A tenured leadership team, and the case for perspective from outside

Credit Union of Colorado had leaders who had been there a long time. That was a strength with a blind spot in it.

The challenge

Long tenure is usually written up as a strength, and at Credit Union of Colorado it genuinely is one. The values are not decoration. “One of the things that drew me to the company is certainly a company that is, the values aren’t just on the wall, they are truly lived, and they’re observable,” the HR lead said. “And there’s an intense member focus, and an employee experience focus as well.”

The blind spot sits directly underneath the strength. “One of my early observations in this environment was, and still is, we have a lot of tenured leaders in the organisation, and that is great in a lot of ways, but it also is, I think, preventing us from having an art of the possible mindset and approach.”

A leadership team that has worked together for years inside one industry develops a shared idea of what is normal, and stops being able to see the edge of it. It also, in this case, developed a particular conflict-avoidance: a culture of nice that had quietly redefined niceness as not saying the difficult thing. Feedback that would help someone grow was being withheld as a kindness. Neither problem is one an internal programme solves, because the people who would run it are inside the same frame.

What they did

The organisation launched a twenty-licence pilot connecting leaders with coaches from outside financial services entirely.

• Coaches drawn from outside the credit union world, and outside banking

• Started inside the HR team, where the first read on usability could be taken honestly, before extending to directors

• Messaging adapted per stakeholder group rather than announced once and left to land

The reasoning was about exposure rather than skills. “This platform offered an opportunity to connect these leaders with folks that have worked outside of the credit union space,” the HR lead said. “My hope is that it will really provide an opportunity for people to stretch their thinking… have more robust conversations around topics that are not being talked about, or historically haven’t been talked about, it appears in this environment.”

The result

The pilot began inside the HR team and extended toward the director group, with adoption treated as something to be actively led rather than assumed.

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