One of the great things I’ve ever heard relative to the economic development practice came last week at the IEDC Annual Conference during the “How to ‘Make It Count’: Applied Metrics for Economic Development” session which featured takeaways from the IEDC’s Economic Development Research Partners Report, Making It Count: Metrics for High Performing EDOs. (This report, perhaps the most important report ever published by IEDC, provides a comprehensive menu of metrics and recommendations that economic development organizations can consider given their missions, functions and resources.)
Now, conventional wisdom would probably suggest that not meeting goals is a sign of ineffectiveness, which in turn can lead to feelings of threat and vulnerability. This “wisdom” may have led to some in the practice forgoing the opportunity to create challenging goals, but rather settling for the status quo. However, when we do not create challenging goals nor have metrics that effectively evaluate our performance (good or bad), aren’t we as economic development organizations and practitioners challenged to communicate any true value proposition, leading to confusion or lack of confidence among our various constituencies of funders, supporters and potential customers?
During the aforementioned session, Ron Kitchens, CEO of Southwest Michigan First, was discussing the perceived difficulty that some have when sharing performance scores that aren’t meeting original expectations. But as Ron suggests, we as economic development leaders need to establish challenging performance goals and embrace the opportunity to lead from a position of vulnerability by being open and transparent when we aren’t necessarily on track to achieve them.
When we lead from vulnerability, we are not only being transparent and real, but we are sharing in a human way that can really draw about the support we need from those with whom we are sharing. This support can lead to the generation of new resources that can be applied to righting the ship. In the case of Southwest Michigan First, Ron talked about how this led to growth and greater engagement by the board of directors, as well as an increase in funding that provided the resources necessary to increase staff and resources.
Stay tuned. It seems that the economic development practice is starting to understand and even embrace some of the new realities relative to our evolving role in the generation of new wealth for the places we serve. With that come needs for new value propositions and performance indicators…some of which we may not achieve as we go down this new path. This makes us vulnerable. And that, in itself, is good. Brene Brown, noted TEDx speaker and University of Houston researcher remarks that feeling the power of vulnerability is “to feel alive.” I like that.
Thanks for sharing.
Shared Complexity 