CEO for a Day – We Laughed, We Cried….

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Last week, I hosted another one of our exceptional Conexus team members as “CEO for the day”. What does that program entail?  In essence, we advertise to all of our employees the opportunity to be CEO for any given day and then we match the agenda from their visit to topics that match what they expressed that they wanted to learn as part of their day as the CEO in their application materials. They also get paid the CEO salary for the day, with one catch – they need to donate it to a local organization in need. The program itself is likely not unique and I’m sure that lots of other places do interesting things to develop their Team and build a strong talent pipeline. But there are a few things that surprise me every time we run this program and host someone at Conexus World Headquarters for the day as the CEO.

Their lack of real insight into what CEO’s do every day. I have met many people that tell me they want to be a CEO one day, either at Conexus or somewhere else. That never surprises me. Earlier in my career, I had the same aspiration. What I find interesting is the answer to the next question I usually ask, which is…”What do you think a day in the life of a CEO actually looks like?” Usually the answer to the question is something like –  long meetings, reviewing reports, meeting with other Executives, etc. Sometimes I get a long awkward pause which leads to a realization that they don’t have any clue what a day in the life looks like and they don’t want to tell me what they really think it is 😂.  Sometimes, they try to make a joke about golf games in the middle of the day and two beer lunches everyday. That sure sounds fun but sadly neither are true. In any event, their perception is very different from reality. Not one of the respondents has ever been actually close to describing a real “day in the life” of a Senior Executive or CEO. Notwithstanding I had the same CEO career aspirations earlier in my career, I didn’t actually know either so it’s not a criticism of their responses, just an observation.

But why is that?

In an organization of some size, are the Executives that disconnected from most others in the organization such that employees really have little real tangible observation of how CEO’s (or Executives) spend their days? I don’t know for sure, but what I do know is that their view or hypothesis of what a day actually looks like is very different from reality. The truth is that they don’t actually know what most days actually look like.  They know what they see but keep in mind that is usually through generic communication channels used by CEO’s, through social media, through their limited interaction with Leaders and lastly, through here-say around the water cooler which is the experiences of others around them.

Part of our rationale for the CEO for a Day program, is to make very transparent and de-mystify what a day in the life of the CEO/Executives actually is and have that story told through the eyes of our employees.  Partly for their own development for sure, but also partly to help others in the organization who might be considering those career paths. Then they will know a bit more about the roles, what they entail, what skills you might need to be good at CEO’ing and how they might build a development plan to get there. They might be a bit less intimidated and be more proactive in learning more about roles they aspire to. One of our “asks” as part of the their day spent with us, is to post on our internal company social media platform about the day completely from their perspective — not edited, but the raw and real observations, the surprises and the ”WTF’s” that they had throughout the day.  It is always a highlight for me as I love living the day again through their eyes and contrasting their views to my own.

If you aspire to a role, ask yourself, what does that actually look like? What data points do I have about how she/he spends their time throughout a normal day? Do I love most of those things and do they line up to my passions?

The second surprise is what I call the “black box syndrome”. Most participants expect that the material for the day will be a bright red box that awaits them marked “TOP SECRET” 🤣. The truth is that the only TOP SECRET information in my briefcase is usually my fantasy football picks and to be honest, if I made that more public, it would probably not be beneficial for me, but I digress. Whether it is a strategy session, a board package, a coaching session for another leader, etc., they frequently have this view of the material being off limits for them as an employee. Before our CEO for Day comes to the office, we send them a package of background information so that they are ready to hit the ground running. They have all the pre-reads, context, research, etc. so that they can contribute to the discussions throughout the day. When we work through the day, they realize that virtually all of the information is readily available and published in the company. It signals to me how much better leaders need to be at communicating and organizing information to better engage all employees in the future of the company.  In all my times of hosting a colleague as CEO for the day, there has not really been any information that was confidential and couldn’t be shared. Sure, I appreciate that as leaders we talk about different kinds of information than unit managers / department managers and we know where to find it, but how much better would leadership development programs be within companies if the strategic planning and execution information was more transparent and if the decisions we make as leaders were better debated by the next generation of leaders in real time, thereby creating some healthy discussion about strategic choices. In essence, the company would be building the “why” in realtime together. I get that is a utopian aspiration but the principle is important nonetheless. There are very few secrets in organizations and I find that leaders are genuinely quite interested in sharing more, not less, of what decisions are in front of them, what they are thinking about, what they are worried about and what they are working on. Sometimes you just have to ask or engage Leaders in sharing what is on their plate for the coming days, weeks and months. I suspect they will want to know the same from you.

