CU Jedi Episode VI: What Credit Union Leaders Can Learn from Lando Calrissian

Lando Calrissian:

-          Cocky, gambler, space playboy, and administrator of Cloud City.

-          Jerk that ratted out the Rebel Alliance to the treacherous Darth Vader.

-          Traitor that caused Han Solo to be frozen in carbonite.

You would think that there isn’t much to learn from this caped scoundrel, but Lando teaches us an ultimate lesson in leadership.  He teaches us that sometimes as leaders we are going to have to make some very tough decisions.  He teaches us that sometimes we have to make decisions that regardless of which choice we make, someone will get hurt.

In the Empire Strikes Back, Lando had two choices to make, and really, he had to choose between the lesser of two evils.  He could let the Empire take over his beloved Cloud City (and we know how well the Empire does that……) or he could set a trap to allow Darth Vader to capture Han Solo and company.

While I am sure Lando was morally convicted to make this extremely difficult choice, he had to make a decision between Han or his city.

When this happens, all leaders can do is rely on their decision making process.

As I’ve written in Cornell Day 1: Failure Rocks!, a decision making process involves:

1. Framing (understanding all perspectives)
2. Gathering Intelligence
3. Coming to Conclusions
4. Learning From Experience

As leaders, we can’t always control the outcomes of the decisions we make.  What we can control is our decision making process to ensure we are making the best decision with the information we have available to us.

Just pray that the decision you make doesn’t cause a Wookie to try and choke the living daylights out of you.

Coach

I was just starting out in my credit union career when then Border Credit Union CEO Jeff Mulligan gave me advice that I have never forgotten to this day.

He told me that when he reviewed resumes, he always looked for participation in team sports as teamwork was such an important part of what we do to be a successful credit union.

In my early resumes, I tended not to have a lot to add in terms of work experience or education, so my hockey accomplishments, while minor, was a quick filler.  As the years have passed, I haven’t had to rely so much on my experience with the puck, but I do include the fact that I have been a volunteer coach in soccer, hockey, and now lacrosse.

Regardless of whether it’s a sport or business, the value that coaches play in people’s lives is invaluable.

There have been many hockey coaches that have made a significant impact in my life, but there is always one that comes to mind.  It was my first year of midget hockey at the age of 16.  Being a “rookie” usually meant that leadership roles within the team that tended to be marked with an “A” or “C” were reserved for those that were in their second year of the midget program.

This tradition would soon be flipped on its head.  That year, we had a new coach, and for the most part, he didn’t really know anyone, and perhaps didn’t have the same historical awareness, political ties, or parental influence that goes with minor hockey.

For whatever reason, be it effort, be it a voice in the dressing room, be it how I represented myself, the coach made me, a rookie, the captain of our team that year.

That vote of confidence, from someone that I hardly knew, has stuck with me forever.  He saw the potential I had to take on a leadership role with our team.  A role that initially I didn’t believe I had the ability to do myself.

So the next time you are coaching someone, whether it’s coaching your staff to success, or teaching your child’s 4 year old soccer team how to kick a ball, remember the difference that you are making in their lives.

That is what being a great coach can do.

Devin Selte

CU Jedi Episode V: What Credit Union Leaders Can Learn from Chewbacca

Chewbacca.  Sometimes the forgotten hero of the Star Wars series.

Why is that?

Well, you could say that  when we are first introduced to the towering Wookie, he was a prototypical follower.  And there is nothing wrong with that.

In fact, I would contend that you must first be a great follower before you can be a great leader.

In 2011, Michael Hyatt wrote a blog “Why the Best Leaders Are Great Followers”.  In the article, he shared how great followers share 5 key characteristics.

He wrote:

1. They are clear. They understand their role. You can’t be a good follower unless you have clearly identified the leader. While you may be a leader in your own realm, everyone has a boss—including you. Great followers not only accept this fact but embrace it.

Chewbacca knew his role.  On paper, he was co-pilot of the Millennium Falcon and sidekick of Han Solo.  In our hearts, he was the lovable, over the top teddy bear that was willing to sacrifice himself for his boss, and the Rebel Alliance.

2. They are obedient. While obedience may be a politically incorrect concept, it is essential for organizational effectiveness. No one should be allowed to give orders who can’t obey orders. This is how great leaders model to their own followers the standards of acceptable behavior.

Whether it was using his key mechanical skills to fix the Millennium Falcon, or using his blaster to save his friends from near death, Chewbacca did everything that was asked of him, and more.

3. They are servants. This is crucial. Great followers are observant. They notice what needs to be done to help the leader accomplish his or her goals. Then they do it—joyfully, without grumbling or complaining.

