Extra Steps When you Have Time … are Okay?

by Kevin Smith, Publisher, TEAM Resources

On a recent trip to a credit union event, I was actually surprised by an airline customer service effort that was positive. (I know, right?) It wasn’t a big thing, but it was enough to make me notice and jot a note. The airlines aren’t getting a lot of good press these days for their customer service. And I’ve certainly gotten my share of “meh” service over the last couple of years.

For example, last spring I got to fly over my destination … twice … over an eight-hour period … without actually getting to land there because of weather. So, I never actually got to where I needed to go. I missed the event. But I also didn’t get the miles towards my loyalty program status, presumably because I never landed there. There’s not much the airline can do about weather issues, but I did feel doubly disappointed when I didn’t even get credit for my own efforts. Jeez.

Ok, moving on to the better story. (I can’t seem to let the miles thing go.)

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You’ve Got the Right to Fight: Healthy dissent in the boardroom leads to better outcomes for your CU.

by Kevin Smith, Publisher, TEAM Resources
(A version of this post was originally published in the July CUNA Directors Newsletter.)

I’m here to start an argument. There. I said it. I mean it.

What I’d like to see is more arguing among credit union board members. What I am seeing is a bit too much harmony for my taste. And no, this isn’t about shadenfreude (no matter how much I like to say that word). This is about board engagement, and avoiding complacency. In general, I’m seeing and hearing about too much complacency.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Harmony on a board of directors is a good thing, to be fostered and cultivated. But if there are only unanimous votes, too much harmony, too much kumbaya … that’s a red flag for me. It usually means there isn’t enough thought going into the discussions and material at hand.

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Board Communication and the Staff

by Tim Harrington and Kevin Smith, TEAM Resources 

A credit union board chair recently contacted us with some questions regarding board communications. One issue had to do with the board’s communications with the staff. Now ordinarily, this is the kind of discussion that we try to shut down immediately with a simple cliché of “all communications to the staff should come from the CEO.” It’s a cliché that’s easy to trot out because it holds up pretty well under almost all conditions, sun, rain, snow, wind…. But it got us to thinking about where that cliché would begin to break down, because they all do at some point, right? (Thanks. We knew you agreed with us.)

So, the rule of thumb (let’s see how many cliché’s we can get in here) is that the board has one employee, the CEO. And the board speaks with one voice, communicating with the CEO. Individual directors do not give any direction to the CEO, officially or unofficially. The board operates as a unit, within the boardroom, deciding its strategy and communicating that when finalized to its one employee with a unified voice. The CEO then directs the leadership and staff of the credit union with their marching orders.

Board Communication with Staff

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Take Responsibility for Your Financial Literacy

Take Responsibility for Your Financial Literacy

(This post is also available in the March 2017 edition of the CUNA Directors’ Newsletter.)

Regulators hold volunteers accountable for understanding key measures and ratios that indicate a CU’s health.

Picture this scenario: 

It’s time for the annual exit interview with credit union regulators. You’ve been told they finished your regulatory exam and have requested the entire board’s presence. If this development hasn’t already alerted you to an issue, the six regulators awaiting you in the board room does.

You look around the board room and see anxiety in the CEO’s face, urgency in the regulators’ faces, and a bit of confusion and concern in your fellow directors’ faces.

Houston, we have a problem: Your credit union is losing money. Your net worth ratio is taking a plunge, and you’re losing assets. “And,” they say, “it’s your fault.”

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A Book Review: Transformational Governance: How Boards Achieve Extraordinary Change. By Beth Gazley & Katha Kissman

Guest Post by Kevin Smith, Publisher, TEAM Resources

“If you truly want to understand something, try to change it.” Kurt Lewin, often referred to as the father of modern Social Psychology.

