When a team comes together to lead with purpose, greatness occurs.
Connie Miller has valuable insight into the success that comes from leading with mission to build a strong foundation for a great culture. Culture supports not only creating a great place to work, but also supports creating teams that drive results for the organization and their clients.
Before Connie’s retirement in 2021, she served as the President/CEO of Icon Credit Union and later Regional President of Horizon Credit Union. Now she serves as CEO of Credible Advantage, a leadership and board development consulting business.
Watch as Connie shares how she took a numbers-driven industry and turned it into serving a purpose in the credit union industry.
I am super excited to be with you today. It says one of my favorite topics and so I'll definitely kick right in, but I am really passionate about culture. And one of the things that I find about culture is that sometimes we think about when we hear the word culture, we think about fun in the office and getting along with our coworkers. And sometimes we forget about the, the piece to it, which is what's the leadership that needs to drive that. And it's so much more it's, it's building in accountability and getting everyone to work towards the same mission of accountability. So let me kick right off with this. I am a big believer that there is two types of leadership and we tend to lead one way or the other. When I became CEO, which was in 2008 icon credit union.
I'd been there about 10 years as the CFO. And I really just wanted to invest in getting everyone going down the same path of what our mission was. So we just went to work on it and we had some great success stories. So I'm gonna share some of those. So there's two types of leadership. There's outcome based leadership and missional leadership and outcome based is really when your primary focus is on the outcomes. It's on the desired outcomes that you are trying to drive every single day. And that is your number one focus versus missional leadership is very much about where the leader's primary focus is much more towards the purpose of the organization in, in relation to who you're serving, who your customers are in our case, who our members were, and really kind of making sure that we create a great organization that is fulfilling that purpose, that that is actually driving our decisions.
So let me talk a little bit about each one of these outcome based leadership. The, the leader's primary focus, as I said, is all about the outcome. So here's kind of what can happen in outcome based leadership and that's that you can be very successful if your number one drive is just towards production and sales and profitability and numbers. And I'm going to give you some examples of these and actually asked you to chime in as well through this presentation, you can be successful, but I'm going to propose that you're never going to be looked at as great. And what I mean by that is oftentimes if this is a driver, it's just about the numbers is team members sometimes will tend to quit. Once the goals are reached, sometimes if they don't get incentives, they're not driven to reach the goals. They don't understand the why sometimes about that.
So sometimes they'll just they'll stop or they won't buy in and lost. They are incentivized. That is sometimes what you see. And these types of organizations you'll actually see organizations that are kind of mocked or even made gone up. They'll get bad publicity sometimes. And they it's not to say that can't be successful, but as I mentioned, they can never be great. So that's kind of what outcome based leadership is. And let's talk a little bit about mission, and then we're gonna talk about some examples. So in mission organizations, the focus is on the purpose. It's on the purpose of what you're trying to accomplish. And so for example, at the credit union, and I was blessed, I worked in the credit union industry for about 25 years. And I was very blessed because it is a very mission led organization and industry. So it's people helping people, it's helping members to financial success and financial building financial success for our members was part of our mission.
So when I came in to work every day, my number one focus was not on how many accounts we opened yesterday. How many loans were open? It wasn't, it was about the culture. It was about do we have all of our team, including even tellers? Are they all working to help our members achieve financial success? And I would use that in my decision. So examples would be if there was a decision about a fee, let's just say a fee for transfers from savings. If you overdraft your account, we want to encourage our members to build savings for emergencies that is financial success. So a factor in that decision is how does this build financial success? Is it contrary to our mission? That would be an example. And I was always more fascinated and interested in lead the team on the decisions we were making around.
Are we helping our members? So examples would be, you know, if we are doing a car loan, even though they might have great credit and they qualify is getting them in a long car loan of, you know, 84 months, the car loan is that in their best interest, are they going to be upside down? Are they going to have some financial challenges when they get ready to sell that car? And so that's what was most important to me. And that's what you will see show up in mission led organizations. So I loved to share with our team, for example, we did this wonderful exercise one time about how much money our members were saving in interest by doing the loan with us rather than some other folks in other financial institutions. That's an example. So the most important thing about mission leadership that is so critical for you to know is that it takes leadership.
