The NAFCU Journal: The Future of Leadership

By John Spence

The new Leadership Download column provides credit union executives with insights into running successful businesses.

The NAFCU Journal: Leadership Download Column - The Future of Leadership, By John Spence

I have seen great organizations destroyed by dysfunctional leadership and mediocre organizations rise to greatness through effective leadership. Although there are some fundamentals of leadership that will never change, I believe we are seeing a shift in what is required to be a successful leader. It is a lesson I have learned over and over in nearly 30 years as an executive coach and organizational trainer: As goes the leadership team, so goes the entire organization.

Massive technological advances, combined with a millennial workforce that has a different view of what role a leader should play, will have a profound impact on every credit union. To be successful as a leader in the future, I believe there are three key “quotients” in which every leader must excel.

The Intelligence Quotient

To be effective, it is essential that a leader is highly competent in two areas: their actual job function and their leadership skills. Th is means leaders need to be constantly honing their skills, learning more and pushing themselves to improve.

Unfortunately, far too few people embrace the idea of lifelong learning. The average college graduate reads only 0.5 books per year after they leave school. If you were to read just one skill-enhancement book every other month — six books a year — you would be in the top 1 percent in the United States. If you were to read one a month, you would be in the top 1 percent in the world for self-learning.

Research into brain plasticity shows that you can increase your IQ if you continue to stay mentally active, but your IQ can also go down if you don’t!

The Emotional Quotient

Your emotional quotient (EQ) reflects your ability to show empathy and compassion and make genuine connections with others. We are learning that EQ is as important as or more important than IQ. A competent leader who can’t connect with people might be respected, but they won’t engender loyalty.

According to Daniel Goleman, one of the world’s leading experts on EQ, there are five fundamental features of EQ:

  1. Self-awareness
  2. Self-regulation
  3. Empathy
  4. Self-motivation
  5. Social skills

In my book, Excellence by Design: Leadership, I boil down the combination of both forms of intelligence to one key phrase: “I am good at what I do (IQ), and I do it because I care (EQ) about you.”

If you demonstrate that you are competent, and work hard every day to get better to support and serve your team, you will be a leader people want to follow.

But IQ and EQ are not enough; you must also have AQ, or adaptability quotient.

The Adaptability Quotient

This may be the most critical quotient moving forward: the ability to discard old ideas, embrace new ideas, adjust your frame of reference and be agile in dealing with constant change. Th is will be imperative not only for leaders but for entire organizations.

The best way to improve AQ is to expose yourself to a broad spectrum of information. Innovative and agile thinking comes from taking your personal knowledge and experience and combining it with new ideas you have never seen before. This leads to insights that will help you anticipate change and lead more effectively.

To create a highly adaptable organization, a recent McKinsey & Company research study indicated, there are five characteristics of agile organizations:

  1. Shared purpose and vision
  2. Network of empowered teams
  3. Rapid decision and learning cycles
  4. Organizational culture that ignites passion
  5. Effective implementation of next-generation technologies

In other words: a motivated group of people that works well together, embraces change and has a strong desire to grow the organization and themselves.

The speed of change in your credit union is only going to increase. To succeed in the future, all leaders on your team must work to improve their IQ, EQ and AQ.

John Spence is an international keynote speaker, executive coach and organizational trainer who has worked helping credit unions for more than 15 years. Spence will lead a leadership workshop at NAFCU’s Management and Leadership Institute this fall.

This article was published in the March-April 2020 edition of The NAFCU Journal magazine. 
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