Perhaps Marshall Goldsmith said it best when he penned the title for his 2007 groundbreaking book “What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful.”
Goldsmith, a veteran executive coach and successful business writer, wanted to hone in on the top 20 bad habits that potentially serve as the biggest roadblocks to otherwise successful executives. If you are a highly driven person who has enjoyed great success professionally, you might have had that “moment” when the behaviors, expectations and impressions you leave on others impede you from getting to the next level in your career. “What just happened?” you ask as you scratch your head. “I thought I was doing all the right things!”
Well, the same stifling phenomena can happen to organizations if they are left unaddressed or, worse, undiagnosed. Frankly, it’s a question we find ourselves asking (a lot) these days at arguably one of the most successful chambers of commerce in the United States — the Gainesville (Florida) area Chamber of Commerce. The Gainesville chamber, which represents roughly 1,200 members with an employment base of more than 70,000, is a five-star accredited chamber with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, putting it in the top 1 percent of chambers nationwide. The chamber has enjoyed a streak of highly coveted successful ventures over the years that include the collaborative community branding effort known as Innovation Gainesville, or iG. The iG movement is credited with, for example, helping the region to land Mobiquity, with 260 jobs, and Nanotherapeutics, with its $122 million dollar capital investment in the nearby city of Alachua and the promise of 150 new jobs.
Surely, any community would be grateful to count these achievements as successful (and we do), but as Goldsmith warns of high performing executives, “When soliciting feedback for yourself, the only question that works – the only one – must be phrased like this: ‘How can I do better?’”
It’s a question we put to not just our staff recently, but to our Board of Directors at our annual board retreat in late October on the Palm Coast. The retreat is probably not unlike most business retreats, where leadership is convened once a year to review strategic plans, listen to high-level industry presentations and rub elbows with top investors. We thought it was important to go a step further by actually engaging our board to tell us what they think about the organization and the direction we are headed in while advising us on whether our strategy is aligned with the community and our vision.
The day and a half retreat featured several panel discussions and keynote speeches on regional growth opportunities for the Gainesville community. It also included an afternoon session of breakout discussions on preselected topics that ranged from marketing and branding to membership and additional resources to regional projects. Board members were asked to spend 45 minutes to an hour at their tables interacting with each other and staff to generate a checklist of recommendations for later review. When the exercise was complete, we convened for a casual dinner, and the next morning we picked up where we left off, this time with one goal: to reach a consensus on our efforts in 2014 and beyond.
Aside from the great insight of our board members, who represent some of the most successful and vested community partners in Gainesville, we learned perhaps the greatest lesson about continuous improvement: Being wrong is an opportunity to show what kind of leader you really are, but you have to ask the question first.
Deborah V. Bowie, CCE, IOM, is Vice President of Chamber Development at the Gainesville Area Chamber of Commerce. She is responsible for managing the Chamber’s divisions on membership, marketing, communications, special events and Leadership Gainesville. For more information about the Chamber, contact Deborah at [email protected].