Fly in the high performance zone

John Foley, who flew in the movie “Top Gun,” urged credit union leaders to take their teams not to the “danger zone,” but the “high performance zone,” in May at the CSCU Solutions Conference in St. Petersburg, Fla.

The high performance zone is “the gap between where you are and where you want to go,” said the former Blue Angels pilot, Sloan Fellow at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and entrepreneur.
“It has a lot to do with leadership,” Foley said.

Foley reverse-engineered the culture of team excellence found in the Blue Angels—the U.S. Navy’s flight demonstration squadron known for precision—for his presentations and created a model for others to achieve high performance. He extolled traits such as:

Purpose. A team’s belief in the processes, products, people, and purpose of an institution is critical. Credit unions, he noted, already have a leg up on the competition.

“What is beautiful about credit unions is that you have deep relationships with your members,” he said. “Don’t take that for granted.”

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