Many business leaders likely feel pressure to present themselves as shrewd, powerful, and infallible. They may feel compelled to hide their mistakes and only focus on their successes. However, one highly successful business leader, former WSFS Bank Chairman, President, and CEO Mark Turner, has stepped forward and openly shared both his achievements and failures with the goal of helping other business leaders learn from and avoid his mistakes.
In his new book, The Path to Sustained Excellence: Strategy, Culture and Team, co-written with Brittany Kriegstein and Lizzie Simon, Turner shares the strategies that allowed him to lead WSFS from a $100 million market value to a $3 billion enterprise. During his 25 years at WSFS, including 12 as CEO, Turner’s unfaltering focus on culture and service allowed him to help the bank achieve sustained growth and long-term success.
But his time at WSFS wasn’t all smooth sailing. He overcame countless challenges, often by making mistakes and learning from them. In The Path to Sustained Excellence, Turner exposes his shortcomings, offering this vulnerability as a tool to enable other business leaders to minimize their own mistakes, both for their businesses and their own lives.
“The challenges that I encountered and had to overcome, whether they be physical or emotional or mental—as I progressed through my career, I learned that they are very common among ambitious, hard-working people who are trying to make a difference,” said Turner. “I wanted to share them so that others who are coming up could recognize that these are a natural part of growth and leadership. Forewarned is forearmed.”
Ultimately, Turner stresses that the key to success is for leaders to identify and stick to a definitive differentiating strategy and then form a culture that supports that strategy. “We stood for being a bank based on service, including service to customers, investors, and business partners,” said Turner. “We had strategies around how we engaged our customers and each other as teammates. That informed a culture based on service and doing the right thing. All those things led to mutually supportive relationships. It’s a harmonization of strategy, culture, and team.”
It may be easy to look at WSFS’s success and admire Turner’s accomplishments. Still, Turner unabashedly reveals the many mistakes he made along the way, hoping other business leaders can learn from them. “There’s a lot more in this book about things I didn’t do well and things we didn’t do well as an organization, and there are lessons in those mistakes that we carried into the future.”
Co-author Simon highlights the book’s guiding principle—that you can impress someone by telling them about your successes, but if you want to make a difference in someone’s life, you show them your mistakes. “That’s what differentiates this book from other leadership memoirs. Mark’s bigger mission was really about legacy and helping future leaders lead in a more productive and harmonious way that also respects their physical and mental health.”
Turner summarizes the foundation of the lessons he offers in The Path to Sustained Excellence: “Leadership through authenticity is the best way to lead. It’s the most healthy and robust way to lead. Part of being yourself is showing other people you’re human at the right moment and time so that instead of cracking under their mistakes, they can stride through them.”
