White Paper

Operations & Member Experience Leadership: Coaching Teams and Employees

By Beth Stetenfeld

posted 06.29.2017 (o & me)

The CUNA Operations & Member Experience Council has published a new white paper, “Leadership: Coaching Teams and Employees.”

One of the most difficult responsibilities of being a leader is often leading a team. Navigating the murky waters of team management can make it stressful and challenging to reach goals, maintain ownership, and meet other strategic obligations.

This white paper in the Leadership Series examines those challenges and offers suggestions from operations and member experience leaders about mitigating and dealing with the stress, including:

• Determining if you have the “right” team in place, starting with an evaluation of the current players,
• Determining the ideal structure for your team—for example, whether it should be tall and hierarchical, or flatter with few levels between staff and executives,
• Identifying, addressing, and avoiding silos—both between departments and within a large team,
• Engaging in effective coaching of both the team and the individuals,
• Retaining talent and circumventing turnover, and
• Creating a balance between implementing strategic and tactical tasks/oversight and leading, coaching, and integrating.

Several credit union executives provide their perspectives about leading the operations and member experience team and employees.