Well, I can’t honestly say that Chewy didn’t do his job without grumbling or throwing out the odd “uuuurrrrrr ahhhhhhhrrrrr uuuurrrrrr” from time to time.  Sometimes silence is tough to do when you have a leader like Han Solo, whose emotional intelligence is as low as the Emperor’s love for Yoda.  At the end of the day, Chewie still got the job done.

4. They are humble. Great followers don’t make it about them. They are humble. They shine the light on the leader. They make their own boss look good—especially in front of his or her boss.

Perhaps it’s easy to be humble when nobody understands what you are saying, but Chewy definitely wasn’t one to have the glow of a lightsaber shine on him.  He quietly went about his business and helped save the world from the Dark Side.  No biggy.

5. They are loyal. Michael Hyatt has written on this before. Great followers never speak ill of their boss in public. This doesn’t mean they can’t disagree or even criticize. It just means that they don’t do it in public. Great followers understand that public loyalty leads to private influence.

If you had to describe Chewbacca in one word, without reference to his appearance, the word that easily comes to mind is loyalty.  He never wavered from his undying dedication to Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, and the Rebel Alliance.

There is no doubt in my eyes that Chewbacca should be considered a leader in the Star Wars series.  But to first do that, he had to be a great follower first.

Devin

Cornell Conclusion: The Big 3 from the Big Red

In most of the training sessions that I provide as part of my role as a corporate trainer at Servus Credit Union, I think back to the days when I was on the other side of the desk at the student.

Most training days are filled with an incredible amount of useful knowledge, but it is extremely hard to remember it all.  My rule of thumb is to try to take away a couple of key items that you think you can implement to better support yourself or support the success of your team.

As my experience at Cornell comes to a close (still have the post assignment to do!) I would like to share with you my Big 3 takeaway items, as well as plans for implementation, from the Big Red.

Rewarding Right Decisions Because of Good Process, Even with Poor Results:  This one really made me think.  Most of the time we reward based on results, and not so much our decision making process or actions.  We have to remember that we can’t control everything.  Sometimes luck just isn’t on our side.  I would like to take greater time to ensure that I have a sound decision making process and relying less on my intuition.  By having the right process, I will be more comfortable if I am not getting the results I am looking for, but know I made the right choice.

Expand My Social Capital:  Discussed it Day 5, it was quite apparent that most of my connections come from the credit union industry.  While this is good for collaborating within the credit union system, perhaps there is additional opportunity to look outside of my world to bring new innovation to Servus.

Over the next 12 months, I would like to expand my network within a few areas:

1. Fort Saskatchewan – Being new to the community and not actually working within it (I work in Edmonton), it’s been a bit harder to get to meet people.  With that being said, as I continue to coach my son’s hockey and lacrosse teams, I will start building new relationships and new connections with the community.
2. Junior Achievement – When I was in business banking, my schedule allowed for me to participate more with this program.  Once my schedule allows for it, I plan to again get more involved with teaching financial literacy to students of Edmonton, which will also allow me to connect with teachers, principals, as well as various business leaders within the City of Edmonton and its surrounding community.
3. Junior Chamber International Edmonton (
   http://www.jciedmonton.com
   ) – Stumbled upon these guys when someone retweeted one of their posts in my Twitter feed.  Here is the description of who they are:

JCI Edmonton is the premiere personal and professional development organization for young leaders in our great city.                

Connecting with young leaders outside of credit unions and developing self at the same time…..I’m in heaven.

The Strength of Culture:  If you haven’t heard the Zappos story on culture, you really need to check it out.  They have 5 weeks of onboarding.  Create fun and a little weirdness is one of their corporate values.  They hire and fire based on those values.  Their culture has everyone working and thinking together.

This is the business challenge that I would like to focus my final assignment on.  How can credit union’s maintain a high enough level of professionalism when dealing with people’s money, but still bring in a little bit of weirdness in to create a strong culture which will ultimately lead to greater member value?

Looking forward to the challenge.

Devin

P.S. In case you were wondering, I didn’t have to swim to graduate from Cornell, but I did Kaoroke for the first time.

We’ll leave it at that.

Cornell Day 5: Dig Your Well Before You Are Thirsty

My friends and family like to make fun of me for my excessive use of social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

I like to connect with people both through face to face experiences, but also in a virtual environment.

I like to build relationships with people and that is extremely important when we are in an industry about people helping people.

For the last day of our session at Cornell (last Friday), we focused on networks and using them to our advantage in business.  Two sets of resources that we all possess as people are human capital and social capital.

Human capital consists of a variety of aspects including:

-       Knowledge

-       Skills

-       Abilities

-       Needs

-       Motives

-       Character (Integrity, Reputation)

-       Traits (Charisma,Confidence, and Conscientiousness)

Social capital is the resources we have available to use based on our personal and business networks.  The value of social capital resides in the opportunity to create relationships with other people.

