were heavily invested in, was doing great. And having the prestigious name Citigroup associated with their business was a huge positive. As we celebrated our thirtieth year and made bold pronouncements for the future, we introduced some new features in the business, for example, a lower-cost ($99) licensing fee, making the business more accessible to more people, along with significant product improvements, which were a huge hit. I’ve been to a lot of events at the Georgia Dome, and I’d never seen or felt a higher energy level. I thought the roof might come off. To the casual observer, it would have seemed like things were rock-solid and invincibly healthy in the world of Primerica. Indeed everything looked just about as rosy as it possibly could, even to 99.9 percent of the people within the world of Primerica. But it wasn’t. The truth was that we were suffocating under an increasingly oppressive blanket of regulation and bank bureaucracy that was threatening to strangle us. Although hardly a soul in that stadium knew it at the time, and wouldn’t know it for years yet to come, Rick and I had been working for months in a confidential and excruciatingly complicated effort to get Primerica completely out from under the Citigroup umbrella, before it snuffed the life out of us. You’ve heard the expression, “It’s always darkest before the dawn.” True enough, but there’s another truth too. Sometimes it’s brightest before the storm. And when the storm comes, you can’t let it catch you off guard. As important as it is to stay positive, don’t ever confuse optimism with naïveté. Be prepared. Know exactly where you stand because it could be sorely challenged by high winds at any time. Have you ever seen one of those beautiful, balmy afternoons where the sun is shining and everything is peaceful, and then out of nowhere the wind suddenly picks up and clouds appear, and moments later you’re in the midst of a full-blown thunderstorm? That’s where we were in the sunny days of August 2007.
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