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.
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 traits 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 hubby old me of last year. I’m going to get in shape.” Then they all go out and join a healthclub. 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. For more Leadership articles, please visit Thought Leadership Zen Blog
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