Last week I spoke with a member of a credit union management team that I’d worked with doing strategic planning a few years back. We got along well, and I thought the team came up with a great strategy for growing their credit union. She mentioned that there was a new CEO, and that the CEO I had worked with left the credit union about two years ago.
When I asked how the strategic plan was working for the credit union, I was a bit disappointed to find that nothing had been done with strategic planning since the old CEO left. Once again, the credit union’s strategic planning had fallen back into the old model – a brief weekend retreat with the board where strategy is discussed vaguely but with little input (or support) from the management team. Naturally, the credit union had done well with its intitial thrust with our strategies – but I sensed that they have also reached a new plateau and were wondering where to go next.
Dropping the ball with strategic planning – or going back to the less-effective “board retreat” model – may look like a good idea at the time. After all, you will save time and money, and the impact on the organization may take years to become noticeable. Rest assured, however, that – from the outside – it is usually very apparent to me when a credit union is moving forward and when it is just treading water, waiting to be steamrollered by the next unforeseen event in the credit union market. Which kind of credit union do you want to be?
