Cues Podcast

In this episode we talk about human-centered leadership. Returning to the show as our guest is CUES’ own VP/Consulting Services Lesley Sears, who heads up our CUES Consulting offerings.She explains the difference between a business-centered culture and a human-centered one and shares why centering your people will ultimately be better for the business.“In business-centered leadership, you're primarily focused on the numbers. You're focused on the ways of business that are outside of the people,” Sears says. “Are we strategically aligned? Are we getting our numbers? What is the data showing? What's the profitability?”“Then the counter to that is digging into and aligning leadership with what's best for the people who are getting the business done,” she adds. “They're the ones that are making the credit union successful. How can we develop our organization to focus on them first, and then let the success of the credit union come from that people focus?”In the show Sears also discusses: 

Knowledge is key to success in business lending, according to Jim Devine, co-founder, CEO and chairman of Hipereon, a financial training company based in Washington state, and lead faculty member for CUES’ School of Business Lending, which starts April 1.In this latest episode of the CUES Podcast, Devine says his aim with the school each year is to “make sure ... that everybody going out the back door has the foundational skills that give them confidence that they can take a set of financial statements from a prospective borrower, do a diagnostic assessment of the performance of that business, link it to their debt service coverage policies and guidelines, and determine whether” they’re willing, as a fiduciary, to let their members’ money fund the credit request.In this show, Devine demonstrates that his own knowledge of business lending runs deep—both in terms of the structures and procedures credit unions need to have in place to do it well and the impacts that the economy and other factors have on credit u

Fintech, including artificial intelligence, is at the top of many credit union leaders’ worry list for 2024.The guest in this episode of the CUES Podcast, Scott Snyder, has ideas for how to approach these concerns that should be steadying. A recognized thought leader in technology and innovation, Snyder has more than 30 years of experience in emerging technologies, business strategy and innovation, and digital transformation for Global 1000 companies.When it comes to emerging and potentially disruptive technology, Snyder says, “the biggest fear of any leader, and I'll throw boards into that as well, is being on either side—either investing too early and too much or being too late and being caught flat-footed and … getting left behind.”Snyder recommends in the show two approaches leaders can take to best manage this kind of technology. The first is “bottoms up, rapid experimentation.”“Let certain populations in your company actually play with this technology … so they … (can) see what's possible and

The 2023 CUES Emerging Leader says the best advice he got about the CUES Emerge program was not to go into it with a preconceived notion about what his business case for the competition phase would be.In this episode of the CUES Podcast, Jayde DelGado, CCM, branch manager for $1.8 billion Harborstone Credit Union, Lakewood, Washington, tells the story of a 1:1 meeting with his CEO, CUES member Geoff Bullock and the 2017 winner of the challenge, then called Next Top Credit Union Exec. DelGado brought several ideas for problems his business case could help solve."Forget about all that,” DelGado recalls Bullock saying. “Don’t go in there with your business plan already done in your mind. Go in there with an open mind. Be open to learning. Be open to hearing. You very well might come out of this program with a completely different concept than you had ever thought, completely different than what you have in mind for your business case now.”“And I did just that,” DelGado says. “I put it all aside, went in the

Resilience is “about being tough, but it’s also about being flexible, and truly resilient leaders know when to be which,” Heather McKissick, I-CUDE, says in the latest episode of the CUES Podcast. McKissick is the CEO of CUES.The decision about when to be tough and when to be flexible, McKissick explains, “depends on the forces that we are up against—because some things you can predict because of wisdom or history or experience, and other things are unpredictable. And there are times when you have no choice but to work with what you’ve got in order to withstand and … keep moving forward.”Being able to be agile, being able to forecast situations and “respond and test and pivot and change and not hold steadfast” to legacy policies or procedures is important, she says, “because if we hold too strongly to those things, we may get left behind.”“Some organizations that don’t have that same kind of spirit of experimentation or transformation when it comes to how they serve their members and experience lag, … attriti

