Six Wrist Plays for New CEOs

By Charles E. Fagan, III, CUES

Here I am, the brand-new CEO of a credit union association that will be serving a large number of new credit union CEOs in the next few years. CEO of CUES since Jan. 2, full in the middle of the National Football League playoffs, I’ve been thinking a lot about what plays to put on my wrist to help me and my new team succeed in getting a great start to a new game. Here are six plays that are working for us and might also work for you:

1. Script your first couple of weeks and then be flexible. Outline what you’d like to do and have happen in your first couple of weeks—and then step into your job as a new CEO knowing that things are not going to go exactly as you planned, and you’re going to have to be willing to adjust.
2. Be respectful of the exiting CEO and his team. Lay back a bit until you’re fully on board, so the departing CEO can wrap things up, and so the team doesn’t have multiple leaders. One of the things I did when I met staff in November was to invite them to send me an email with six lines: three completing the sentence “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if …” and three completing the sentence “Wouldn’t it be awful if … “ This didn’t require them to stop working for longtime CUES President/CEO Fred Johnson, but rather to reflect on what was going well with the organization. It has been incredible feedback, with many people thinking about things at a company level, which I thought was really cool.
3. Learn about the organization’s products and processes. While coming to CUES from CUES Supplier member PSCU, a payments services provider in St. Petersburg, Fla., keeps me in the same industry, CUES is somewhat new to me in terms of product set. So it’s important for me in the first 90-day window to spend a good bit of time at headquarters, learning about the organization and what it’s good at, and getting to know the people. (See more on getting to know people in No. 6, below.)
4. Don’t try to be an agent of change from day 1. This is a fast follow-on to number 3. If the credit union you’re starting to lead has been successful in the past, let the business run as the business runs for a while, and try to catch up with how it works. I’ve already described spending 90 days close to headquarters, listening and learning. About a month in, I’ll attend my first CUES Council meeting and CUES Symposium: A CEO/Chairman Exchange, and get some external exposure. Even then, CUES’ member relations team will be out front with me more in the background, trying to learn and see how we interact and involve ourselves with credit unions.
5. Start to develop good working relationships with board members and get a handle on their hopes for the company. By the time you read this, I will probably already have executed the play on my wrist to call individually each of CUES’ board members for perspective on what they expect this year. It’d be a miss on my part if I didn’t get some feedback from the directors and lay the groundwork for working together closely.
6. Give special attention to getting to know the company’s people. When you have a very tenured leadership team like we do, you need to take every opportunity to tap into that knowledge base. These first months are about trying to be very open and honest and tell the other CUES leaders about my style, and give them an opportunity to adapt to me. I meet weekly one on one with each senior manager; plus, we have a weekly senior management team meeting. I’ve also blocked hours on my calendar to meet with any employee who wishes to schedule time with me. I want to sit down with our employees to get to know them and to identify trends and issues affecting staff. All of this is meant to drive out fear and get any concerns on the table.

The final outcome of a good wrist playbook should be good scores—and some key wins—for a new CEO and his or her organization. You’ll see how CUES comes out over the next few years with the plays I’m calling. I’ll be interested to hear how new CU CEOs come out by executing these six plays and their own. Fill me in with an email to chuck@cues.org.