The last surprise is the “us them” expectation. I am frequently surprised at the level of  “us” and “them” that come through as surprise in how the day actually unfolds.  Emerging leaders don’t expect that some of the things that they are asked to do regularly in the interest of improvement and learning are still critical for leaders. They don’t expect there to be regular coaching conversations, feedback, stand up meetings to quickly solve problems and get past barriers, “oh shit” moments, self development,  time to reflect on what you should have done better or differently and they certainly don’t expect any fun. They don’t expect that while the best member facing employees focus on delivering “wow moments” to clients/members, the best leaders focus equally on creating the small “wow moments” for their customers, namely their colleagues.  Notes of encouragement, recognition, appreciation moments and the small things that might seem easy to overlook are as big a part of the leaders day as they are for the customer facing professionals trying to build loyalty and trust with their clients or members. What makes you a great Advisor to clients (trust, empathy, caring, attention to detail, feedback, fun, etc.) also makes you a great leader in my humble opinion.

My most recent experience in this program was last week when I got to spend the day hanging out with Emmanuel from our Member Contact Centre. Here is how his day played out:

  • He chaired an ELT Stand Up Meeting.  Our Energizer was a “Movember Mustache Quiz”.  I think that Emmanuel finished second in the quiz if I remember correctly.  I only got the Tom Selleck cookie duster correct and finished well down in the ELT standings
  • He announced to the entire organization about the acquisition of a subsidiary company (and then answered all of their subsequent questions about the “so what” of that transaction for our credit union)
  • He mentored a very bright young leader from another credit union in British Columbia
  • He participated in start up pitches from our Cultivator resident companies over lunch
  • He called both our Regulator and our Wealth Management Dealer to talk about the evolution of our Wealth Management business
  • He observationally coached our Executive Vice President, Business Banking through direct feedback from her Team
  • He did some prep work for a meeting with the Saskatchewan Caucus of the Federal Conservative Party to provide them with our views on recent legislative opportunities (CEBA Program, Open Banking, Credit Union support of small business, etc.)
  • He fit in a few “Happy Conexus’Versary” e-mails to our Team achieving service milestones and responded to the regular onslaught of electronic messages (e-mail, Teams chats, texts, social media DM’s) from colleagues and members.

It was a crazy busy day and with him in charge, I likely should have gone golfing and for a couple of beers.  He had it completely cased. The best part of it was reading it all again this morning through his eyes and seeing how his perspective changed about what the CEO role actually is and perhaps more importantly, what it is not. Whether or not Emmanuel ascends to the CEO role at Conexus or elsewhere, at least he’ll have a better idea of what the role looks like in real life.

I can’t wait for the next one….

The gravity around “being competitive” and why it’s hurting uniqueness – for companies and for leaders

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Recently, I was asked to join the BC Young Leaders Group to participate in their annual conference this year. I am always honoured to be asked to hang out with the young, bright minds working in the credit union system. The energy in the room and the passion for the purpose of cooperatives is a great way to fill my cup for a few months.

Their conference is titled “Executing Innovation” and they specifically asked me to talk about things like:

  1. How do you help your organization move forward when your superiors may be creating roadblocks?
  2. How to pitch ideas and generate buy-in
  3. How to develop an Innovation Mindset

I decided to call my presentation – Changing the “That Hasn’t Been Done Before” Mindset.  

Here’s why 🙂

When I was in business school (both times), there was much discussed about how to “be competitive” and “measure” your success. The challenge was that the measurement or comparison was always against others in the industry. The measurements in banking were not that hard to figure out — return on equity, return on assets, assets under management, efficiency ratio, productivity, etc. In fact, I would suggest that if you look at the balanced scorecards of multinational banks, community banks you’d likely see much of the same. If you went further and examined financial cooperatives you might also be surprised to see a small collection of the most used metrics that describe success.

In the businesses cases that I worked on in school, the success of the fictional business was a measurement against peer groups or others that competed in the same “vertical” industry. Both the Professors and the Students continually made reference to “being competitive”, “chasing the competition” and “closing the gap”. In today’s world, we are bombarded with Google alerts, Twitter lists and hashtag mentions of competitors, that we then use to immediately compare and contrast against the businesses that we lead.