You have to have a real strong focus on leadership leadership qualities, leadership focus, and it takes behavior changes because as we, as leaders get busy, there's always way more emails to respond to. Then we have timed board, there is more new ideas and products that we want to consider. There's new strategies, there's new competition, and we get very busy with those things, but we don't stop and think about what are we doing to drive towards our purpose. So I'd love to just throw this out as a conversation, because I think it's real important. Can you think of a outcome-based organization that let's just take a big retail store? Can you think of a big retail store that really leads? It's all about the numbers, get the price as low as they can, the cells, and they really aren't looked at as great a throw, throw a few of these in the chat.
And they're going to share with me an idea or two that you have, does anyone chime in, in a, and I'm thinking about Facebook there's certainly been some things recently about Facebook. Is there any others? Walmart? Okay. Walmart is, if you just think about Walmart, even has websites where people post pictures of people that shop at Walmart and make fun of, so they aren't great, right? We can look at them now, are they successful? Yes. Walmart is continuing to put up new stores. They continue to grow so we can say they're successful, but we don't look at them. We actually wine when we have to go to Walmart. Sometimes you'll see social media posts where it's kind of negative when people shop at Walmart. So they are very, outcome-based driven. Let's take a large bank someone chimed in about a large bank that is just very much about the numbers and, and they aren't leading with that purpose.
Let's see if I can get a few. I usually hear some common ones. Wells Fargo. That's always the one that pops up, right? So Wells Fargo is they are one of the top four or five largest banks in the world. So who can say they're not successful, but we would never look at them, right? There's, there's all kinds of bad PR around them. There's all kinds of things in, and I hear them come up often. So it isn't, they're a very outcome-based driven institution and that is their focus. And it's much more important to them. And as a result turnover's high employees are disengaged. Employees will go to the media with things they don't like about it. That is what happens at Wells Fargo. So that is an example of outcome based organizations. You'll actually see industries also that have cars. Car dealerships would be an example where that's a choice.
You actually will see some car dealerships that are very mission led. It's taken care of what is needed. So that's the difference. It is a choice. And I really challenge each of you to think about what you do day in and day in and how you lead. I'm an accountant. I love the, but I didn't start my date with the numbers. So let's look at this a little bit. And what the biggest thing I can say is if you just start imagining how you turn your organization into a movement, and if you can get your team to really think about what you're doing day in and day out, and it's a movement, and then it kind of starts to come together. So this is a slide that has lots of information in it. So I'm going to touch on it just very briefly.
The most important thing on this light is to see where it says start here. And you must start with your leadership practices to get an organization like this, and you have to have a compelling mission. And you've got to build that culture of countability along with fun. And you really need to be committed to who you serve. You need to never lose sight. I always told my team that I never, ever, ever lose sight of every single payday, the money coming in my bank account, as payroll came from the wallets of our members, we didn't get government funding. We didn't get, so I, you can never lose sight of who you're serving and who is keeping your organization float. And so that's where you start. And I love working with organizations creating this compelling mission because a lot of organizations have vision and mission and culture values, but they haven't connected the dots with how we go about this.
And you'll see leadership practices is at the top of that, this thing. And this is each of these feed, the next piece of this puzzle. And it all eventually goes full circle. So it's really critical to know in outcome based organizations that arrow that start here actually starts with the financial performance. So it goes the opposite way. So if you want to be really mission led, invest in leadership and invest in always taking the time to slow down and talk about your why. And I will tell you organizations, don't spend enough time on this and leaders don't spend enough time on this because you're busy and you get busy. So it is something that you know, I think it's critically important. I've been blessed. I've been a member of this ditch, for example, for many years. And our executives have this incredible opportunity to, to attend amazing speakers that are profound in content.
