9 minutes
Every business executive’s leadership has a far-reaching effect on the organization. The way employees do their jobs is greatly influenced by the cues they receive from above—whether those cues are intentional or unintentional, articulated or implied.
That’s why it’s important for a credit union leader to take a hard look at his or her management style, vision, goals and values. It all trickles down. If a CU’s leadership isn’t clear and coherent and in keeping with the institution’s mission, there’s no way the members will be happy.
In the CUES Elite Access™ executive education series, CUES offers a remote learning course called Leadership Brand and Shadow in partnership with Cornell University. The course examines two facets of well-thought-out leadership. The first, leadership brand, is a reflection of how you as a leader are perceived by peers and employees. It’s a brief statement about who you are that can help you to capitalize on your strengths, prioritize your work, lead more clearly, and maximize your effectiveness.
The second, leadership shadow, is the way a leader’s behavior affects the behavior of other staff members and the organization’s culture as a whole. Whether they realize it or not, employees look to management for clues as to how to behave. That’s the shadow your leadership style casts.
The stakes are high. To really know what effect you’re having on employees and members, you have to find out how people perceive you, then put some real thought into whether that’s the way you want to be perceived. What shadow are you casting? And what brand would you like to represent? What’s the best way to be an authentic leader and bring the greatest possible value to the CU?
Compete on Strengths
The main purpose of the Leadership Brand and Shadow course is to help executives carve out time and space to reflect on their strengths as a contributor to their organizations, says Kathleen O’Connor, Ph.D., associate professor at Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management, Ithaca, N.Y.
“Whenever we’re trying to identify strengths, we’re also going to be considering what some of our weaknesses are,” points out O’Connor, who taught the inaugural Leadership Brand and Shadow course in 2014. “There’s a minimum level that we all want to invest in our biggest weaknesses so they don’t weigh us down in our career, so they don’t become major obstacles to our achievements. But it’s much easier for us to compete on our strengths than to compete on our weaknesses.”
Most of us wouldn’t be able to name our greatest strengths, at least not with any assurance. That’s where the Reflected Best Self exercise comes in. Developed at the University of Michigan, the model forms the centerpiece for the course.
“Participants are asked to consider their own strengths,” O’Connor explains. “They’re also asked to find 10 to 20 feedback providers from all walks of their lives who have also had a chance to see them at their best. Those feedback providers will also describe situations, again, where they noticed that the respondent was really at their best and behaved in particularly notable ways.”
Melissa Christian, member solutions manager at $576 million Corporate America Family Credit Union, Elgin, Ill. (with 65,000 members and 200 employees), took the course and found the feedback very revealing.
“I equated it to having your eulogy while you’re still alive,” Christian laughs. “Some of the things people brought up as having made such a difference to them were things that I thought were no big deal. For instance, I had a peer who approached me before a big meeting with a member of management. She was really nervous about it and she was thinking about canceling. I encouraged her and gave her a [motivational] book I had just finished reading. She said it made a big difference to her, and she appreciated that I took the time to do it. You realize how the small things that you do can have a big impact on other people.”
Hugh Blane, president of Claris Consulting, Seattle, uses a similar leadership branding exercise with the executives he coaches.
“One of the things I ask my clients to do is ... to ask four to five of your employees—[plus] four to five of your key stakeholders in the organization who don’t necessarily directly report to you, maybe some customers, maybe your boss—how your leadership either positively or negatively impacts those you work with,” he says.
This type of feedback, O’Connor says, tends to be vivid and detailed, and far more positive than managers are used to hearing in their working lives.
“We tend to hear about things when they’re not going very well, or we get generically positive feedback,” she says. “That’s not the same as ‘I saw you at your best when you stayed past working hours to support a colleague,’ or ‘I saw you at your best when you managed a sick parent with a project deadline with grace and patience.’ We usually just don’t get that.”
Leadership Venn Diagram
Identifying your strengths is only one part of defining your purpose and creating a cohesive leadership brand. Blane says the other two parts are realizing what you’re truly passionate about—what do you get lost in? what gives you energy?—and figuring out where you can bring the greatest value to your organization and your members.
“At the intersection of those three questions is where your purpose is,” he says. And that purpose, he says, should serve as the basis of your brand.
