3 minutes
To find the new ideas necessary to take your credit union to the next level, you may need to walk empty, unknown corridors.
This is excerpted with permission from Benezet's book, The Journey of Not Knowing.
Evening in an office ushers in an odd tranquility. With the departure of the workforce, the daily hubbub of conversation, machine noise and human movement ceases. The scene changes to a few remaining workers who hunch over their desks absorbed in projects or quiet. The atmosphere is one of enveloping calm and deep concentration.
For an executive, evening has a different breed of quiet. Without employees, vendors, or investors filling the doorframe, it can present a moment of disconcerting emptiness. The usual distractions of the business day that so automatically structure the time disappear. No one is around to ask for input, bring up a new problem or harp on an organizational complaint.
At this moment arrives a critical choice. Always in plain view loom unsorted emails, reports, and requests beckoning executive attention. Indeed, such items require attention, and doing things that need doing does move things forward. The feeling of satisfaction that comes with checking things off a list is hard to resist.
It is just that spending valuable time on them does not take the organization to a new and better place, a place yet to be discovered.
Leadership, put simply, is about discovering strategic ideas that lift an organization to a better place and bringing others along to make them happen. It takes you away from the well-worn, prescribed routines of business life into corridors not seen before, unknown places that hold endless promise, ambiguity and trepidation.
Winning means generating ideas that move the business into the future to improve the lives of customers, employees, shareholders, and communities. Between producing ideas and delivering them lies the reality of daily business life, an obstacle course of personal and organizational hurdles that can make it tough to achieve results. By their nature, new ideas are hard to make real. That is what makes them so compelling. Furthermore, as the ideas evolve, leaders also evolve to want more and better for their organizations.
Leaders succeed by stepping into new places without the benefit of a clear road map, and convincing others to join as they create a route. The courage to do that has to come from them. It is not for everyone, yet to understand its properties can open the door to deep professional and personal rewards.
Leadership offers those who choose it an opportunity to have an impact on people’s lives. Driving the urge to lead is a hunger rising out of life history, dreams and personal values to find untried ideas that will make a positive difference.
To satisfy that hunger, a leader enters a large labyrinth of unfamiliar, dimly lit corridors of endless questions and choices. The corridors twist, turn, and exit at some yet-to-be-known place. It can feel inefficient, unfamiliar, and anxiety provoking. Yet in those twists and turns lies a journey toward the possibilities of something different, bigger, better.
The journey through those corridors is intense; a leader ultimately takes the journey alone. When you are a leader, you lead the expedition that others might or might not want to join. Generating visions for better futures can feel exhilarating. At the same time, what is hard to fathom is that while you are exploring the scary place of new ideas, not everyone will want to spend time there with you. That is because when you embark on the leader’s journey—leaning forward, tilting at windmills—it is anything but comfortable. It comes with no promise of success, or even failure.
In short, the future of new ideas is unknown, and that makes all the difference.
Julie Benezet is principal of The Journey of Not Knowing and the author of the book by the same name. A former Amazon.com executive, lawyer, and entrepreneur, she has spent 30 years building businesses, buildings, and careers.