The comparisons don’t stop with the businesses we lead either. The comparison and chase extends to the leaders in those businesses. The gravity for each of us to look, feel and appear like others is palpable. We likely all have leaders in our lives that we admire or perhaps even want to be like. I am no different. There were and still are many leaders that I look up to and hope that one day I could grow and develop to be more “like them”. It’s fine if you aspire to achieve the leadership outcomes that other great leaders achieve. I want to be more patient, more open minded, a better listener and more of a catalyst type of leader. I know leaders that do all of those things exceptionally well and I admire them greatly.

But the chase is dangerous for leaders.

It’s one thing to want to be better as a leader or business and then look for examples of what better could look like in one area or another. But the development and growth of both the leader and the business has to be in the context of being a better version of myself (or itself for businesses). As I said above, I want to be more patient. But I cannot let the pursuit and growth of being more patient tear away at the passion that I know helps me to succeed. Here is where the challenge lies. If I admire the patience of other leaders and just look to re-create that for myself, I might wake up one day very different than the “Eric version” of the leader I aspire to be. It’s the same for businesses and the evolution of the businesses we lead needs to be the same. There are other businesses I admire as being super innovative. I want to create a more innovative credit union, but it has to be a more innovative version of Conexus not just recreate a version of Conexus that looks like a different business. If we did, we might wake up one day with a business that is not aligned to our purpose or strays from our values un-intentionally. I had a great mentor very early in my career that made this point to me in a very direct way:

“As you grow as a leader, you still need to be yourself, everyone else is taken”

I realized later that was originally an Oscar Wilde quote, but it resonates with me and I use it frequently with those I mentor and coach.

The chase is also dangerous for businesses.

I was at a presentation a few years ago by Youngme Moon. She was speaking about this very issue which was highlighted in her book Different. I vividly recall a picture she showed during the presentation. It was something like the one below and she asked the conference participants which one of these we were as a business and how will we create a sense of uniqueness in the mind of our customers and potential customers.

How would you position yourself if you were the CEO of any one of these products? I know when I buy water, I care about which one I see in the cooler, how it is packaged (recyclable or not) and the size of the bottle compared to my thirst. That’s it, that’s all. I also don’t want to be a leader in any of these businesses where the consumer cares so very little about the choice. I appreciate that finding a financial partner and buying water is different and personal finance is certainly more emotive, but it was a great reminder of why uniqueness matters.

It was a sobering question when you really think about how you create competitive differentiation in the cluttered mind of the consumer. It’s also a question about how you go about the growth and development of the business and the leaders within and the danger of the “chase”. There is tremendous gravity around the chase, and we all need to be careful about allowing it to pull us places we don’t intend to be.

If you have or develop a bunch of leaders that look like each other and those leaders look, act and talk like those that work in many other businesses in your industry, what are the chances of you creating something unique, special and distinct for those that you seek to serve, either as customers or as employees (customers of the leadership environment you create)?

Very small indeed.

It’s hard enough to create new ideas, new strategies and uniqueness in business. It’s harder yet unless you are completely aware and conscious of the gravity to “sameness” and think regularly about how to grow, develop, learn and create in the context of being unique and in the case of leaders, being themselves.

I was reminded of this early by the very same mentor when he said:

Be careful. If you chase the competition, you might just catch them. Then what?

May we all celebrate those around us (business and leaders) that are unique and revel in being themselves, first and foremost.

To the BC Young Leaders – see you in a few weeks 🙂

Patience, “The Infinite Game” & Cooperatives

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I just finished reading “The Infinite Game” from Simon Sinek. The book is based on earlier work from James Carse in 1986 about understanding the difference between a finite mindset and an infinite mindset. It was a provocative poke at the current state of business and capitalism and the need to ensure that both investors and business leaders are focused on the long game of creating value through their investment choices (for investors) and business decisions (for leaders). Sinek argues that business today talks about “winning” and “beating the competition” and the disconnect that creates in the behaviour of both investors and leaders. In the case of my industry – how do you “win” banking? There must be some secret scorecard for our industry right? Of course there isn’t. Ultimately, he argues that there is no such thing as “winning” in any industry, just arbitrary, near term business metrics that drive leaders and investors to a more short term view of their businesses.

At the same time, I have seen and read many articles suggesting that the global pandemic we find ourselves in will be an inflection point in terms of business disruption and that the behaviour of the consumer has been or will be forever changed. Watching in our own credit union how the pandemic has accelerated the move to digital transactions makes the argument easy to believe. Of course, time will tell if this is truly the “TSN turning point” for digital disruption in commerce. They say that you always overestimate the change that will take place in the near term and underestimate the level of change that will happen over the longer term. I don’t know who they are, but that has certainly been the case in my business career as business has evolved faster than I would have predicted over the longer term course of my career. That’s an easier way to say that I am old 😂.