Erica Taylor says her best advice for credit unions on how to best further their DEI journeys is to listen, really listen, to staff and their communities. “Start with listening and truly listening to hear..., listening to understand people,” says Taylor, VP/communications and community relations for $20 billion Golden 1 Credit Union, headquartered in Sacramento, California. “It’s powerful stuff. It builds trust. It empowers everyone that is listened to. … It’s good all around.”Like all credit unions, Golden 1 CU was founded on ideas of equity and helping one another. More recently, the organization has formalized its DEI journey, starting with assessments of staff and leadership to really listen to what credit union team members had to say about their sense of workplace belonging. “We know that diversity of backgrounds, experiences, perspectives, life makes us a stronger credit union and really makes us a stronger community,” explains Taylor, a CUES member, in the show. “That’s something that’s been a big par

In this episode, Lesley Sears talks about the implications of research showing that newly promoted employees are more likely to leave your organization—and what you can do to mitigate their flight risk.“When we promote somebody, we’re assuming we’re building loyalty,” says Sears, CUES’ VP/consulting. “We’re … really feeding into and developing this person. But statistics have shown us that that’s not always the case.“ADP has come out with a research study that shows 29% of the people that were newly promoted left, transitioned out versus 18% that normally would have.”Spoiler alert: Sears says successfully fixing the problem comes down to strengthening your organizational climate.“The culture … is really … the byproduct of how everything in the credit union is working,” she explains. Whatever the challenges are at the credit union will show up in the climate and culture. “So, address the culture,” she asserts, “and thereby you can address a lot of your challenges in the credit union itself.”In the show Sears a

Terrance Williams says it was his dad who taught him to be a leader who listens, an intern who asked him how he knows insurance is still the right career for him and his parents together who instilled in him his mantra of “paying it forward.”In this episode of the CUES Podcast, Williams, the new president/CEO of CUESolutions provider TruStage®, illustrates his leadership style by describing his approach to having lunch.“I want to make sure that everyone’s comfortable engaging with me,” says Williams. “When I go get lunch, I talk to everyone in the cafeteria, regardless of their role, and regardless of what they do, and I want them to view and see me as someone that's approachable as someone that they can talk to and engage with—and give me feedback, give me a suggestion, give me a thought. (That) doesn’t mean we’re going to do everything that comes my way, but I always want to maintain that open forum, so that people are comfortable coming to me and approaching me."Williams explains in the show how

Chris Jones and his team have renamed their company to better represent what they do. Jones is a senior benefits consultant and partner in PARC Street Partners. PARC stands for plan, attract, retain and compensate—all key elements of the company’s work to help credit unions create a succession plan, attract, retain and compensate key executives so that both the executives and the credit union “win the financial game.”In the end, he says in the show, the credit union’s members win too.“If the credit union is winning the financial game, the executive should win the financial game,” he says. “And as the result of those two, ultimately, keeping the member in the center, … the member is winning the financial game. When the organization is healthy and moving forward, the member is winning.”PARC Street Partners specializes in helping credit unions, executives and boards put in place supplemental executive retirement plans so that everyone can win the financial game together. But in the show, Jones emphasizes that SE

Hybrid, remote and in-person work gets talked about a lot these days. The conversations are often about which companies are staying remote, which are calling every employee back to the office, and which jobs can truly be done effectively from someplace other than a physical location.But a topic that’s been less talked about so far is the impact of our new choices about where we work in terms of career development. And this is the topic Deedee Myers, Ph.D., delves into deeply in this episode of the CUES Podcast. Myers is the president of DDJ Myers, an ALM First Company, the CUESolutions provider for succession planning and the sponsor of CUES’ Advancing Women publication.In this show, Myers emphasizes the need to both slow down and focus on people in a variety of areas related to people strategy and career development.For example, Myers says executives are exhausted from having to manage several groups of people—those who are in the office all the time, those who are in the office part of the time and those wh

