Credit Unions
Dealing with Divisive Directors
Honor the principle of democratic member control even when you need to remove a board member. Like a lot of things in life, governance challenges seem to come in threes. There was the year that we had three clients struggling with their representative boards. Last summer, the trials were three different mergers and acquisitions. This…
Read MoreDoes A Divided Vote Make You A Divided Board?
A divided vote makes you a human board. And it’s what you do afterward that matters most. While most of our clients are credit unions, Quantum Governance also works with a wide variety of other non-profit organizations—foundations, associations and charitable groups, even a small children’s home in India with an annual budget of just $50,000—helping…
Read MoreThe Playground Bully Grows Up
I’ve been bullied three times in my life, and as anyone who has ever been bullied can tell you, that’s about three times too many. Luckily for me, each of these bullies entered my life when I was adult. They were professionals, on-the-job bullies. And the last one did the damage just recently. I don’t…
Read MoreReimagining Your Board Meetings
To make your gatherings more effective and engaging, first look at the real reasons boards meet. Leaders everywhere seem to be asking the question, “How do we make our board meetings more effective and more engaging?” To answer that question, I think you have to first look at the real reasons that boards meet. To…
Read MoreTaking Action On Credit Unions’ No. 1 Director Recruitment Priority: Diversity.
The credit union and women’s movements are clearly doing something right. But we still have a long way to go. The day after Kamala Harris was picked by Joe Biden as his running mate, I was talking with a colleague of mine about his choice. I have to note that the colleague in question is…
Read MoreA Hero For All
There’s nothing like meeting your hero. For some, that might equate to a football player or a musician or maybe a politician — a well-known celebrity type, whose mere physical presence is immediately recognized by all. For a governance geek like me, heroes are fewer and farther in between. But they do exist and when…
Read MoreEffective Communications in the Board Room
A great number of the governance challenges that we come across in the work that our firm undertakes with credit unions can be boiled down to matters of communications. Are your board members crossing over into day-to-day operations? Well…have their roles and responsibilities been clearly defined, updated and effectively communicated to them? Are there two…
Read MoreTell Me Something I Don’t Know: What You Need to Know About Assessments
We don’t know what we don’t know. It’s such an obvious thing to state, and yet we would suggest this simple statement of fact may be the key to the future of your credit union. Often our clients approach us with a sense that although their credit union has a healthy balance sheet and continues to…
Read MoreGood Governance: Who’s on Your Board Today? Tomorrow?
Data from our new report, The State of Credit Union Governance, 2018, finds that the majority of credit unions feel pretty good about who’s currently on their boards—but are much less sure about the future.
Read MoreThe State of Credit Union Governance, 2018: Six Key Findings
We’ve been regularly surveying credit union board members, supervisory or audit committee members, CEOs and senior staff for the past five years. And for as many years as we’ve been surveying them, we’ve dreamed about the notion of pulling together a “state of the state” of credit union governance report – both to forward our own understanding…
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