For me, there are a number of signals that confirm that things are indeed changing. Here’s a few that have been top of mind for me lately:

Capital market shortcomings – Last week, Canadian markets were at virtually the same level as they were pre-pandemic. What?!? Are you telling me that investors believe that an identical stream of future cash flows will accrue to them from the same firms post pandemic as pre-pandemic? Really? On the contrary, I believe they are desperately betting on short term hail mary / efficiency / cost cutting / M & A / etc. will prop up share prices in the near term. Do you think this will incent business leaders to consider the strategic choices of this inflection point or drive for nearer term success that they can showcase as “beating the competition” and “winning” in a down market?

Cheap money – We are operating at historically low costs for money. This also artificially inflates near term success for firms and further, encourages higher leverage positions as money is considered to be on sale these days. That might not be all bad, if the additional cash is used to support new initiatives, research, growth and transformation but watching consumers and businesses and how they are taking advantage of low borrowing costs and where the additional money is being spent, makes me nervous.

Rapidly changing consumer expectations – Make no mistake that the mindset of the consumer is changed. I have read lots about how the health crisis has only accelerated the shift to digital for consumers and that the shift was already underway. Perhaps. But the speed with which consumer behaviour is changing is striking and businesses will need to respond not with tweaks to their model but transformative change. We will no longer have the time to make slow methodical changes to our business and still keep up with what consumers expect.

Growing concern about inequity and exclusion – the current business models have contributed to exclusion and income inequity and those challenges are being surfaced in front of all of us in a really big way. Look around. Every conversation I am in today involves inclusion, equity, diversity and a growing sense that all of us (POC, LGBTQIA2S+, Allies, CIS, Indigenous, Short fat bald guys, etc.) need to come together to make it better. It matters greatly that people feel like they can participate in the economy and have opportunities to succeed.

The demand for transparency / authenticity in business – In a similar way, I believe that we are on the cusp of a new era of expectations around transparency and authenticity in business. That doesn’t mean that everyone needs to be happy with the decisions you make, but what it does mean is that you are open, honest and transparent not just about WHAT you want to achieve but HOW you intend to get there. My sense is that there is a real desire for people to work, engage and partner with businesses that they trust and those that demonstrate values that align with their own. People don’t expect perfection, but they do expect to know what you stand for and they expect for you to try your best to live that everyday.

If we are at an inflection point in terms of business models and transformational changes are necessary to support new ways in which to serve customers and build businesses, then this is also a perfect time to reset expectations and mindsets of  both investors and business leaders. I have a few ideas on how leaders can stay focused on changing their mindset:

  1. Purpose: Business were historically created to solve problems and monetize the solution. Today, I believe that businesses and organizations exist to deliver on a purpose. What is your why? This clear articulation of why you exist and what you seek to do is not marketing fodder. It is a promise to employees, consumers and your community about what you stand for and what you will be held accountable to deliver. It is the call that will galvanize organizations, pull people together and inspire them to do great work. In our organization, we have done away with mission, vision and all of that other garbage I learned in business school. Today, in our organization, we have a single purpose and we are united in our passion to bring it to life. It is not a short statement of some metric – it is a moonshot of aspiration that permeates our DNA.
  2. Courage: It takes great courage for investors and business leaders to swim against the current. I am speaking next month to a group of young finance professionals on the west coast about changing the “it hasn’t been done that way before” mindset.  I have a few examples in my career of ideas that were pitched and ridiculed that today, seem brilliant. In a discussion with a colleague yesterday morning about this topic, he offered a new book for my reading list that speaks to this same idea. Offering new ideas and gathering momentum around them is hard and few do it well. Why do you think we have a whole industry that has emerged around change management, innovation, agile, etc? How are ideas surfaced in your company and what happens to them and those that propose them?
  3. Profit Models vs. Sustainability Models: We have worked hard in our business to think about financial performance through the lens of sustainability. This thinking goes back to a discussion about 15 years ago with a colleague in my former role and has taken that long to think through. Today, we think about how we are performing in the context of how much is sufficient to sustain the business and how much capacity do we have to invest in creating the next generation of ourselves. The amount we have available is calculated in almost real time and is used to accelerate or decelerate as necessary. The model has bled into decision making, Board reporting, pandemic responses, etc. as a more long term way to financially plan in our cooperative.
  4. Daily Improvement: Much has been made about agile, minimum viable products, fail fast, etc in current business literature.  I am no expert on all of those things but I believe the root of all of it is in the idea of constant improvement and continually moving towards the purpose of the organization. The products may change, the delivery model may evolve, new channels will be built – but at the end of the day are you constantly moving towards the purpose in #1 above. This is a very different mindset than “winning”. In the end, you just have to keep moving forward towards your purpose.
  5. Team: I start presentations about leadership development with a statement “that the business with the best people will win”.  I appreciate the irony in using the term “win” in the context of this blog but just realized that now so will change my statement after this reflection 😂.  The point is that the level of performance of any business is a direct correlation to the diversity, quality and smarts of the people that work there. I have had the luxury of working alongside of some very bright people in my career and some that come from very different backgrounds. The funny thing is that great people tend to follow each other around and there is a gravity that pulls them together. When you are able to find a few of them, more want to join. Working amidst a group of really bright, diverse minds gives you more courage, provides more critical thought and considers new and unique perspectives. I have another blog half written about the change it is taking from me as a leader to more consciously create and then harness the power of diverse teams, so will leave that for another day. Suffice to say that our success has been directly correlated to our level of human talent.

