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:
- How do you help your organization move forward when your superiors may be creating roadblocks?
- How to pitch ideas and generate buy-in
- 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 🙂