From a past episode of the CUES Podcast, we already know that Scott Hackworth is an able data guy. In this show, he talks about the compensation data and corresponding trends that stand out in this year’s CUES Executive Compensation Survey and CUES Employee Salary Survey. He also describes the suite of data analysis tools included in the CUES compensation surveys and how they may be helpful to both credit unions and their team members.“The year-over-year comparisons are still very high,” in the latest survey data, Hackworth says in the show. He is a CPA and president of Industry Insights, CUES’ partner in producing the annual surveys. This year’s increases are in the “high single digits, whereas in ‘21, it had been the low double digits. But we’re still in that 7, 8, 9% year-over-year change—and that’s on a same-sample basis. So, looking at the same groupings of companies, same employees largely, we are seeing 7, 8, 9% pay increases. That’s significant."In addition to the overall upward trend, Hackworth

Peter Glyman finds it fun to say “yes” to a fintech integration with a Jack Henry product.Glyman is managing director of corporate strategy at Jack Henry, a CUES Supplier member and the sponsor of this episode. In the show, he talks about his fintech experience as the co-founder in 2006 of personal financial management tool Geezeo, which Jack Henry acquired in 2019 and subsequently integrated with its Banno Digital Platform.In the show, Glyman says a best practice for credit unions when it comes to fintech might be “getting involved.” This could be watching fintechs directly; starting a credit union service organization to work together with other CUs in monitoring the environment; or partnering with a larger group like Jack Henry that’s vetting fintechs and choosing which to integrate into its products. Glyman also talks about application programming interfaces—or APIs—what they are, why they’re important and the value of knowing a fintech has published theirs. And in addition to talking about Jack Henry-fin

In the latest episode of the CUES Podcast, Lesley Sears defines the differences between climate and culture and explains how they together create the workplace your staff members experience every day. VP/consulting for CUES, Sears then rises to the challenges of describing each of the nine elements of climate in two minutes or less. In that short span, she defines each, explains what to look for if they’re healthy or unhealthy dimensions, and what to do to bring each along toward health. The nine dimensions of culture Sears highlights are: Challenge and engagement Freedom Trust and openness Idea time Playfulness and humor Conflict Idea support Debate Risk-taking Credit unions want high numbers for every dimension except conflict, Sears says.. “Debate is different than conflict,” she explains. “Debate is healthy conversation. Conflict is not healthy. So, it's the sniping. It happens when people genuinely don't like each other. There's a dislike in the climate. So again, as much as playfulness an

According to Deedee Myers, Ph.D., in this latest episode of the CUES Podcast, more and more CEOs are looking at their organizations and asking themselves, “What does it need to be in the future?” The answer to that question, she says, has to be put in the context of unprecedented times with the hybrid remote work environment taking hold and the need for leadership skills really changing.“As humans, we need to ‘North Star’ right now,” says Myers, CEO of DDJ Myers, an ALM First company, a CUESolutions provider and the sponsor of CUES’ Advancing Women publication. “We need a reason to come to work. We need to come together with one voice and have a place to go. Call it a vision or North Star organizing principle, we need to know why we matter every day. That’s lost right now in a lot of organizations. That's why a lot of CEOs are looking at the organization of the future. What is that compelling reason?”Myers suggests that when CEOs are designing the organization of the future, they should talk with many st

Omar Jordan says a mantra he lives by personally and professionally is, this one from Tony Robbins: "Stop being afraid of what could go wrong, and start being excited of what could go right." As founder/CEO of the credit union service organization Coviance, Des Moines, Iowa, Jordan believes that credit unions would benefit from not being afraid to take a risk to see what good could come of it—especially a calculated risk related to home equity lending, lending automation and working with fintechs. “In this industry, as you know, … we're good at managing risk,” Jordan says in the show. “And that's primarily what I hear. ‘We manage risk, we manage risk.’ And to that I say, … 'Everything is scary until it's not.’ And so, it's okay to take risks every now and then as long as we're not putting one out of business. Let's … continue along the path of innovation.” In this episode of the CUES Podcast, Jordan talks about trends in the HELOC market. “We've been actually