Leading in this challenging environment is hard. When I look back on my leadership journey, this may be the most difficult leadership environment that I will ever face. Will it lead to new thinking, new business models and new strategies for for us to pursue?  Or will this lead to more pressure on near term results, diminished strategic investments, less research and development, less continuous improvement and the pursuit of more efficiency in current business models. I hope it’s the former and I am trying hard to make it so.

The last thing I would offer, and selfishly, is that there are business models that work better in times like this. Business models that favour the creation of long term (i.e. generational) value, that incessantly focus on the customer, that care deeply about the “how” and the impact they have on communities and on people.

It’s never been a better time to be a cooperative ✌️.

Failing forward on the “Fail Forwards”

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I posted earlier on my site about competitive advantage today being defined by the agility of an organization and the continuous speed with which is brings new value to the market. If you accept some of those arguments, then perhaps you will also accept that the new speed, iteration and “intrapreneurial” culture also brings the occasional “whoopsie” into the fray.

Most leaders I know would suggest that the organizations we lead are completely receptive to failure and that as leaders, we all support the tremendous learning and growth that comes from making mistakes. Sure we do 😂. If I hear one more musing about how you “miss 100% of the shots you don’t take” as encouragement for people to try new things, I might throw up in my mouth, if just a bit. I only say that because those kinds of things are so very easy to say, while at the same time, the experience that our employees have when failure actually occurs is not exactly as encouraging.

There has been much written about how organizations should respond to failure, harvest all the learnings, share those broadly and then go on to achieve unbelievable results as a result of the failure. Academics have long hypothesized about how the specific actions, body language, spoken/unspoken responses and behaviour of leaders all have a disproportionate and lasting affect on the those experiencing setbacks at work. Both positively and negatively. I have actually seen articles which would suggest that those initial, visible responses will have the single biggest impact on how these sorts of failures are digested by organizations and whether or not organizations truly learn and grow as a result.

That puts a lot of pressure on leaders and in particular on their own level of self awareness and self control. We all want things to work out perfectly and to succeed on things that matter. When they don’t workout that way, being in control of your emotions all the time is a hard thing to ask of anyone. For CEO’s, there is always more visibility and opinion on the choices you make and the consequence of choices. For me, when I make a mistake, I know there are 1,000 opinions on what I could have done differently. I offer that not to ask for any sympathy – I love my job and all that it brings. I offer it to demonstrate how hard it is to ask leaders to be perfect when it comes to admitting failure and really looking deeply for the lesson that exists within. It’s hard enough to admit defeat in a 1 on 1 conversation, it is infinitely harder for leaders to admit mistakes to the masses of people that count on them everyday. For that reason alone, it’s good to practice this level of transparency early in your leadership journey and graduate to admitting failure in progressively larger settings. You can get good at it, trust me, I have tried. Sometimes, I have done it well and other times, not so much 🤔.

