Leadership Development for Credit Unions
Prepare Your Credit Union’s Current and Future Leaders for Success
Few things are more important to the success of your credit union than the effectiveness of your leadership team. From your senior leadership team to your middle management to your front line supervisors, you need everyone to be leading every day to the best of their ability.
Dr. Michael Hudson has worked with leaders of growing businesses, not-for-profits, and government agencies for over 25 years, helping individuals and teams develop their abilities in leading themselves, the people they lead, and the overall organization. His core belief is that in the best organizations, every one leads, whether they bare the title of leader or not.
Rather than deliver canned leadership lessons that can be accessed anywhere, Dr. Hudson designs, develops, and delivers customized programs that focus on engaging your people in doing what they do best most of the time. Building upon foundational concepts that support effective leadership, he works with your team to create a clear definition of what leadership means in your credit union, then helps you implement a program to prepare your current and future leaders for success in that context.
Throughout the effort, the focus is on engaging your team in defining what leadership means to them by taking a careful look at how today’s leaders are leading, the gaps between the way they are leading and the way the people in the organization want to be led, and the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and experiences that can prepare your current and future leaders to bridge those gaps.
Though there is no step-by-step model for achieving this result, the general approach involves:
- Assessing the state of leadership within your credit union using tools such as employee surveys, focus groups, telephone interviews, and personal assessments…all focused on understanding what is working today, what isn’t working today, and what people want in the future;
- Assessing the environment within which your credit union is operating, including site visits if requested and appropriate, and solicitation of staff and member input;
- Examining your current leadership structures and processes to reveal opportunities for improvement that can be easily and quickly pursued to create results…to help the team see immediate results in small ways that lead them to support the required longer term effort;
- Creating a model of leadership that fits your credit union so that everyone gets on the same page with regard to what leadership means within the credit union…defining a clear set of beliefs and expectations for what leaders do on a day-to-day basis;
- Implementing a series of experiences that develop the leadership capacity of everyone in your credit union and engage them in pursuit of personal learning plans that will improve their knowledge, skills, abilities, and experiences…all in the context of your organization’s leadership model; and
- Defining a long-term process and putting the necessary supports into place to make leadership development a natural and logical step in the development of your team… so that it becomes viewed not as a one-time event, but as an ongoing part of the building of both individual and team capacity.
Our Credit Union has worked with Michael closely over the past several years. Under his leadership he helped us to define our role as a board. We learned how to govern and to deliberate the issues and come to informed decisions which benefited the membership. We recognized the importance of the Chain of Command and how important it was to board/staff relationship, and we viewed ourselves as part of one team with a common mission—service. Michael showed us how to be leaders and to focus on our skills to achieve optimum results. What we learned as a Board from his service was one of the best investments we ever made. We are truly a better Board because if it.
— Russell McCready, Board Chairman,
Dover Federal Credit Union
