4 minutes
A longtime nurturer of credit union leaders, Stan Hollen suggests offering aspiring executives a breadth of experiences.
In an era of sweeping change, intense competition and technological disruption, credit unions need people with the talent, preparation and vision to find the way to success. That’s according to Stan Hollen, former CEO of $11.3 billion The Golden 1 Credit Union, Sacramento, and recently retired CEO of CUES Supplier Member CO-OP Financial Services, Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., who spotted and worked with 16 people who went on to become credit union CEOs. Two-thirds of them were women.
Big banks recruit top students from MBA and Ph.D. programs at leading business schools and put them on an executive development track where they are formally rotated, coached and evaluated against each other. Their job is to excel as trainees. It’s not like that in most CUs, Hollen says, especially smaller credit unions in smaller markets. There trainees have full-time duties; perceptive senior executives notice bright, ambitious co-workers and open a few doors for them so that bureaucracy and the daily grind don’t hold them back.
“It’s mostly informal,” Hollen says. “You don’t find a lot of structured one-on-one mentoring programs. The word may never be used. It’s all about noticing people with the ability to learn and grow and lead and then helping them do so.”
Hollen, in his days as a credit union CEO, would notice someone who was excelling in one professional area and deliberately move them out of that area to broaden their experience.
“There’s a danger in being siloed,” he says. “A CEO needs experience in a broad range of activities. We would rotate someone from the call center to IT to lending just to broaden their exposure.”
Civic activity is also helpful. “We encouraged people to get involved in community activities and to serve on local boards,” he says. “Visibility counts. You need to get your name out there, to meet community leaders and get noticed outside the CU.”
“You don’t do it (mentor women) to right a social injustice,” he says. “You do it to develop future leaders. It happens that a lot of talented women accept jobs in credit unions, so there’s a rich talent pool here. The culture is friendlier to women executives than it would be in some industrial fields.”
Stan Hollen, recently retired CEO of CO-OP Financial Services, Rancho Cucamonga, Calif.
Mentoring in pairs doesn’t always work. “Everyone has limits and personalities. Sometimes you run into conflicts and people who don’t work well together,” Hollen concedes. “You handle it. You reassign people.”
Mentoring women is essentially the same as mentoring men, Hollen insists. “You don’t do it to right a social injustice,” he says. “You do it to develop future leaders. It happens that a lot of talented women accept jobs in credit unions, so there’s a rich talent pool here. The culture is friendlier to women executives than it would be in some industrial fields.”
The mentoring Hollen is talking about is less about passing on wisdom than putting a promising prospect on a project team or sending them to credit union schools sponsored by trade associations or vendors—places where they can build peer networks and bring back to their CUs insights from the outside world, he explains. Sometimes Hollen would spot the prospect and initiate the opportunities; sometimes the prospect would ask him for additional responsibility.
Success lies in the hiring as well as the mentoring, Hollen points out. “You develop talent, but you don’t create it,” he notes, so you have to look at your community, your brand, your compensation, your recruiting, your staff expertise and morale and see what’s there that would attract top talent. Then you try to make it more attractive. That can be especially challenging in small communities, he concedes.
Credit union leaders are always consciously developing future leaders for their own CUs, Hollen explains, but it doesn’t always work out that way.
“If you take someone with high potential, give them leadership experience and send them to schools and conferences where they build peer networks, some of them will leave for greener pastures,” he reports. “That’s the risk you take, but it’s good for your reputation and the person could return some day.”
Usually, a credit union has only one CEO at a time, and if that’s what the ambitious future leader is ready for, they’ll go where they can get it, he points out. You seldom lose a top management prospect because a spouse is transferred. “At that level, they’re usually the main breadwinner. People sometimes leave for personal reasons, but usually it’s to take a job they want.”
Mentoring has changed over the years, Hollen notes. In the ’80s and ’90s, it was more common to move up through the ranks, he says. There were fewer people with college educations and certainly fewer with graduate degrees. Seniority was more important.
“Now we hire people with education and career goals, and we’d better accommodate them. This is especially true of women. They sense the opportunities. They have the ambition. Credit unions today are great places for women to move up.”
Richard H. Gamble is a freelance writer based in Colorado.
