Becoming the Noun

At my first credit union, we had an extremely competent board with strong business acumen. I was lucky to engage with this group as they taught me a number of valuable lessons. I remember vividly having lunch with one of these individuals. He was sharing a story about the early days of his career when he received a promotion. He told me, “I was leading a competency that I had never done before. I had no idea how to do what the people on my team were doing.” He shared with me that he quickly adopted a technique to elicit ideas and solutions from his subject matter experts. When they would come to his office and say, “We have this big problem. What should I do?” He would say, “What do you think we should do?” He alerted his team that they should not even enter his office unless they had ideas about how to solve the problems they faced. He had quickly positioned himself as an expert and quite a dominant influence without any subject matter expertise. He laughed and said to me, “They

As a parent, one thing I was underprepared for, (of the many), was how my husband and I would have strong and sometimes passionately different ideas about the values and learned behaviors that were most important for MacKenzie to learn. I’m a vegetarian and Scott is a carnivore. Early on in our pregnancy, we discussed this and both felt it was best to let MacKenzie decide what she likes and choose whether or not to eat meat just as I had. As with most babies, she wasn’t particularly interested in eating meat when she was first being introduced to solid foods. However, both my dad and Scott’s mom and dad were excited to see if she would enjoy meat. One day someone shared bacon with her and her choice was easily made. She is definitely not a vegetarian. Even in these early days she was starting to demonstrate her independence and decisiveness. My husband Scott stays home with MacKenzie and thinks a lot about how that time at home can help to shape her into a suc

  We live the verbs in our life to ultimately become the best nouns we can be. In becoming a credit union leader, making mistakes has been a big part of the journey.   “Everyone makes mistakes.” “You aren’t innovating if you don’t have some failure.” “You’ll be a better leader having had some errors to learn from.” Have you ever been told one of these things? As a perfectionist, these statements ring true for me, but, I have never been a fan of failing. Just this week I got a taste of just how human I am. I bought a new dress. I took it to my closet right after it arrived in the mail because I’m working really hard to prevent clutter from piling up in our home. However, I didn’t have any scissors upstairs to remove the tags. Thus, I quickly hung it in my closet with the tags remaining. On Wednesday morning, I was excited to wear the dress for the first time. When I put it on, I remembered that I had yet to remove the tags. As I was doing my hair, I pulled