Let me give you some real life examples

Organizational Design – Early in our journey to create more creativity and innovation in my current role, I had done lots of research on “ambidextrous organizational design“. I had grand ideas and made what was, at the time, very drastic organizational changes. The changes were very hard for the organization to digest. Our Teams could not connect “the why”, struggled with implementing the changes and to be candid, the changes were initially a bit of a disaster. I struggled with a long time to admit my failure in communicating, in researching and in listening better to the feedback I received at the time. Over the four years since then, we have slowly incorporated the learnings and are getting better at becoming more ambidextrous, but a more open admission of the failure at the time, I’m convinced, would have helped immensely. Missed opportunity for sure. #FacePalm.

The Fail Forward Awards – We revamped some of our internal recognition programs in the last few years and tried very hard to use this as an opportunity to drive home the cultural changes we wanted to make around creativity, innovation and accepting failure. We introduced a new awards category to our revamped programs that celebrated failures and importantly, incorporating the learnings from those missteps.  We did a fantastic job of almost all of this work – except one thing.  We had designed the program to allow you to nominate others in the organization for their failures.  Read that last sentence again.  OMG, yeah….oops. We quickly learned that was not the way to encourage people to open up publicly about failure and how they learned, grew and shared those learnings. We discovered the design flaw early, laughed at ourselves and the irony around failing forward on the “Fair Forward Award” design. Today, that program is one of the most hotly contested awards at our super cool, annual awards program and it is a real tangible way in which we are living our values as a learning organization. Quick recognition, transparent admission of an oversight, then a pivot to incorporate much better ways for people to share their own stories of setback, learning and growth and ta-dah, works much better. Easy right?!?

The better you get at demonstrating the vulnerability around your own imperfection / fears and the more courage you will build to allow you to share the learnings that come from mistakes. When people within the organization see leaders doing that regularly, it becomes so much easier for them to do it too. It also becomes less emotionally exhausting to lead others when you can leave your “I have to be perfect” backpack at home and just be yourself.

Inherently, people want to work for other humans – warts, flaws and all.  The sooner we act more human and let go of perfection, the easier it is for others to choose to follow.

Quick update from a reader of the blog – Jill let me know there was a “Museum of Failure” showcasing failed ideas but created as a way for all of us to learn from these whoopsies. Check it out!

I mentor primarily female leaders. Here’s my why and my awkward moments…

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I have been involved in mentoring for almost 15 years. I was inspired early in my career by all of my mentors and the impact that they had on my growth. To this day, I rely on the things I learned from them and will forever grateful for their investment in me.

One mentor in particular made me promise that when I was in a position to make a difference, that I would “pay it forward” to invest in others. So here I am, in the midst of mentoring relationships 87, 88, 89 and 90 working hard to live up to his expectations.

A few years ago, it dawned on me that this was also a great opportunity to help bring more diversity to leadership within finance and more broadly within business. I started to think about the choices I had made in terms of the mentoring relationships that I pursued. Suffice to say that for whatever reason, I had not mentored many emerging female leaders in my first 20-30 mentoring relationships and I didn’t know why.

Fast forward to today – I am pretty direct with those interested in working together that I have “a default” to supporting the growth of female leaders through mentoring. There are lots of reasons why I have decided to “put a flag in the ground” and be so open about this both within Conexus and in our community. Here are some of them:

Better Performance: The academic science is clear that businesses with more diversity (gender and otherwise) outperform. Period. I present regularly in the GBus 875 class at the University of Regina and I usually start by citing work from the likes of McKinsey and Zenger Folkman on the correlation between gender diversity and business metrics like return on equity and leadership effectiveness. My role as a business leader is to help our organization perform better. This is an easy way to make that happen.  For the record, our organization is gender balanced both at the Board and Executive levels and while we still have work to do in development programming, we are making great progress.

Systemic Leadership Development Bias: The recent #BLM discussions in our community have highlighted the systemic biases that are present as it relates to race / ethnicity. If you look close around us in business and in society, there are many. In my opinion, the same is true for leadership development. Through all of the discussion about growing the number of women executives and directors, the systemic biases have received less attention than the pure numbers of women in these roles. I propose that the development programming, having been largely constructed and approved by the male leaders that were predominantly in place for years within organizations had a bias towards programming that inherently produced more male leaders. In our organization a number of years back, we experimented with development programming built purely to support the growth of female leaders. Some of it worked well, other parts not so much. That said, it was a fascinating experiment that helped me appreciate how the men and women potentially learn and grow differently. I also learned about the ways in which organizations can support and encourage females differently from males. I recognize the risk of over-generalizing the learnings but suffice to say, there are differences. For those of us of the “XY” group that are leaders responsible for building other leaders, it is important for us to understand and appreciate the difference. How we encourage the growth and development of all leaders is based on our appreciation of the differences that exist.

