The Power of Being Yourself: A Game Plan for Success--by Putting Passion into Your Life and Work by Joe Plumeri

Author:Joe Plumeri
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2015-04-13T14:00:00+00:00

I challenged them, and they were a little startled to be singled out like that, but they put down their newspapers.

“Put the paper down and move up to the front of the room,” I challenged them, and they were a little startled to be singled out like that, but they put down their newspapers.

By then I had the attention of the room. I did what I always do—I looked them square in the eye and spoke from my heart. I wanted to grab them and make sure they were with me, so I went to my ace in the hole. I told that room full of people the story of my father having quintuple bypass surgery at age seventy-eight, him lying there in bed pale and unsteady looking, and waving me off when I told him I’d get him a house in Florida so he could go down there and relax.

“‘Relax?’” I shouted to the room in Boca Raton, quoting my father. “‘I don’t want to relax!’”

No, he wanted to bring a minor league baseball team to Trenton, and that was exactly what he did. This was a kind of passion and determination every single person in that room could understand. This was a kind of optimism and crazy belief everyone in the Primerica family had lived for himself or herself and talked up to others. I was speaking their language, the language of look up, not down.

Art Williams had left the company because, as good as he was at motivating, he had a poor record on compliance issues. Once he left, however, the heart of the company was gone. There was no leadership. “We’d had almost a revolving door of CEOs,” John Addison told me. “You know how you have the employee of the month? It was, who was the CEO of the month? They had been through this new vision and that new vision, this new vision, that new vision, and people were kind of like, Yeah, okay, right.”

Sandy kept throwing person after person down to Atlanta to run, it and they all came back in body bags. This was a unique challenge, requiring all the vision and experience and organizational ability required to run a major company but also the ability to fire people up and keep them fired up with evangelical fervor and passion. One of the cardinal truths about leadership that you always need to keep in mind is that nature abhors a vacuum. In the absence of a common vision, in the absence of leadership, everybody will supply their own vision and their own leadership, and the result will be a divided, scattered company where true teamwork and common vision are out of the question. Bad cultures start in the absence of a common vision.

I think leadership always starts with listening to the people you would lead and doing more than trying to understand them, but instead really taking on that challenge so you get them—you get what they’re about, get what drives them, get their hopes and dreams.

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