O’Connor visualizes a similar Venn diagram, based on the feedback from the Reflected Best Self exercise. Values affect your decisions, your priorities, and how you treat other people, she says, so she gives participants food for thought, showing them how other executives’ values affect their leadership.
“I interweave stories from executives into this experience so that people can see that there are lots of different kinds of leaders out there,” she says. “Some leaders will say, ‘What’s important to me is integrity, candor, and results.’ Other leaders will say, ‘What’s important to me is compassion and fostering trust.’ There are different archetypes, different models of being a leader that might appeal to different kinds of people. There’s no one best way.”
Once managers have considered their strengths and their values, O’Connor invites them to think about how those strengths and values match up with the needs of the organization. All credit unions have specific values and brand identities; the question is, is the leader’s brand a good fit? If it isn’t, could it be, with a few tweaks or a different job description?
“What’s incumbent upon the participant is to consider the feedback, consider their own beliefs, and then figure out if there is a sweet spot,” she explains. “It’s an intersection of [your] strengths and values with opportunities to exercise and express those. You’re looking for times when you can be true to your values and strengths, or you have an opportunity to play to your strengths. If my strength is in mentoring others, I have to make sure I create opportunities where I can do that.”
Ideas Into Action
How, then, does leadership shadow relate to brand? That becomes apparent when you look at leadership brand from a slightly different angle. There are three dimensions to any brand, says Blane: your default brand, your desired brand, and your designed brand. The default brand is what you’re doing already; the desired brand is the brand that’s most in line with your talents and values; and the designed brand is the way you put the desired brand into action.
“What is it you really want to be known for?” he asks. “In your heart of hearts, what would you like people to say about you at your retirement party? That’s your desired brand.”
Susan Geear, VP/innovative education and leadership at DDJ Myers Ltd., a CUES Supplier member and strategic provider based in Phoenix, says she sometimes calls this desired brand “leadership identity.”
“Trustworthiness and reliability are some of those fundamentals that we assume [leaders want to be known for], but what else? If I’m leading an IT division, what do I want to be known for there? Innovation? Being progressive? Customer service?”
In contrast, the designed brand is the leadership shadow: how your brand really affects peers, employees, and members because of the way you behave as a leader. In Geear’s terms, it’s how you assert your identity.
Blane says, “Designed brand is simply, ‘How do I behavioralize [my desired brand]?’ What kind of conversations do I need to start having? How do I need to change what’s on my calendar? I encourage you to come up with three things that you’re willing to commit to doing, that you’ll make a promise to yourself and others, ‘I will absolutely get every single one of these done every week.’”
O’Connor calls leadership shadow the brass tacks—the way you enact your brand.
“Leadership shadow is what you’re talking about, how you’re conducting yourself, who you’re meeting with and not meeting with, what your priorities are, what behaviors you’re rewarding,” she says. “I think if we can enact the brand and we are consistent with what our strengths and values are ... it’s so much easier to be authentic at work.”
Beyond Technical Expertise
When leaders create a strong leadership brand and understand the power of their leadership shadow, the credit union and its members benefit. But leaders also gain valuable insight that can help them personally in their careers. O’Connor says she’s found that when people get to a certain level, they have plenty of technical expertise and have racked up successes—but they still need to create a compass so they know which direction to go.
“Once you can create a very concrete statement about ‘I am at my best when I…,’ it makes it much easier for you to say yes to opportunities that will allow you to be at your best and to really shine,” she says.
Leaders who take the Leadership Brand and Shadow course can be at the executive level already, but Christian says middle managers can benefit just as much, if not more. She herself is middle management, and she believes the chance to reflect on her personal brand has made her more aware of her strengths and turned her into a more valuable employee of her credit union. It has also given her the confidence to aim for positions outside her existing field of expertise.
“I’ve been in banking and the credit union industry since the mid-’80s, and my experience has always been in lending,” she says. “In late 2012, I was given the opportunity to manage our collections department, which we now call member solutions. I had literally no experience in collections whatsoever. But it was my core strengths that got me the opportunity and have so far, to date, made me successful.
“As you progress up the corporate ladder, you need to sell yourself just as much on your core personal strengths as on your technical skills. That, along with the course, made me realize that I’m not just a one-trick pony. I can do other things and do them well because of the skill set that I have. It opens your eyes to the greater possibilities.”
Jamie Swedberg is a freelance writer based in Georgia.