Coaching & Development of Leaders Needs to be Customized: In my experience of recruiting, hiring and developing some exceptional leaders, I have been more aware of looking for the subtle differences that existing when directly coaching, leading and growing successor candidates from both genders.  These differences are now starting to show up in how we discuss succession in our organization and it has also directly led to the growth and attraction of exceptional talent.

My Family Why: I have three teenage daughters that I hope someday will grow into superb community leaders, engaged in making a difference in areas they are passionate about. They deserve the same investment, coaching, support and mentoring as others and then they should have to compete for opportunities based on their ability to add value.

My journey has also included some more challenging conversations. Here are a few samples:

I had a prominent business leader reach out to me one day and ask about my advocacy and support of women leaders. He was quite curious that I would be so open and direct about working with female leaders. He was quick to connect my work to his potential fears in the context of the #MeToo movement and how any suggestion of impropriety might destroy my career. He was VERY clear in the discussion that for him, it wasn’t worth “the risk”. I was quick to point out that I wasn’t mentoring anyone over a martini, in a dimly lit bar, at 11:00 PM. I also pointed out that my mentoring relationships with other leaders (male and female) were largely the same in terms of specific development areas and the format of the meetings (coffee shops, business offices, time of day, etc.). He was not convinced and suggested that he would not “put himself in that position”. I have thought about that call several times since then. I am discouraged by his misplaced fear and also discouraged in the loss of another potential advocate for more gender balance.

I had a graduate student from the University of Regina reach out and ask me to mentor her. I met with her a couple of times and she was quite interested in my public statements about my mentoring choices and gender balance. She asked me if I had ever mentored a woman of colour.  GULP.  I hadn’t and I readily admitted that to her. While I am proud of my mentoring work, I didn’t feel very proud then. I wondered about whether I had ever had the chance or sought to source potential opportunities from other groups less represented in leadership ranks in our community and if so, why hadn’t I pursued those with the same energy. Perhaps that will be my next foray but suffice to say it was a powerful moment for me to recognize that advocacy can’t stop with just gender. Thank you Michelle for being so direct with me.

I have had more than a few fantastic male leaders (some in my own organization today), openly challenge me on my decisions to potentially exclude them from consideration of a mentoring relationship. Again.. OUCH. For someone who prides themselves on developing others, it was hard to hear. I completely understand their emotion of experiencing bias that excludes them. I also sympathize with females who have likely felt that way much longer and in more profound ways. I also wonder about how hypocritical my position appears to be as my career would likely have been very different had I not had access to the mentors I did  (who were almost all male). However, I feel strongly about my why and will press on. I do try to help ensure they have access to a mentor that will add value for them, even if it might not be me. For me, it’s a way to appease the guilt that comes from saying no and that I have disadvantaged a certain group. It is also not lost on me the experience some female leaders have had repeatedly in their careers. While the healthy challenge likely won’t go away (and it shouldn’t) the conversations aren’t always easy.

I attend lots of events in our community that are designed to support the growth of women leaders. Organizations like WESK, RaiseHERCo, YWCA, Women’s Leadership Forums, etc. are doing great work to create places to encourage and support the development of leaders. When I attend, I am usually the only guy there or there is only a handful of others. It makes me feel a bit misplaced and there are times when it is hard to connect. I am getting more comfortable with it over time and when it feels awkward, I remind myself of how it must feel for women leaders when they are one of only a few in the room for other business functions.  I use those feelings as a way to empathize about the feelings it creates, to learn and to appreciate how that might be the same to what others in our community experience. Being the token “dude” has become a bit of a badge of honour but there are lots of times when I have had to push myself to attend as I know it might feel awkward or uncomfortable.

I am mentoring a colleague today and recently, we got into a very deep discussion about the physiology of humans and the differences between XX and XY as we age. It was a very strange but powerful conversation. Afterwards, the two of us talked about how we might share our conversation more broadly within our organization to highlight how awkward it was initially, but how interesting it was to explore and learn from each other. I admit that I never was coached on how to have a conversation about aging (with other male leaders let alone my female colleague), but it was an indication of how the world is changing and it renewed my optimism about the potential for us to better support each other as teammates as we experience life and all that it brings us. Was it awkward? You better believe it. Was I scared shitless? Yes! Did I learn? Lots. Do I better appreciate the differences and use that in my discussions today with other leaders? You betcha. Thanks Nicole for your courage in having that conversation.

