Strategic Growth Conference

Anthony Demangone: Hey everybody, this is Anthony with NAFCU. I’m with Mike Neill, one of the service and culture gurus in America. We’re going to be giving you a taste of what Mike’s going to be covering at Strategic Growth in San Antonio.

Mike, how are you, sir?

Mike Neill: I’m doing great.

AD: Awesome! At Strategic Growth you’re going to be talking about creating awesome sales and member service culture. Why does that matter?

MN: Well, it has to matter because there’s no other area in which you can differentiate. So, you’re not going to differentiate on price, product, technology, location, rate. There is nothing that is not commoditized that we simply do not do.

When I work with most boards on strategic planning, they can’t even answer why should someone choose to do business with my credit union as opposed to somebody else’s credit union or bank. And so, there’s got to be some differentiation that calls people to want to do more business with you. And the way you’re going to do it is by dominating in ease of use, employee engagement and culture, which then those things lead to employees saying, “hey, I think I might be able to save you some money.”

Employee engagement is so important in this equation, and culture, because your members are never going to love your credit union until your employees love it first. So you can implement all these systems and structures that people tell you to do to create a great member experience. But if you don’t know how to lead and develop culture, you’re not going to be successful.

AD: If there’s a question that they could bring back to their team from your presentation that can get a great conversation started, what do you think that question or thought would be?

MN: Have we developed systems and structures to create a dominant member experience that are reflective of how we create outstanding balancing? The idea is, we have perfect balancing -- almost -- at our credit unions because we hire people that are going to be accurate; we train them for two weeks on how to be accurate and how to be in compliance. And then we measure it every single day and we coach it every single day and people that don’t do it don’t stay working at the credit union and people that do it well get promoted. And then we have systems and structures that create backups in case we don’t do it right the first time.

You know what people have a tendency to with this whole idea of member experience? “Oh, let’s do some service training.” “Let’s get somebody in here to do sales training.” And then people don’t do what they’ve been trained to do. So people try to train their way into this culture rather than create systems and structures that will create culture. It can’t be done.

That would be my question: Have we created systems and structures that replicate all the other systems and structures that create success? If not, then we can’t create member experience.

AD: Give me a story or a stat about service culture that you think might actually surprise most people that you tell it to.

MN: 71% of the employees in the United States are disengaged in their work. 65% of managers in the United States are disengaged in their work. And 70% of an employee’s engagement is directly tied to their immediate supervisor.

You will not be able to create culture, employee engagement or member experience without highly engaged and highly competent managers. If you haven’t done comprehensive management training, and developed a management way of behaving and acting in your credit union, you won’t get there. Because those middle managers will be the inhibitor that keeps the leadership from achieving what it wants to achieve.

AD: Where do you go to stay on top of this stuff?

MN: I stay out of the credit union space very intentionally when it comes to what I’m taking in so I can broaden the range of understanding of what other people are going through, because they’re going through very similar things.

A book I’m reading right now, which I just love, is called The Business of Expertise, by David C. Baker. And the idea is, the deeper you can dive into your area of expertise, the more opportunities you have to create dominance. So, rather than trying to be everything to everybody, how do you leverage what you do well, and your affinity, and dominate in it by understanding it at an even deeper level.

AD: What are your final 10 seconds you want to share with people thinking about coming to this conference?

MN: If you come to this conference, you’re going to walk away with things you can take back and utilize right away. And you’re going to make your credit union better just by having come.

AD: Mike, I will see you, my friend, in San Antonio. Thanks for what you do.

This is Anthony Demangone at NAFCU. You can shoot me an email and I’ll be happy to talk to you about what we’re trying to do to help you at our Strategic Growth Conference in 2020.