By Lisa Hochgraf
Here at CUES Symposium: A CEO/Chairman Exchange, we've been taping short interviews with attendees and speakers. These videos will become part of CUES' new Center for Credit Union Board Excellence.
Yesterday I had the privilege of shooting a video of Les Wallace, Ph.D., speaking about the importance of critical thinking in leadership. (And now I'm really pumped to go to his session, too.)
President of Signature Resources Inc., and co-author of A Legacy of 21st Century Leadership, Wallace said that critical thinking helps boards go from seeing individual transactions to seeing entire processes. In other words, it helps them go from seeing the pieces of their organizations to taking a holistic view.
To illustrate his point, Wallace cited "The Work of Leadership" by Ronald A. Heifetz and Donald L. Laurie. The authors suggest that leaders need to get "up on the balcony" to get better perspective on the organization they're leading.
"Business leaders have to be able to view patterns as if they were on a balcony," the authors write in the Harvard Business Review article. "It does them no good to be swept up in the field of action. Leaders have to see a context for change or create one. They should give employees a strong sense of the history of the enterprise and what’s good about its past, as well as an idea of the market forces at work today and the responsibility people must take in shaping the future. Leaders must be able to identify struggles over values and power, recognize patterns of work avoidance, and watch for the many other functional and dysfunctional reactions to change."
So yesterday, the garage for innovation and today the balcony for perspective. Where do you go to get inspired?
Lisa Hochgraf is a CUES editor.
Read "Permanent Whitewater" by Les Wallace from Credit Union Management.