In this episode of the CUES Podcast, Lesley Sears says she loves the commercial in which “Polly Pratz wore many hats.” While the commercial is for an online university, Sears loves the many hats idea as it relates to having an organization-wide skills taxonomy—a system for deeply understanding the skills of each employee and the organization overall. Having a skills taxonomy can help an organization not just think about their people within the boundaries of their position or role (such as teller or chief marketer) but rather think broadly about what they can or could do—their current and developable skills (such as accuracy or setting marketing strategy), explains Sears, , CUES’ VP/consulting services who heads up CUES Consulting.In the commercial, the female protagonist “has on a firefighter’s hat and the coach’s hat and … all of these different things that she has done in the past,” Sears says. “The skills taxonomy really begins to identify that for the organization, … so people really understand who their

A decade before CUES member Dana DeFilippis, CCE, became CEO of Merck, Sharp & Dohme Federal Credit Union in Chalfont, Pennsylvania, she decided she wanted the job.Coming to credit unions from public accounting, DeFilippis prepared for the CEO role by adding leadership of the IT department to her duties as VP/finance of the $825 million institution, excelling at opportunities her CEO gave her to present to the board, attending CUES’ CEO Institute and earning her certified chief executive designation, and getting to know every part of the organization.Now CEO for two years, DeFilippis has leveraged the knowledge she gathered to help her use technology and teamwork to promote staff innovation and better serve members.“So, our ultimate goal is that we free up our employees’ time (from) doing mundane things, so that they can be more innovative; they can think about how things are being done and how do we, you know, continue to improve our processes, improve our products and services that we’re offering to our

Tyler Leet takes credit union cybersecurity very seriously. For him, it’s not just a job. It’s a duty.“We have an obligation,” says Leet, director of risk and compliance services for the regulatory compliance group at CSI, Paducah, Kentucky, the sponsor of the latest episode of the CUES Podcast. “Businesses have an obligation, credit unions have an obligation to keep their members secure, their data secure, their money secure.”In this show, Leet shares his 20 years of experience in information security, risk and compliance by describing best practices in “going on offense” to defend your credit union and the data it generates against hackers. These best practices include knowing:The key differences between “vulnerability assessments” and “penetration testing” as well as between “compliance” and “security” The value of assessments and tests—and how to put each in contextHow to build a well-balanced cybersecurity programLeet urges credit unions to not be afraid of the results they might get from doing vulnerabi

The 17 Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations are central to the corporate social responsibility program for $8 billion United Nations Federal Credit Union, New York.These goals such things as living wages, clean water, ending poverty and empowering women and girls, explains Yma Gordon in this episode of the CUES Podcast. Gordon is VP/Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact for UNFCU and the Executive Director of the UNFCU Foundation. “Credit unions are known to have purpose,” Gordon says. “And so for us, it's about really living that value to put people, planet and prosperity ahead of profit.”Gordon makes an important distinction between “CSR” and another common buzzword, “ESG”—or environmental, social, governance. To Gordon, CSR has to do with the work of delivering on the mission of its members—employees of the United Nations—to leave the world a better place. So that includes “our collective action, our policy, our investments,” work done both internally and externally.“Corporate soci

In this episode of the CUES Podcast, Alex Johnson underscores the idea that knowledge is power when it comes to credit unions' success in understanding and making decisions about fintech. The creator and author of the Fintech Takes newsletter, Johnson describes ways credit union leaders can track trends in fintech and even recommends several of his favorite fintech resources. In the show, Johnson also emphasizes the importance of credit unions staying strategic as they contemplate fintech and how to engage with it.“I think when you’re trying to decide … what’s hyped or overhyped or maybe not hyped up enough, … it needs to be done through the lens of … who are members or customers and what problems are we trying to solve for them? And how does this technology contribute to that goal?” he says.“We don’t have unlimited resources to throw at this stuff,” he adds. “We don’t have an unlimitedly large technology staff or sometimes any technology staff at all. We don’t have a huge budget for this stuff. And so y