Credit Union Blind Spots: Leadership Wedges

The Wedge
There is a story about an iron wedge that I recall hearing years ago. The legend was told by a white-haired farmer who recalled as a young boy finding a faller’s wedge. The wedge was flat, and heavy, a foot or more long, and splayed from mighty poundings.

[For those of you who do not know a faller’s wedge is, it is used to help fell a tree. It is inserted in a cut made by a saw and then struck with a sledgehammer to widen the cut.]

Now the young man who came across the wedge was already late for dinner, so he laid the wedge down between the limbs of the young walnut tree his father had planted near the front gate. As he headed for home he told himself that he would take the wedge to the shed right after dinner, or sometime the next day.

Filled with good intentions the young man meant to deal with the wedge, but somehow there was always something more pressing to attend to. Soon the wedge was firmly gripped as time moved forward and the man married and took over his father’s farm.

 The wedge, grown in and healed over, was still in the tree the winter the ice storm came. In the dark silence of that bitter night one of the three major limbs split away from the trunk and crashed to the ground. This so unbalanced the remainder of the top that it, too, split apart and went down.

The next morning in the light of dawn not a twig of the once-proud tree remained. It was to this sight that the farmer awoke. With time to only mourn his loss the man’s eyes caught sight of something in the splintered ruin of the once proud tree.

 ‘The wedge,’ he muttered reproachfully. ‘The wedge I found in the south pasture.’ A glance told him why the tree had fallen. Growing, edge-up in the trunk, the wedge had prevented the limb fibers from knitting together as they should.

Credit Union Wedges - The Core Group

Today like the farmer in the story many credit unions suffer from wedges that are embedded into the cultural fibers of their organizations. They have simply grown used to all decisions being made by a core group. Typically this group are the ones that have been with the credit union for thirty years and started as a part time teller and worked their way up to the lofty inner circles where all the real decisions happen.  

Instead of looking for ideas and solutions from others, this group sees creativity and insight as a privilege. You are either in or you are out of the process. This group of leaders unwittingly holds back the energy and talent of those around them. Instead of looking for new intellect to add to the dialog they fall back on recycled ideas that are simply versions of other recycled ideas from playbooks that worked for them “back in the day.”

Imagine what the other side of the spectrum could look like. Where would your credit union be if it had leaders that sought to unleash talent and to multiply the abilities of those around them? Picture a leadership team that actively sought how to double the brainpower of staff and managers for the good of the organization.

I came across an article that talked about how leaders can magnify and unleash the talents of others that listed the following attributes:

Attract and Optimize Talent:

When you hire talented people learn the capabilities of the individual so you can connect them to opportunities to improve the group. See beyond organizational titles and look for talent at various levels of the organization. Cultivate and reward people who seek to come up with solutions. Spot light them to the organization in a newsletter or with your internal media boards.

Create a Culture of Intensity:

The maze of titles and offices and small minded kingdoms that come with internal politics are the breeding grounds for mediocrity. You simply need to scan the newspapers for credit unions and community banks that invested everything into the talents of too few people to see this play out. They would be on the list headlined by the words “Regulators Seized”.  Peel back the label on many of these institutions and you would find managers that created tension and anxiety by suppressing the best ideas from those around them. At the first hint of danger they circle the intellectual wagons and stop communication to the very people they need the best ideas from.  

Great leaders do just the opposite by giving everyone the information they need with permission to voice their ideas on that information. This unleashing of ideas draws in people to the process. Spectators on the team are pushed to the sidelines and your natural leaders and creative thought workers get busy making things better.


Toss the Ball

If you were watching your favorite sports team (soccer, football, basketball, and baseball) you would be horrified if you saw the same person take the ball and try to win without ever giving the ball to anyone else. It would be baffling to even consider such a strategy.

Today in financial services too often the “thought police” do exactly that.  They rely solely on their own understanding when they consider what direction to set for the organization. This same mistake is then multiplied by each lower level of the organization as leaders are taught and groomed not to engage others. These leaders spend the majority of their time “telling” others instead of “asking” others.

Don't wait until it is too late and then look at the wedge you never took the time to deal with. A wonderful experiment is to spend your next week asking the hard questions that spark ideas in others. Instead of answering your own questions allow those around you to fill in the voids you have presented. Allow yourself to toss the ball and give those around you permission to catch the ball and run with it. Don't fall trap to one of the common credit union blind spots of not removing the wedge and looking beyond the people in front of you. Magnify the intelligence of your organization by engaging others and letting them fill the voids you know exist.