Archive for category: Blog

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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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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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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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.

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

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