Last month, I did a presentation at Linn Area Credit Union in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on innovation. The CEO, Jenny Lorenz, had heard me deliver this talk at the Symitar Annual Conference and arranged for me to come and also deliver it to her entire team. It’s one thing to talk a good game related to encouraging enterprise-wide innovation, but quite another to walk the talk. Jenny is an amazing person, an adventure athlete, who has applied that competitive spirit to changing Linn Area from a small SEG-based credit union to a financial institution aggressively competing in the Cedar Rapids market.
The message she wanted delivered to all associates was the need to be looking for ways to innovate. No different than most businesses, many of the employees of Linn Area may not think it is their job to be innovative. But while a teller or accounting clerk may not be writing the next version of their online banking system, there are numerous areas in which innovation can occur. Of particular interest are procedures that can be streamlined or eliminated, such as a 5-step process that could become a 3-step process. Even cutting out 5 or 10 minutes can add up to a half a week of saved time annually. Multiply that by 10 such procedures, and you start to accumulate significant time savings. And that saved time can be applied to member-facing services or can be spent… thinking.
And that is exactly what Jenny wants her employees to be doing. So much so that she has included an innovation goal in their annual review. Every year, as a manager is evaluating each employee’s performance, there are specific questions related to how the employee has been innovative over the past year. They may have participated on a cross-functional team working on a process innovation or may have had a unique idea that dramatically increased the member experience. By adding the innovation element to the annual review process, a clear signal is sent that innovation is not only encouraged; it is expected.
But for Linn Area, innovation is not just for credit union associates. Following my presentation to the staff, I conducted an innovation workshop for the board of directors. The purpose was to assist in opening up their minds to the new possibilities of what the services of a future-focused financial institution would look like. I find that many boards tend to be somewhat stuck in the past related to financial services, yet when I start asking questions about innovation occurring in their businesses, they immediately begin talking about all kinds of innovation. Boards are typically made of up business people, but Linn Area has current and former educators on their board, so it’s not hard for them to see the ways innovation and technology have changed education. The idea, though, is to get board members to think innovatively about the institution. This energizes them to be thinking creatively about the products and services offered, and also serves to alert them to be looking for innovative solutions to be offered up by senior management.
I greatly enjoyed my day at Linn Area Credit Union. Besides them being such great people, there was an enthusiasm for innovation I find very rare at financial institutions of any kind. What would it take for you to get that type of enthusiasm for innovation at your organization? Do you need to ignite innovation that will spread enterprise-wide and drive future growth and success? Reach out to me at david@i7strategies.com and let me know how you are making innovation a priority or how I can assist you in making it so.