As part of our class, we were asked to complete a LinkedIn Map based on the connections we have through their site.  Here is mine:

I have ties to the credit union community.  Having those connections has provided me with a lot of great opportunities and experiences, and was also a key contributor to the creation of the Servus Young Leaders Network.

Throughout the week, we’ve been challenged with looking outside of our worlds to bring creativity and innovation into our credit unions.  As our instructors have repeatedly said, creativity is an import and export business.  It is about taking an idea from here and putting it over there.

It’s obvious that I have a tremendous opportunity to increase my social capital outside of the credit union community.  Our facilitator Kathleen O’Connor summed this up perfectly by saying, “You need to dig your well before you are thirsty.” While I am not currently in a member facing or direct people leadership role, it doesn’t mean that I should not be looking for opportunities to connect with people both in my community and outside of the credit union industry.

I’ve started digging a well, but I need to dig it deeper and wider to get the gold.

Cornell Day 4: Let’s Bargain!

Some days I wonder how I was able to convince my beautiful wife to marry me.

I’ll tell you one thing, it sure wasn’t because I can bargain!

Our 4^th day at Cornell was spent practicing the art of negotation.  Realistically, it reconfirmed a gap area of mine in which I quickly jump into things before I truly assess the important facts.

This remained true for my first opportunity for a 1 on 1 negotiation session where I quickly read my company’s assessement on purchasing a competitor that would bring great value to our organization that was possibly in some financial trouble.  By not taking the time to note that I should be comparing my purchase price to a comparable offer of $225,000,000 for a similar out of country company, I negotiated a price of $325,000,000.  In all fairness, I was not the highest purchaser in the class, and also a new facility would cost me $350,000,000 and the CEO gave me a blank check of $450,000,000 to buy what I needed.  None the less, a noted weakness of mine was highlighted like a mistake on a 6 year old’s spelling test (miss my kids).

As the day progressed, I got better…I think.  To be honest, I don’t feel I am a great negotiator, other than when it comes to my wife (due to much practice), however, our learnings from the CUES program at Cornell today will help me improve.

Today was a lot of interaction with my fellow classmates, in which I continue to learn so much from.

We all were also introduced to the acronym of SHIFT.

SHIFT is the way you think about negotiation, paving the way for wins.  To SHIFT you need to:

Separate interestes from positions

Hear the other side

Invest in the relationship

Frame negotiation as a problem to be solved

Think creatively

What tactics do you use to support you in bargaining?

Please share, I could use the help!

Cornell Day 3: The Womb of Civilization

You’re probably scratching your head trying to figure out what the title of this blog has to do with credit unions and Day 3 of the CUES CEO Institute II at Cornell.

Well, it does a lot.

Our main focus for the day was on Leading with Power and is summed up best with this quote:

“Driving changes in strategy, structure, and culture will, in part, rest on your ability to build power & influence, network & ability…..”

Our closing exercise called “The Kidney Case” allowed us to spend a lot of time practicing the area of influence and power.  As part of our pre-reading, we were provided with 9 candidates who were vying for a kidney transplant and it was our challenge to rank them in order from 1 to 9 on who would get the kidney.  After much discussion in areas of building influence, perception, mindset, body language, and power posing throughout the day, we were split into teams and assigned 1 of the 9 candidates.  In 30 minutes, we were to develop a presentation to convince our fellow classmates (acting as the Transplant Review Board) to select our candidate as the recipient of the available kidney.

The candidate that I selected to receive the transplant was a 15 year old straight A student who was a volunteer tutor for learning-disabled children.  She was the daughter of a visiting ambassador.  This fact did not matter in my consideration as all children’s lives are precious, regardless of what country you call home.  I initially had her as my number 2 prior to the presentation, however, when the words “The Womb of Civilization” were spoken by my fellow classmate (and acting doctor of the girl) I was sold.

As for me, well, I was selected as our presenter based on my experience in presenting, mainly from winning the Next Top Credit Union executive title.  Only problem……I need to get American.  With a picture of the American flag and bald eagle proudly watching over me, I did the best to represent our 34 year old war veteran who had risked his life for his country.  Unfortunately during the presentation I said he needed a new liver, not a new kidney.  OOPS!  Either way, loads of fun today for everyone.

I would like to leave you with my AHA moment for the day.  It was this:

Higher Status & Power à More Autonomy/Control à Less Stress

Don’t believe me…check out this article with analytic evidence: It’s Good to Be the Top Banana.

At first I was quite shocked by this report, however, once I started thinking about my career over the years, and where I am at today, I fully support this claim.  Quite frankly, I feel more stressed in my current position as compared to when I was senior relationship manager team lead in business banking with five direct reports and managing a loan portfolio of over $100,000,000.

What are your thoughts?  Would love to hear from you!

And remember….

God Bless America!