In a bid to further help member credit unions develop leadership skills, The Cooperative Trust has partnered with Michael Neill and Associates.

Through MNA's Vertex Management Development Program, scholarships have been made available to select Trust members for a year long customized management training program. 

MNA also provides support by offering periodic webinars to the Trust community for honing management skills.

The first webinar, “Performance through Coaching” was recently held and revolved around the concept of “What you're willing to accept becomes your standard.”  Neil shared tips ranging from coaching employees to encouraging others to meet their highest potential.

According to Jayson Peters, IT manager at Wyandotte Federal Credit Union in Michigan and Cooperative Trust member, key webinar takeaways to becoming effective leaders and managers included coaching back to the mission rather than numbers and recognizing that performance problems are a result of willingness or ability.

“When we coach back to numbers, it leads to disengagement. It is important for us to always coach back to our mission, something bigger than ourselves,” said Peters. “In our industry, that's easy, we're here to improve our members' financial wellbeing. It is important for us to manage outcomes, and coach behaviors. We learned all performance problems boil down to employees are either unwilling to perform or do not have the ability to perform.”

He added the webinar emphasized that effective coaches challenge employees to improve.

“When it comes to poor coaching, we often don't understand the people we are coaching, or we parent rather than coach,” said Peters. “Ultimately, we need to stop 'buddy parenting' employees, where we are more concerned with feelings then results.  An effective coach has an appropriate balance of a tough parent and a buddy parent.”

Michael Neill, president of MNA, provided the coaching model of providing employees the knowledge, equipment and environment to do their jobs and the rest being up to the employee. He said a great coach will recognize employees' accomplishments and advise course correction when needed.