This journey is far from over for me. I remain super passionate about using mentoring opportunities to advocate for and develop more female leaders. I have learned to revel in my own discomfort and to accept that it will be hard, uncertain and I won’t know all the answers. I will also continue to be motivated by “my why” and to use the chances I am afforded to make a small difference in bringing more gender diversity to business through mentoring.

Lastly, to my own mentors – Dave, Dave, Jeff, Sean, Paul, Kim, Ian, Dean, Bruce, Alisdair, Laurie and Howard – thank you for everything 😀

For those active in mentoring, does any of this resonate with you? What would you add to the discussion?

What is competitive advantage today? Culture!

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I grew up in the business world expecting that anything worth doing of any consequence could be easily studied, analyzed and the range of any expected outcomes was completely understood. The only way that there were outcomes or risks that were not understood was if you missed thinking about them as part of your work. If something unintended occurred, it was because you overlooked finding examples of where that had happened previously in other organizations or worse yet, in your own organizations with other change efforts.

The world has changed in so many ways but perhaps most of all around uncertainty. Today, as leaders, we are faced with a very VUCA world. Information is overwhelming and it is hard to keep pace with the amount of change taking place in real time, right before our eyes. As a lifer in the cooperative finance space, at one point, I felt pretty comfortable with knowing most of our organization, how it worked and how value was created for our members.

Fast forward to today.

Today, leaders spend considerable time operating in the blender of volatility, ambiguity, complexity and uncertainty. New information emerges daily, consumer expectations change by the moment and to top it off, your technical expertise has eroded considerably as the business has evolved over time. How are you feeling now as a business leader. Uncomfortable?  Ummm…Yup.

The good news is that other things have changed as well that work in our favour. Here are a few:

  1. The capability of employees has increased drastically over the same period. What I learned in graduate school is now being learned much earlier (i.e. high school or undergraduate programs) by emerging leaders and their level of skill and ability is much greater than mine was when I was younger in my career. Emerging leaders are being exposed to innovation, entrepreneurship and courage as a way of life and are more apt to be comfortable in the business environment of today. The challenge will be whether the leaders of today will enable the level of creativity and curiousity that will be necessary to engage emerging leaders but also to harness their skills in a way that has tremendous opportunity to drive value inside of organizations.
  2. Risk Frameworks are so much better defined than they ever have been. In purpose built organizations, like the one I work within, boundaries have been established both around how people behave as well as where organizations are intended to play within. This helps create a playing field that is well established and well known by all. So while employees are more entrepreneurial, there is also a known “sandbox” for all to play in.
  3. Purpose has emerged as the key attribute of best in class organizations. It is no longer possible to have sustainable competitive advantage for extended periods of time. The cost of technology has been reduced to near zero and now organizations that are best in class in creating value are being asked to have cultures that support the continuous creation of value, iteration, innovation and partnerships with others (people, communities, governments, other organizations). The question now is not whether you have a product or service that is unique, but rather, do you have an organizational culture that is unique and can “out quick” your competitors in creating value. This is a very important shift in how organizations can sustain themselves through a very disruptive time.
  4. Leading requires much less technical expertise than people think and more of engaging with people, stakeholders, communities to help deliver on #3 above. The biggest job of leaders today is to create environments that can harvest the diverse perspectives of teams (more on that in another post 👍) and then create a safe place for the group to think critically about how to create value in today’s volatile world. CEO’s are still required to think critically, but in high performing organizations, the critical thinking happens in a group setting. Critical thinking is now a team sport and the CEO or Leader is the Head Coach.

The new competitive advantage is building organizations such that they can continually scan the market, meaningfully engage with customers to define business problems worth solving and then quickly get solutions into production and not stopping there.  From that point, you must continuously refine the product/service through real time feedback with customers. The critical thinking / debate / exploration has to happen in a way that enables speed and innovation and that mindset has to existing throughout the organization. If it does – it becomes the competitive advantage that we all long for.

Here Goes Nothin’

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I have had this domain set aside for a long time and really wanted to get to the point where it was published, but something always got in the way. You know what it was?  Me! 😩

Then, came a global pandemic and while there was much to be concerned with and many things lost or forgone, I did find something that I longed for….time. I also found that I had run out of excuses getting in my way of building this site and to share some thoughts more broadly with my community. So here goes nothing.

Thanks for stopping by for a visit. If you have ideas about any of my posts, leave me a comment on the blog.

If there is anything you’d like to hear more about, let me know. I’d love to hear from you!