By Elisabeth Leamy
It’s that time of year again. The time when the internet is awash with articles dictating strategic priorities for the coming year. Credit Union leaders get bombarded from all sides: associations, vendors, consultants, regulators–and more. I studied several recently published priority lists and found a dizzying array:
- Grow membership, attract younger members, deepen member relationships.
- Increase deposits; reduce delinquencies; improve underwriting.
- Boost lending; manage interest-rate risk; increase non interest income.
- Contain costs, improve profitability; strengthen liquidity. Upgrade mobile apps
- Prevent cyberattacks, adopt AI; protect against AI!
- Optimize branch networks; modernize digital banking; compete with fintechs.
- Expand financial education; increase financial inclusion.
- Improve employee engagement; retain talent; strengthen succession planning.
A Flawed Priority List
Whew! Take your pick. But guess what? Every single one of the priority lists is flawed. How? They’re too long. “When everything’s a priority, nothing’s a priority,” as the saying goes.
In fact, according to Franklin-Covey, we can successfully go after only one to three priorities at a time if we want to achieve them with excellence. Pursue four to 10 priorities at once and you will likely nail only one or two of them. Try for ten or more and experience shows you’re unlikely to achieve any with excellence.
Booz and Company surveyed 1,800 businesses and found something especially compelling for credit unions: The businesses with the most strategic priorities, had the lowest revenue growth. By contrast, those with the fewest strategic priorities, had the highest revenue growth. It literally pays to prioritize!
Here’s a hint from history: If you trace it to its roots, the word priority used to be singular only. There was no plural form! And yet, in today’s complex financial climate, credit union executives can’t afford to focus on just one or two goals. So…what’s the solution? It’s counterintuitive. A little subversive. I dare you:
DON’T always do your best.
Three Buckets
Pursue all the goals you must, but don’t make them all toppriorities. Give them different levels of effort. Specifically, try dividing your efforts into three buckets:
GOOD.
BETTER.
BEST.
I named this The TRIoritize Technique, because it’s a 3-part prioritizing system.
ALL of your word must be GOOD.
Much of it will be BETTER.
This allows you to conserve time and resources to make your BEST exceptional.
For those who worry “good” is code for “mediocre,” not at all. GOOD means solid and sound. It is the baseline level you will not dip below. For me, as a journalist, “good” meant “accurate and fair.” Every story I did had to be at least accurate and fair. That was good enough. You credit union pros know your work best. What might “good enough” look like for you?
I stumbled into Good, Better and Best when I was the on-air consumer correspondent at ABC’s Good Morning America. It was a pressure-cooker world where we had to compete with our fellow correspondents for time on TV. Air time was known as “oxygen” and we all know what happens when you don’t get enough oxygen…
The Answer
My answer was to give everything I had to everything I did, every time I did it. It wasn’t working. And I made my blunders and bloopers live on the air for all to see. And then one desperate day I had a revelation:
When we try to make everything our best, nothing is.
That’s when I stopped always striving for my best and started dividing my work into those three tiers. I was just trying to survive, but a funny thing happened: I thrived. By NOT always doing my best, I did BETTER work. I credit the Good-Better-Best framework with helping me work full time in television news, while also writing a Washington Post column and two books on the side.
Some of my favorite GMA stories were the “savings makeovers” I did in partnership with credit unions, and I have been a credit union advocate ever since. I’m writing this article in hopes that the counterintuitive framework I stumbled onto will be of help to the credit union community I admire so much.
Going Against the Grain
Oh, I know my advice goes against the grain. I mean, we have been taught since we were toddlers: “Always do your best.” But the truth is, not every initiative deserves your team’s precious peak level of effort. That’s not laziness — it’s prioritizing. When we stop trying to make everything exceptional, we free up the time and resources to make the RIGHT things exceptional.
When I took The TRIoritize Technique on the road in keynotes and workshops, people started asking me how you choose which work deserves what level of effort. So, I developed what I call my “TRI Tool.” The T-R-I in TRIoritize stands for Talent-Reward-Impact. Simply ask yourself three questions:
- Does this goal align with my (or my organization’s) true TALENTS?
- Does it have the potential to reap rich internalREWARDS?
- Does it have the merit to make a positive external IMPACT?
If the answer to just one of these questions is yes, do a GOOD job.
If the answer to any two is yes, do a BETTER job.
If the answer to all three is yes, that’s when you should do your BEST.
TALENT can be an individual’s “zone of genius” or an organization’s unique differentiators. What does your credit union do better than anyone else? Focusing on what you’re good at sounds obvious. The degree that it helps is the stunner.
REWARD is any internal reward that benefits the organization. Revenue is the obvious one, but also positives like good publicity, more members, lower costs.
IMPACT is external—how you help people. The good you do out in the world. This is not some woo woo metric. Researchers found the stock prices of purpose-driven companies were 12 times higher than those of other companies. And American workers said they’d be willing to give up a quarter of their future earnings to do meaningful work.
Credit Unions are lucky. So much of the work you do helps people. And yet, I have found credit union employees are some of the most modest people I have met. Back when I was giving a lot of speeches to credit union groups, I would do this whole schtick about the journalist, lawyer and politician who all bragged “we are changing the world” and then contrast them with the credit union employee who said “Aw shucks, it was nothing.”
Why Credit Unions are Lucky
If you’re still struggling with the notion of not always doing your best, consider this. We all do work that’s not our best. We are spread so thin that we aim for our best but fall short and settle for “good enough.” If instead we strategically aimto make certain work “good enough,” that same exact work is a success instead of a failure. It’s a practical, yet powerful, mindset shift that puts us back in control.
So, as you ponder the zillion-and-one priorities the pundits say you should perfect in 2027…
Don’t always do your best.
Instead divide those priorities into GOOD, BETTER and BEST.
Because the key to doing great things is not trying to make everything you do great.
Elisabeth Leamy is a journalist, author and speaker who helps people achieve peak performance by conquering their competing priorities and focusing on what matters most. Connect with her at ElisabethLeamy.com.
