1. A CEO's Growth Mentality

One of the critical findings from this year's study is that the number one predictor of revenue growth is how much of a CEO's time is spent on marketing and sales. We asked CEOs how much time they spent on marketing and sales, and we were shocked to find that this was the single most important behavior in predicting a company's growth rate. Even more surprisingly, this was an even stronger predictor of profitability than revenue growth.

If you can visualize a camel, you know what our data looked like. There were two large “humps” with a clear dividing line between CEOs who spent less than 40% of their time on marketing and sales, and those who spent more than 40% of their time on marketing and sales. We called this our “two days for growth rule,” emphasizing the commitment that a CEO should put into sales and marketing every week.

Key questions for credit unions:

• Does your CEO have a “growth mentality”?
• Is your executive team and credit union committed to marketing and sales?
• Does your credit union effectively align a service-oriented sale culture and your marketing efforts?

Read more: A learning mentality … 2. A Company's Learning Mentality

We found an intriguing contradiction in the personalities of the leaders of the companies in our studies. The leaders from our study had an extremely strong belief in their ability to control the future (called locus of control by psychologists), but the stronger a leader's belief in her or his ability to control the future, the lower the company's profit margins. What could this mean? Was the very skill that was needed to become a leader holding back companies?

We found the answer in another trait we studied, called learning orientation. Learning orientation is a measurement of how strongly a company believes that its ability to learn is a key competitive advantage. We found that the stronger a company's learning orientation, the higher the company's profit margins and the more realistic the leader was about being able to control the future. This is a classic example of how “what got you here, won't get you there,” where a leader's lack of maturity in team building is holding back the creation of a winning team.

Key questions for credit unions:

• Is your credit union's ability to learn a key competitive advantage?
• Does your CEO and executive team value original ideas from your team?
• Does your CEO's belief in her or his ability to control the future limit the growth and leadership of others in your credit union?

3. What's Your Credit Union's Operation System?

In 2013, one of our major areas of focus was on the impact of different types of best practices on a company. We wanted to see if companies were more or less likely to succeed if they had a vision in place, had clearly established values, a marketing plan, and so on. We looked at nine different best practices, and one of the most surprising findings was in the collective impact of best practices. We found that for each additional best practice a company had in place, it was 6.6% more likely to hit its profit targets for the year – meaning that a business that had all nine best practices in place was just shy of 60% more likely to have hit its profit targets than a business with none in place.

We dubbed this “building an operating system” for your company, where purpose and accountability have been built into all of your operations, and key functional areas like sales, marketing, operations, finance, and HR are aligned in their behavior. I view a company's ability to put multiple best practices into place as an indicator of both its maturity and its commitment to avoiding the “flavor of the month” that is so common when businesses put a practice into place for a few months and then forget about it.

Key questions for credit unions:

• Have you established an “operating system” for your credit union?
• Which best practices are you missing in your credit union and why are they not in place?
• Is there an “application gap” where you have created certain best practices but they are not being used or contradict other best practices you have in place?

Cameron Madill is CEO of PixelSpoke in Portland, Ore. CONTACT: (503) 267-0570 or [email protected].