CUES 157: Resilient Leaders Must Be Tough—or Flexible—as Needed

Resilience is “about being tough, but it’s also about being flexible, and truly resilient leaders know when to be which,” Heather McKissick, I-CUDE, says in the latest episode of the CUES Podcast. McKissick is the CEO of CUES.

The decision about when to be tough and when to be flexible, McKissick explains, “depends on the forces that we are up against—because some things you can predict because of wisdom or history or experience, and other things are unpredictable. And there are times when you have no choice but to work with what you’ve got in order to withstand and … keep moving forward.”

Being able to be agile, being able to forecast situations and “respond and test and pivot and change and not hold steadfast” to legacy policies or procedures is important, she says, “because if we hold too strongly to those things, we may get left behind.”

“Some organizations that don’t have that same kind of spirit of experimentation or transformation when it comes to how they serve their members and experience lag, … attrition, … a lack of engagement or satisfaction by their members because the organization that they’re looking to to help them through some of the most challenging times in their careers or in their lives isn’t able to keep up with the challenges and changes all around them.”

In addition to resilient leadership, this show also gets into

• McKissick’s vision for magnifying the good that credit unions and their leaders are doing all the time—and how CUES can support that
• The value of credit union industry players having conversations that would support taking the ongoing cooperative work of credit unions to the next level
• How McKissick applies her ideas about resilience to potentially disruptive technology like generative AI
• The importance of learning about new technology from credible sources
• How CUES can help credit union leaders and their organizations build resilience going forward, which in turn will build CUES’ resilience

Links for this show:

• McKissick’s “banana bread column”
• McKissick is the guest in this video: Resilient Leaders Leverage Dynamic Integration
• CUES Emerge
• CEO Institute: FinTech
•  Transcript