In today’s ever-changing environment and economic landscape, members of the board of directors find themselves pivoting and having to navigate to stay abreast of all the changes to effectively support the CEO and management team to ensure the credit union is responsive to members’ needs and continues to grow and strengthen financially.
With so many moving parts, we can find it challenging to determine how best to support and ensure the CEO and management team navigate effectively through changing priorities such as cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, digital platforms, system upgrades, market share, the economy, liquidity challenges, hybrid structures, attracting and retaining top talent, attracting and retaining new members (specifically millennials and Gen Zs), and increasing loan growth in a high-interest-rate environment.
Thus, the million-dollar question becomes: How do board members play an influential role in
leading growth? Equally important: What does board-driven leadership for growth look like
and what does it entail?
The Role of the Individual Board Member
Let’s start with the primary fiduciary responsibilities of the board of directors: care, loyalty and obedience. Inclusive in the board of directors’ responsibilities is to hire, monitor and evaluate the CEO. This also entails that as a board leader, your role is to collaborate with and empower the CEO as well as hold the CEO accountable for executing the strategic plan and achieving the goals and objectives outlined in the strategic plan, in addition to managing and operating the credit union effectively moving the credit union forward and strengthening it financially for continued growth and success.
Now let’s view the board of directors from a leadership perspective to support board-driven leadership growth for the credit union. Creating a leadership culture for growth will help ensure greater success long-term. As a board leader, your leadership mindset should be focused on three critical components that can impact positively to create a culture for growth:
- individual growth;
- credit union growth; and
- employee growth.
As a board leader, your objective is to inspire, encourage creativity (out-of-the-box thinking); empower, challenge, ask the right questions, and offer “what if’ suggestions. The “what if” strategy encourages creativity and lends itself to leadership collaboration between the board of directors and management.
For example, you could begin with:
- What if we start…
- What if we stop…
- What if we change…
Below is a pretty good definition of leadership provided by one source on e-how.com (http://e-how.com) that can help board leaders evaluate or re-evaluate their leadership mindset and how they can better support their CEO and management team to ensure they are empowered to move the credit union forward positively:
“A leader is an individual who has the ability to establish a direction and then influence people to follow that direction. Leaders know how to ask the right questions, inspire creativity and subsequently get the job done. A good leader knows how to stimulate growth, make people feel good about who they are, instill confidence and provide guidance. Additionally, leadership is the ability to orchestrate and stimulate transformation with people and organizations.”
Individually and collectively, board leaders must be open-minded, creative, curious and committed to execute board-driven growth.
The Role of the Collective Board
Now let’s take a deeper look at the role of the board of directors collectively. Again, as a board, we have to engage in strategic thinking and collaboration with the CEO as well as empowerment and accountability of the CEO. Through strategic thinking and collaboration with the CEO and the management team, the board can help support and drive growth for the credit union. The board drives growth by empowering and supporting the initiatives that bring the strategic plan to life and by keeping the CEO accountable for achieving the goals and objectives outlined in the strategic plan.
One way to ensure accountability is by inspecting and validating the planning progress and asking the right questions. Additionally, asking the CEO and management team to develop a one-year action plan that reflects what objectives and action steps will be taken every quarter to achieve overall objectives and goals for the year is a critical accountability tool. It keeps everyone focused on where you are, where you are going, and how/who/when you are going to get there. Ray Davis, author of Leading for Growth (https://www.amazon.com/Leading-Growth-Created-Culture-Greatness/dp/0787986070) and former CEO of Umpqua Bank, states unequivocally that “empowerment without accountability is futile.” This is so true! The board’s job is to hold the CEO accountable. The CEO’s job is to hold the management team accountable, and the management team’s job is to hold managers and staff accountable. It is a trickle-down process and works well when everyone is engaged in accountability.
The Five Cs of Leadership
Another component of board-driven leadership growth is establishing a leadership brand as well as leadership standards for the board of directors. This strengthens the leadership of the board of directors. The five C’s of leadership can help define the foundation of how the board of directors should engage effectively:
- Caring: Care enough to become the best leader you can be to bring out the best in others.
- Curious: Be curious enough to ask the right questions that challenge the CEO (and management) to think outside the box, to elevate the staff and to increase member engagement, revenue, loan growth, and membership growth or retention.
- Connect: Connect through the right conversations to build stronger relationships through trust.
- Creativity: Encourage creativity so that more options and opportunities rise to the top.
- Commitment: You gain commitment when others feel how committed you are to them.
The five C’s of leadership can then be filtered down to management and the staff so that everyone understands what your action-driven leadership attributes are and also understands the “WHY Factor” (why are these important?) and the “HOW Factor” (how do we put these attributes into action with each other and the members to build stronger relationships?). Investing in this type of training is hugely critical to the success of building a leadership culture for growth.
Board-driven leadership for growth also requires creating a focus on transformational leadership, which requires transforming the heart, mind and soul of every board member, member of management and employee to think and engage like a leader. There is truth to the adage: United we stand, divided we fall. If we all think like a leader, we will all engage like a leader. It takes leaders to lead change and to ensure growth, and it takes a team. Remember, hope is not a strategy! We must intentionally develop leaders and transform resisters.
As John C. Maxwell states in his book, Life Wisdom (https://www.amazon.com/Life-Wisdom-Maxwell-Insights-Leadership/dp/1433681692), “Resisters will eat your strategy for breakfast.” He also states that, “The truth is that TEAMWORK is at the heart of great ACHIEVEMENT.” Therefore, encourage and support your CEO to develop strategies to turn your resisters into “change champions” so they can help you achieve success. If a resister can’t be turned into a “change champion,” it is imperative to find a way to remove them so they don’t become a barrier to growth! Negativity is toxic and counterproductive to the culture. The board, collectively, needs to encourage and support the CEO to create a leadership culture for growth strengthening every employee to become the best version of themselves to help lead and
grow the credit union.
There is so much truth to the adage, “You can’t keep doing what you have always done and expect different results.” If you want different results you need to think outside the box and encourage creativity because it is outside the box where all the magic happens. So, in closing, what you are going to START doing, what you going to STOP doing, and what are you going to CHANGE individually as a board leader and collectively as a board of directors, to ensure you create board-driven leadership for growth?
