The Berger Leadership Blog

Too Big to Grow?

Recently, NAFCU Executive Vice President and COO Anthony Demangone wrote in his blog, “Musings from the CU Suite,” that Facebook is now worth more than General Electric. He noted that it was a marker of the changing times. So I thought of that when I saw in Forbes that the value of Amazon has now surpassed the value of Walmart.

“Given that Walmart is the world’s largest retailer, it is pretty amazing that a company launched as an online bookseller by a former banker only 21 years ago could be worth more than what has long been retailing’s juggernaut,” Forbes said. But they also pointed out something crucial: After becoming so gargantuan and crowding out the competition, Walmart stopped growing in 2011. Its profits now increase just 1 percent each year, and as a result they keep wages and benefits low, which doesn’t help their reputation.

Amazon, meanwhile, responded to a changing market, and it grew more slowly. Now, it’s so convenient and well-known to consumers that it will be hard to stop.

I think credit unions can do the same thing when it comes to competing with too-big-to-grow banks. Banks are still huge – but their customer service and products are not growing better and more affordable, respectively. Meanwhile, credit unions’ reach is growing as consumers notice how convenient and personalized their service can be.

When consumers are prioritizing convenience and personal service over the companies that have been biggest in the past, it’s a great time for credit unions to shine.

And speaking of different workplaces: Make sure to check out NAFCU’s new Salary Comparison Report, in which we highlight compensation trends for a wide variety of professions that are most common in the industry, with data from both state and metropolitan levels for different credit union occupations.

Declutter your office, declutter your business

There are plenty of programs on TV about home improvement, and many involve attempting to declutter a really messy house – sometimes extreme hoarding situations. I thought of those shows when a recent article in Forbes noted that Jack Welch used to compare GE to a large old house with a bunch of junk in the attic, which needed to be cleaned out from time to time.

Your credit union might not need a literal cleaning out – although I’m sure we all have a few stacks of paper that we don’t really need anymore – but like Welch said, every organization needs some spring cleaning from time to time.

Forbes said you “have to identify where your business — or your unit, function, or team — needs to ‘move’ in order to be exceptionally successful. This will give you and your colleagues the motivation to get rid of the clutter that’s slowing you down. For example, the head of a financial services firm recently challenged his team to increase their face-time with customers by 10%. This ‘move’ forced them to examine what they should stop doing, how they could streamline work, how they could improve the collaboration between the customer-facing teams and the back office, and more.”

Here at NAFCU, we’ve been talking about our pared-down strategy of focusing on advocacy, education and compliance assistance, because those are the things we do best and those are the things our members need and expect from us. That strategy is helping us move past some clutter that no longer needed our attention. What clutter can be cleaned out of your business model and strategy? It’s no longer springtime, but it might be time for a cleaning.

Is your to-do list helping or hurting?

Do you like to use to-do lists? I do, but like most people, I rarely complete all my list items. However, I don’t feel that bad about it – at least not now:  According to an article in Forbes, 41 percent of the items on the average to-do list are never finished.

That means that to-do lists often turn into more of a source of stress than satisfaction. “It’s no wonder we feel so overwhelmed in the day, but fight insomnia at night,” Forbes notes.

Also – when you pick items to finish from the list, are you picking the most important items or just focusing on what can get done fast? That can leave important issues – like regular check-ups with your doctor – unaddressed because of that never-ending list of more “urgent” (but less important) tasks.

Forbes contributor Kevin Kruse says that in his more than 200 interviews with billionaires, Olympic athletes and entrepreneurs, no one has mentioned a to-do list. Instead, he says, they “live and work from their calendar.” Calendars show you how much time you’re spending on each issue, allow you to prioritize and keep things balanced. When you’re not trying to race through a list but are working to balance your week, you might find it helps you focus on what you need – and what your team needs.

Think about how best to balance your day and week in terms of what you need to do to work best with your team. Think in terms of what your organization needs from you. If you keep postponing the important things in favor of finishing off a list of small things, you won’t be doing yourself or your team any favors.

How to fight stress

If you ask any American if they’ve felt stress recently, I bet that nine times out of 10 you’ll get a response in the affirmative. It seems inevitable no matter what we do. But there are strategies to help combat stress – and, in particular, strategies that help leaders lessen the stress felt by their employees.

The Harvard Business Review cites a few examples of how to keep balance in the workplace. Among other things, they suggest:

• focusing on what matters – making sure your team is fulfilling the purpose it was meant to fulfill, without extraneous distractions;
• an “edited” workload – don’t say yes to every new project without considering whether it’s a good fit for your team;
• uninterrupted work time – employees need at least an hour daily – maybe three – in which they know they’ll have no unnecessary interruptions, in order to be productive;
• set objectives for meetings – come up with three objectives for your meeting, and make sure it can’t be accomplished with an email instead;
• limit your emailing – after-hours email should be the exception, not the rule; and
• lead by example – if you act purposefully and don’t just respond to every new distraction, you’ll set the tone for your employees.

We can fight stress if we focus on what matters and keep at it. Very few people think they produce their best work when stressed out and frazzled – and we want our employees’ best work! It may require some changed habits, but a stressed-out workplace is hardly inevitable.

How to help employees be awesome

You may or may not say the word “awesome” very often out loud – but I hope you think your employees are awesome. I certainly think my team is awesome. But it turns out that saying it out loud – telling your team that you believe in them and think they are awesome – can make them do even more awesome work.

Harvard Business Review recently ran an article from leadership development consultants Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman. They found that managers who consistently rated their employees more positively than others – what they called “positive-rating managers” – were rewarded by employees with higher engagement. Employees with positive-rating managers average in the 60^th percentile of engagement scores, while those who worked for negative-rating managers scored around the 47^th percentile. They even found that other employees viewed the employees under negative-rating managers as being less effective.

“This is a particularly alarming possibility when you consider the seemingly reasonable motives of those who gave consistently lower ratings,” Zenger and Folkman wrote. “We frequently heard them say something like, ‘I want my people to get the message that I have high expectations.’ Those who gave high marks to their people also had high expectations, but they were more focused on sending the message that they had confidence in their people. They truly felt that they had selected the best people for those positions, and they expected them to succeed.”

How we act and what we say as leaders makes a difference. It’s good to remember that high expectations are better communicated through positive reinforcement rather than negative feedback.