Leadership Is About Crafting A Vision, Building Excitement And Giving People Parameters

Terrance Williams, CEO of TruStage, an insurance, investment and technology provider, shared his key leadership insights in my latest "Art of Leading" interview. Subscribe here to receive future interviews.

Q. What is your approach to leadership?

A. It's difficult for me to describe my approach without telling you how it was shaped. My journey began in a town outside of Charleston, South Carolina. I was blessed in that I grew up in a two-parent household—an educator and a construction worker—and the values they instilled in me included a work ethic, a focus on education, and the belief that I can accomplish or do anything. 

My mom and dad also were influential people in our community, even though I didn't know it at the time. My dad was the elder of our church. They always played this leadership role from a community standpoint, and they were always involved and giving back and helping someone who was sick or helping raise money for someone who had lost their job or raising money for a family when someone passed away and they didn't have insurance. 

They always had this approach of paying it forward, giving back, and making a difference. They are 86 and 82 years old today, but it was only seven years ago that I had to stop my dad from driving the church van to pick up people to take them to the polling station to vote. I said, “Dad, you're 79 years old. You should be in the van, not driving the van.”  

Q. What were you doing outside of class in your middle school and high school years?

A. I'm 6'4", so I played basketball, and I was involved in a lot of clubs, including student council and government. I was always someone who would step up and raise their hand from a leadership standpoint. If I'm in a room of 20 people I've never met before, I'm probably going to be mingling around, introducing myself, connecting with people, trying to figure out how to bring people together. That's always been me from a personality standpoint, even during my early years.

Q. What are some specifics of your leadership style today? What are the behaviors that earn gold stars from you and what do you not tolerate?

A. With people who join my team, I share with them a document that's about two pages and lists, in a form of self-disclosure, the things that are really important to me. I talk about the importance of accountability and how we own our own results. No one else has accountability for our results but us, regardless of market conditions, external forces, et cetera.  

I talk about the importance of hiring and how one should always take time and do the due diligence. I talk about the importance of execution and how it should be driven at a level where it's almost flawless. If it's a big goal, there should be a clear plan, with milestones, dates, expectations, and we should hold ourselves accountable to those things. 

I talk about the importance of attitude and why it's critically important, particularly in a leadership role. We have to understand where our mood elevator is at all times because your actions are being observed, whether you realize it or not and whether you open your mouth or not. 

Q. You mentioned the importance of hiring well. What’s your approach?

A. Ultimately, I'm looking for leaders. I'm not looking for someone who's a technical expert. I'm looking for someone who can lead, who can inspire, who can motivate. So I will ask—particularly with someone who's been a leader for a number of years—who exists because of you? Who has risen through the ranks due to your mentorship, due to your influence, due to your coaching? And I want real examples around that. 

I also ask for examples of things they’ve done in their career that demonstrated their prowess as a champion of leadership. I’m also looking for someone who is inquisitive, comfortable challenging the status quo and driving change. I want them to understand how to drive productive peer relationships. 

Q. How would you complete the sentence, "The hardest part of leadership is…"? 

A. The hardest part is remaining humble. If you look back at the roles I’ve had over the last ten years, they’ve typically been president or chief of something, including my CEO role now. You always have to be aware that what's on your business card will drive how people engage with you. And if you're not cautious, people will only tell you what they think you want to hear. You have to draw people out about the pluses and minuses, the risks and opportunities of an idea, as opposed to only getting what someone thinks you want to hear. 

So I have to clearly articulate to people that I want to hear their perspective and opinions. Many business decisions are nuanced; they aren't really black and white. I’m also a leader who thinks out loud. So I will say, “This is just a thought. I don't want someone to run out of the room and do ABC because Terrance said it. I'm thinking out loud.” I want people to be comfortable engaging with me and coming forward with full thoughts on an idea as opposed to just telling me what I want to hear.

Q. Other key leadership lessons for you?

A. While I'm incredibly blessed and have had what many would consider success in my career, I have hit walls before. I've had episodes in roles where I didn't hit it out of the park, and those are the most effective from a learning standpoint because it helps you to understand what you could have done differently. 

As an example, one of my goals when I was at Nationwide was to become a general manager, which at that company meant that you had full accountability for the P&L in a market. As I was moving up, I had some level of success operating in individual functional areas, including running the claims division and sales. But when I finally got my first general manager role, I made a mistake that is blatantly obvious to me now. 

In my conversations with each of my direct reports, the message I was conveying to them was, in effect, just do what I did when I did your job and you’ll be successful. I never said it that bluntly, but that's in essence what I was saying without realizing it. I quickly realized that is not how you engage or motivate a team. Telling them to do what you did is not leadership. Leadership is about crafting a vision, building excitement and motivation and giving people parameters but letting them operate. 

In my first general management role, I didn't do that effectively in the very beginning. Fortunately for me, I had a number of mentors around that organization who reached out to me to say, "Terrance, this is what I'm hearing." I was able to course correct and evolve my leadership style. That's a story that I've shared many times over the years about how I stubbed my toe early on, so to speak.

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