Leaders need a bird’s-eye view of business details
A while back, a discussion I had with CUES’ Board of Directors led me to take a new look at CUES’ work to promote the professional development of credit union leaders. Specifically, the directors and I talked about the importance of CEOs understanding what it’s like to work in their organizations day to day and how that work is impacted by culture and environment.
To find out more about what CUES staffers’ workdays look like, I asked them. For almost a year now, I’ve met monthly in a large-group setting with all the CUES employees with whom I don’t otherwise regularly meet. In addition to just getting to know each other better, we successfully identified points of pain in some administrative processes that they work with regularly and how that pain could be eased. Most recently, that group gave me outstanding feedback about how CUES could improve its all-staff meetings—feedback that’s already been implemented.
In developing educational offerings, CUES similarly has to consider the details of credit union operations while promoting the idea that leaders need a long view of things. Consider the CUES Skybox blog. The idea behind the name of the blog is that a skybox is way up in a sports stadium’s box seats, looking down on the game. The blog gives big-picture perspective on nitty-gritty topics, ranging from branding to cybersecurity to payments to talent management.
When it comes to something so complex as lending, credit union leaders have to think big-picture, while still understanding the underlying processes. That’s why CUES continues to offer the three-segment CUES School of Business Lending and the CUES Advanced School of Business Lending that cover in great detail how to evaluate a small business for a loan. In contrast, for directors, who need to know how to oversee business lending but can’t get into day-to-day operations, CUES offers Business Lending for Directors Seminar.
How do you keep a bird’s-eye view of the work going on at your credit union while still understanding what your employees do on a daily basis? I’d love to hear from you.
