Leadership Credo

 One of my classes this semester - Demystifying Organizational Culture, taught by Peter Meola - recently required us to go through a "Leadership Credo" exercise and present our credos to the class. While I admit the process seemed a bit corny at the outset, I ended up deeply impressed by my classmates' thoughtful results.The basics of our exercise:

1. Leadership Lifeline 

      a. Identify 4-7 defining moments in your life
      b. What leadership lessons did you learn from those moments? What core principles did they create for your desired leadership style?
      c. Give a few examples of practical applications of the above - what worked? What didn't?

2. Leadership Credo
     a. Describe what you stand for as a leader (in one sentence or less)
     b. What is your firm's Winning Proposition? (i.e., what is your mission that sets you apart from everyone else?)
    c. What are your key priorities? (i.e. what goals do you have in order to achieve your winning proposition?)
     d. What are your instrumental behaviors? (i.e. what do you require of your employees/ colleagues in order to achieve the key priorities?)

Below is my credo - edited slightly to remove specifics on my company... as Dragnet would say, names have been changed to protect the innocent.

Seek adventure, pack lightly, and bring a pencil.

This may not sound like typical career advice. It may not even sound like typical mountaineering advice. But it is my leadership credo.

What does this mean and why does it matter? Our department is a non-traditional one. Customer acquisition, stockholder demands, and regulatory requirements are all meaningless terms for us. We serve a single family, and our mission is to solve their financial needs before they are even aware of them.  

Our battle is therefore not against competitors but against our own complacency, and to successfully advise the family we must be proactive with our advice, accurate yet agile with our methods, and creative in our approach towards developing passionate employees.  

People rarely consider accountants to be adventurous. Our field’s stereotype is someone who plays it safe, hides in their cubicle, and – above all – avoids at all costs engaging with other human beings. This is not us, and this cannot be us. But what does it mean to seek adventure in an industry typically defined by tradition and static rules?

The word vacation to me used to mean a week of sitting comatose on a beach, enjoying a novel while listening to the hypnotic sound of waves hitting the sand. Then I married a Navy veteran with aspirations of climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro, the world’s second highest peak. The notion of using boots, camelback water systems, and Cliff Bars to facilitate vacation was a foreign one to me, but I was willing to first try San Gorgonio, a training climb in Southern California. With a trail of 20 miles and an ascension of 6,000 feet, the elevation climb alone would be the equivalent to climbing the stairs of the empire state building seven times.  Such a trail can’t be taken lightly. Every item going into your pack must be carefully considered – needs vs. wants assessed, extraneous weight eliminated. Every ounce of unnecessary baggage would weigh down each and every step we took on the trail.  Even our goal had to be considered.  Why? – you ask.  Shouldn’t the goal be obvious – reaching the summit?

Despite what inspirational posters or sports books tell you, reaching the top is not always the bottom line. You must temper your desire to bag the summit with an acknowledgement of the unexpected. We very well might not reach the top, through uncontrollable factors. Altitude sickness. Lightning storms. A twisted ankle. Our defined end-goal was to enjoy good company, remember humility in the face of untamed nature, and endure the physical challenges: which would hopefully, but not necessarily, end up with us reaching the summit.

What does my journey mean for this company? I am tempted to offer a variety of inspiring platitudes about endurance, believing in yourself, or somehow comparing the euphoria we felt as we experienced the sweeping views from Gorgonio’s peak to the elation of a job well done. But I won’t do that. I’ll instead share what I believe mattered most that day: writing in pencil.

We made plans. We were prepared. But we were also willing to change course at the blink of an eye and to embrace adventure as the willingness to change a destination point as the journey threw challenges towards us.

So too must we embrace this idea as a department. The temptation we face is to accept our processes and goals because they are simply there. Familiar and comforting, if at times monotonous, our customs wrap us in a false sense of success. Without the pressures of external customers or regulatory deadlines, we could easily continue just as we are without being fired. But we would fail in our mission of providing proactive, unparalleled service to the family.

This desire to serve the family can only thrive in our desire to blend financial accuracy with management flexibility; to constantly reassess how our goals are serving (or failing to serve) them, and to be willing to erase failing efforts and redraw new plans. A sense of adventure will serve us well as we look to be flexible and proactive with a thirst for the next challenge, in whatever form it might take. 

This means that no idea will be shot down because it is different. We will not let ourselves be weighed down with unnecessary baggage. Therefore no process will be kept unless we can explain why it is needed – and why there is no better way to accomplish it.  

Finally, keeping ourselves motivated towards flexibility and excellence will only occur if we can invest in our personal interests both inside and outside of the workplace. We cannot expect one another to be passionate about our jobs if the firm is not also passionate about developing us as complete citizens. Therefore our department will offer [specific volunteer/training initiatives].

We are a Family Office: we serve a family, but we also strive to in some ways become a group of adopted siblings. Willing to embrace one another’s interests and to develop each other professionally, but with the underlying understanding that our commitment to providing the family with unparalleled financial management means that we will seek adventure, pack lightly, and write in pencil.