And even though they absolutely loved it and had joy and got amazing wisdom from it, I still had a hard time getting them to attend because they were busy. And so this is something where we have to carve out the time and we have to invest in it. And it really is what kind of drove me to write my book about building your career a few years ago, because I just saw this lack of investment in leadership practices, and we all need them. I've, I've used them in my career. I've hired leadership coaches. We all need them. None of us are perfect with this. So at our credit union, what we did, and I really encourage you to think about your culture values, however you have them is to make sure you've got a group of them that are very much about how you behave internally.
And then another group about what you want your customers to feel. So ours, for example, our internal ones were driving leadership where two of them, we wanted driven leaders on our team. What does that do for our members? They would be knowledge. They would see us as being knowledgeable. We ha they would be trustworthy and we'd be bills stable as an organization. We'd be innovative if we have driven leaders were innovative, right? So we wanted our members to see us as that. So we actually practice two sets of values, our culture values. So that's our internal, and we call them perception values, which were our customer's perception of us. And we talked about them all the time. And then our third, we had a third set of values, which was our financial. So that was kind of what we did. You can organize these however you want, but it's real important that you have these well-defined.
So let me just talk about why, what does it do for your organization? This is just a sample chart of some of our financial performance at the credit union. Once we started working on culture, we started tracking where we were compared to industry. So 2009 is when we really started employees, knew the values really well. We really spent a year trying to just really working to get it in bread. And you can see the top line is was our credit unions performance. The bottom line was the industry. So we consistently were outperforming. There's two blips in this that I want to talk about because they're they're real. The first one that happened in 2013, 14, we actually merged in a small credit union that was underperforming and we really wanted to help them. And it's something that credit unions do.
It's incredible. So we, we definitely have the blip there as a result of that, but you can see how we kind of ticked it up and it takes about a year after you do that to kind of settle down and blend two cultures together. The second blip in 2016, which I am fine talking about is I made two bad executive team hires that did not fit our culture. And it will hurt you when you do this. It's important to rebound quick when you do that. And sometimes you're, you're never going to make all perfect decisions, right? So as leaders, we just have to stay focused on what we're accomplishing and if we miss step, we've got to rebound and go at it. So that's what happened there. And you can just see, we just started, we rebounded quickly from those. So those were some lessons learned from that 2016, 15, 16, 17 time.
Here's the thing is why, right. And what can we build? So I that's our team, we threw out a random, Hey, does anyone want to go camping? And and it was completely random. We didn't pay, it was a weekend. You could come if you wanted. And we have so much fun as a team when we started really investing in culture. And yeah, they made me do crazy things like a Spartan cheer, and, you know, but the reality is it was we were all driving towards success and I'm really proud. Many years, we were in the top 200 of credit unions, the healthiest credit lines in the country. And 2019, we were actually ranked number seven out of 5,400 credit unions for the healthiest credit unions. So it pays off. I spent a lot of time, I would take employees out, every new employee, I would take out to coffee and we would talk about our culture values, and it was time consuming to do that, but it was worth it because I could set that tone and get them to know me as a person.
And we just had tremendous tremendous success and fun from doing that. So I love this cartoon because so often we can look at the world around us and think about well, we need everyone else to change. And we don't think about what we're going to do to change that when it comes time for us to actually sit down and think about how we're going to change and adapt, we think everyone else should change and not us. So I just encourage you to never to be that person in the bottom slide that doesn't want to raise your hand and be willing to adapt and change as well. We all need to be in that game together. So just want to thank you for this time. I it's a pleasure. It's just, you can tell, this is my favorite topic. And I, it worked for me and I had an incredible career and I'm super excited now to work in the consulting side of helping other organizations. That's my contact. You can call me anytime if you have a question or anything. So, and I just love watching SOLV from the outside and seeing that it fits my, my what my vision is of culture. So thanks for having me.