If you’re anything like me (and I assume that you are), then you have too many books piling up literally and virtually, too many articles saved, too many emails with links to information that you’re supposed to keep up with these days. Sometimes I feel like I’m drowning in it. So I shouldn’t have been surprised when I stumbled across Transformational Governance: How Boards Achieve Extraordinary Change by Beth Gazley and Katha Kissman a full year and a half after it came out. But I’m sure glad that I found it. (Full disclosure: I hired Katha Kissman to speak at a CUNA Volunteer event several
years ago. She’s cool, yo.)

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The Governance Spectrum: Balance Between Too Strong & Too Weak

(From the forthcoming TEAM Resources publication: A Basic Credit Union Governance Guide for Credit Unions, by Tim Harrington and Kevin Smith)

In our experiences, there is a range of board member behavior, from too weak to too strong. This represents the Governance Spectrum. The left side of the spectrum represents boards that are too strong, too involved and not making the best use of their time. On the right are boards that are too weak. They have abdicated their responsibility and their authority. What you want to strive for is a balance of oversight and forward thinking. This is a tightrope to walk sometimes, looking for the Goldilocks moment where your actions are “just right.”

Governance Spectrum

Governance Spectrum

(Click the image above to download a copy of the Governance Spectrum for your own use.)

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Mind the Gap: Communicating the Strategic Plan

We’re headlong into planning and budgeting season, and after reviewing a few plans, a couple of things have occurred to me about communicating the strategic plan.

mindthegap

Communicating the Strategic Plan

Have you ever noticed that no one ever has a new strategic planning document that simply says, “Just keep doing what we’re doing. Things are going great”? And rightly so, I guess. I mean, you don’t hold planning sessions to envision what you’re already doing. But too often credit unions get caught up in the concept of the planning session and the idea that this is the one place where we come up with new, different, and forward thinking. We all want to be innovative and feel like visionaries. And no doubt our industry is dealing with dramatic change and an environment that often feels like quicksand shifting beneath our feet.

My point is that there are often a couple of large gaps between the plan and the people that derail the process. Read more

Board Leadership: Preparing the Chair

lss-vert-51-percent

 

In a recent survey of nonprofits, 51% of board chairs said they “did nothing specific to prepare” for the role of chair. That’s a pretty staggering number. The survey “Voices of Board Chairs” from the Alliance for Nonprofit Management reported on the experience of 635 nonprofit board chairs from across the United States. throneOf course, this survey isn’t specific to credit union boards and chairs, but we fit in the nonprofit area. And the results of this report align with what I see anecdotally across the credit union industry.

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Governance & Mergers … or Mergers & Governance

shhh image

Shhh

D’oh! I just said the “M” word. Shhhhhh! We don’t want to talk about that. The leadership in the credit union movement treats merger talk as verboten. You don’t see much on conference agendas, or on webinars. And I get it – talking about it might come across as endorsing it, and there’s a school of thought that says that more credit unions are better for the industry.

Well…it’s no secret that there are a LOT of credit union mergers. According to the NCUA, there were 234 mergers in 2015, which actually represents a slow down of late. Read more

The Role of the Board Chair

The Role of the Board Chair

Recently I had the chance to spend some time with a great group of board members at that National Association of Credit Union Chairmen (NACUC) – Leadership Development Seminar. One of the things we talked about was the role of the board chair. I thought this well worth putting down on *paper* as it were.

The role of the chairperson is multi-faceted, complex, and often changing within the context of the organization’s dynamic. Unfortunately, there’s no perfect set of “rules.” But there are some guidelines. Here are our “tips” on navigating the position successfully:

Board Chair

Board Chair

Roles:

Facilitator – The board chair must draw together the individual directors into a team, working together on behalf of the membership and the credit union. To do that, s/he must wrangle individual personalities, draw out conversation from some, and rein it in from others. Having a solid understanding of the personalities of each director … and the CEO helps the chair keep things on track, moving forward, and civil.

Leader – Wait! Isn’t being a leader at odds with being a facilitator? Isn’t this a contradiction? No. There are times when the job is pure facilitation and times when it is leadership and setting direction. A skilled leader will know which is which and be able to handle both without perceptions of contradiction.

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