Both experience and education are necessary in any professional field. If adjusting is truly a professional vocation (an issue that has been debated in this column before) then the criteria of professions, including both general and graduate-level education, rigid testing and control by a professional organization, dedication, ethical standards, and altruism (plus personal mentoring by professionals already in the field) must be present. If the claim industry is to have leaders, it must have professionals to assume those roles. Real professionals must be hard working, dedicated persons of great integrity — but real professionals also warrant, and must demand, the rewards of being a professional, in both social status and compensation.

Dean Sam Candler of Atlanta recently wrote an essay on leadership that warrants analysis. He asks what leadership is, and suggests that the answer is trickier than one might suspect. “Leadership,” Candler says, “is the practice of growing people through change. First, it is a practice, which is to say, it is a discipline and a habit. It does not occur just once in one's life, or in one's tenure…. The discipline of leadership requires patience. Leadership,” he continues, “is also about growing something, like a garden. It is about growing people. Thus, the direction of leadership is outward, toward the fulfillment of other people. Leaders grow people. What are leaders growing people towards? My answer is that leaders grow people through change. There is no need for leadership if change is not occurring. People need leaders to nurture, cultivate, and guide the community through issues of change.”

If there's no change, there's no need for leaders, he says. That certainly seems to be the case in the claims world. It seems pretty stagnant. Candler continues that, “if no change is occurring, we might reasonably suspect that not much health is in that community either! Any good and healthy community is experiencing change. It is the nature of life itself.”

Rules for Leadership

Candler lists thirteen criteria for leaders, ranging from “know yourself,” which he says is the most important factor for any leader, to “take yourself lightly.” A leader's ego can get in the way. He says that leaders must “have a vision,” something beyond just the job, and that they must love people. Many would-be leaders–like many bosses, relatively few of whom ever make the grade as leaders–seem to have no concept of how to deal with people on a one-to-one or group basis. They give orders, and tromp on toes with hobnail boots.

Candler says that leaders must “stay engaged,” and “practice what Edwin Friedman called a 'non-anxious presence.” He says that leaders must help others to be right, not wrong, but that they must also be careful where they focus attention, for where the leader focuses, so will the followers. As we each have a different style of communication, we must put effort into positive communication. He suggests that it is a matter of initiative, and that “whatever you want, give it away!” Leadership, ultimately, is a major sacrifice.

The Perfect Claim Leader

Well, no one is perfect, but I've known a few leaders who came close. One, a retired former claim executive and editor (and former columnist for this publication under his pen name “Justin Adjuster”) sent me a copy of his autobiography. He was born in 1920 and basically grew up in poverty without even any health care, but from his earliest experiences he practiced leadership. He was an Eagle Scout, was in high school ROTC, and when he finally got into the Army in World War II, he went on to Officers Training School, and became a real leader, hunting up casualties of the Bataan Death March. Then he got into the independent adjusting business, in what was really the infancy of casualty adjusting, and his leadership skills became well-known. In those days many adjusters were also attorneys, taking advantage of the post-war G.I. Bill to obtain Bachelor of Law degrees or other higher education. Undergraduate degrees were not always a prerequisite.

When he moved from branch managership to claim education, achieving high honors in his law school, he became — as he did for me — a mentor for literally hundreds of new adjusters throughout the nation. Undoubtedly, a handful of readers will know of whom I speak, Bernard David Hinkle, as he was often an invited speaker at claim conventions and meetings. His publications were known internationally, always written with a good measure of humor as well as wisdom.

I've known other great leaders as well. Many have been associated at one time or another with this publication (as contributing editors or on the editorial advisory board) or with the various educational institutions, and many have also either been a friend or a mentor. A few of my mentors are no longer living, or they have retired, but their reputation lives on in those they inspired to be true loss and claim adjusters. Many were in national organizations, like PLRB or the Insurance Institute of America, or the Claims Section of the CPCU Society. Some were writers, others speakers, but all were great communicators, dedicated to helping others achieve their best. I'm sure there are many such leaders out there today, but we don't hear much about them. (Hey, readers: Send us some stories about your mentors and leaders.)

Common Sense

Occasionally it turns out that leaders, even top-notch ones who can inspire an army to march into hell, if necessary, make bad mistakes. The ability to lead, and the ability to communicate and mentor, are not necessarily combined with common sense in all cases. We see this in great political leaders, especially those who can inspire and show true love for others. Somehow good leadership and good judgment are not synonymous. John F. Kennedy was a great leader and a great communicator, and was an inspiration to most of us, but he was also a man who made some very poor personal decisions that, had the media been in the 1960s what it was in the mid-1990s, could have ruined his reputation. Poor decisions have ruined more than one president. This is often the case with great leaders.

A number of recent biographies have featured the famous FBI director, John Edgar Hoover. (Young J. Edgar Hoover, J. Edgar Hoover — The Man and the Secrets, The Director, etc.) Hoover was, without question, a dedicated leader who built a rag-tag minor division of the Justice Department into the famous criminal investigation institution that it became by the 1970s. (Hoover died in May of 1972, having first joined the Justice Department in 1917.) But like all great leaders, Hoover made many enemies, made serious blunders, and played loose with the law, doing things that, when disclosed, shocked the nation, and, unfortunately, set a bad example for the future FBI that still creates controversy and inter-agency rivalry. His “lily white” men-only agents would have hundreds arrested without warrants, “bug” or wire-tap citizens without any type of search warrant or permission of higher-ups in the Justice Department (the Attorneys General), conduct investigations for purely political purposes (asserting that there were no such things as “secret” files — of course not! They weren't called “files.”). As a leader he did not want to expose his agents to their possible corruption if he had gone after “organized crime,” so he simply denied that there was such a thing! He was, in short, a dictator, and during World War II, a spy on the American public, even to opening the mail and reading it, a trick the FBI learned from the British.

Perhaps his greatest blunder was failure in mid-1941 to pass along to the Navy a Japanese document obtained by a British agent (after whom Ian Fleming patterned James Bond) that sought detailed information on Pearl Harbor, simply because Hoover didn't like the agent. That little fact didn't come out until many decades later, after Hoover was dead, even though the British M-6 knew. They could keep secrets as well as Hoover.

A Touch of Genius

Hoover, like many great leaders, was a genius at communication and organization. When he finally had the opportunity after World War I to organize the Bureau of Investigation, as it then was known, he did so as meticulously as was humanly possible. He demanded loyalty of his Special Agents, and generally got it. But he was also in many ways a “bad boss,” egotistically always taking credit for what the agents did, being the glamour-boy for the FBI, attending arrests, but not stepping forward until the shooting was over, then posing for the photographs. Some great leaders are like that.

For one to become a leader in the claim industry it will take a genius with selfless dedication to hard work and the ability to understand people and make them look like heros. We always knew, even when it was J. Edgar's mug in the photo, that it was the special agents who were the real heroes.

A good leader must also be a forceful, demanding the best of his or her people, but also a tyrant to him or herself. Great leaders in our industry are out there — they should not be shy. Hopefully you either know one — or you are one, even if the only person you are leading is yourself.

Ken Brownlee, CPCU, is a former adjuster and risk manager, based in Atlanta, Ga. He now authors and edits claim-adjusting textbooks.