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Leadership Levers
This podcast spotlights leaders' actions so they may enhance their organization’s performance and culture.
We feature CEOs and industry-recognized Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) who share their experiences and insights on three key challenges: people, performance, and profit.
If you are a leader who wants to learn from your peers about improving performance and financial returns, please join us.
Leadership Levers
Engaging Employees for Growth - Leadership Lessons with Brian Waldron
Would you like to discover the secrets behind fostering a thriving & engaged workplace culture?
In this episode, we sit down with Brian Waldron, President & CEO of Dort Financial Credit Union, to discuss how leadership actions directly impact employee engagement, culture, and organizational performance.
Brian shares his leadership journey - from starting as a teller in college to leading a $2.3 billion credit union - and his lessons on building a culture of empowerment, fostering leadership development, and aligning people, processes, and profits to drive long-term success.
Tune in to hear actionable insights on:
*The role of leadership in shaping employee engagement & retention
*How cultural alignment impacts financial performance & customer experience
*Strategies for empowering employees & creating internal growth opportunities
With over two decades of experience in the credit union industry, Brian discusses the importance of understanding diverse employee backgrounds to cultivate an inclusive culture. He also emphasizes the need to anticipate financial trends to safeguard a positive work environment, offering actionable strategies for leaders at any stage.
This episode is a must-listen for leaders seeking to create a values-driven workplace where open dialogue, employee satisfaction, and cultural alignment drive performance and success.
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Welcome to the Leadership Levers Podcast. I'm your host, Will Gladhart, CMO at the Culture Think Tank. At the Culture Think Tank, we empower leaders with metrics that strengthen culture, drive performance and return. We're here today to learn about the actions leaders have taken to address organizational change. Today, our guest is Brian Waldron, President and CEO of Dort Financial Credit Union. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us.
Brian Waldron:Will, thanks for having me. I truly appreciate it.
William Gladhart:Absolutely. Let's begin by having you share with our audience a bit about yourself, your background and your organization.
Brian Waldron:Absolutely! Well. As you mentioned Brian Waldron, president and CEO of Dort Financial Credit Union, I've been the President and CEO since March of 2022. I built a 20-plus year career in the credit union industry, actually starting out when I was in college at First Miami Student Federal Credit Union, on campus working as a teller. So I've done a lot of positions across the country, but I think it's a really unique opportunity to start when you're in college as a part-time teller and work your way all the way through and now being CEO of a $2.3 billion credit union in Michigan, which is awesome. Besides that, in my personal life, I am a father of three boys 21 and twin 17-year-olds and a dog dad to four dogs and I've been married to my wife for over 20 years.
William Gladhart:As you mentioned in some of our pre-conversations, it's never dull around the house - never, never. So we'll be discussing three questions today as a warm-up to start our conversation. Would you share why you believe a healthy culture is critical?
Brian Waldron:Well, you know, I've built my career in management around employee engagement right.
Brian Waldron:I really feel like it's important for employees to feel engaged and create that work culture where employees feel empowered and that they can ask questions and then they can make decisions and they can lead the credit union forward.
Brian Waldron:One of the biggest experiences I ever had early on in my career the CEO came into one of our leadership meetings and said we were having some issues and we needed to lay off some staff. And sitting across the desk from someone and telling them, for no reason of their own, that they don't have a job anymore, really impacted me in a not so good way at the time, but I vowed at that moment that I would never do that if I was ever to become a CEO or in a senior leadership position. I've kind of built my career around employee engagement, making sure employees are satisfied, because I truly believe that when an employee is engaged and they're happy, that they're going to provide the best member service or customer service right, and so to do that and to change culture and to be a change agent for culture has been really important throughout my career.
William Gladhart:Yeah, I love hearing that. Often we see that leadership's actions and behaviors directly impact performance and connectivity and how people understand their role at an organization. Just as we kick off the next question, it's been my, it's been our experience that leaders tend to struggle in three key areas people, process or profit. In your role as CEO, would you identify maybe one of these three areas that represented a cultural challenge within the organization?
Brian Waldron:Well, I think people is always the challenge, right, because people come from different walks of life, they come from different backgrounds, they come from different cultures, based upon either where you live or where they've grown up or lived in their past. So I think people is just a really challenging effort. As the CEO, I think we need to understand the other two key factors, right. We obviously need to understand profitability and how that affects everything, but I think it's important to understand profitability and how it affects people, right? So, going back to my original example, where I sat across the desk and had to lay somebody off of no fault of their own, I believe in my heart and I'm not speaking poorly of ass leaders that I've had, because there have been some really great ones but I believe it's our key role as a CEO to understand profitability in the future, right, and to make sure we're looking out and making sure we have all those things so that we can provide the best employee culture. When I go back to understanding people, I want to meet them where they are right. I want to challenge them, I want to understand, I want to be able to have a conversation. I think you know one thing I've heard throughout my career as managers is we don't have enough people. And then, of course, I kind of chuckle right, because I look down at the numbers and I'm like, well, we could improve here, we could possibly improve there, and no one's working overtime. And when I look out the window at five o'clock there's a rush to the car, right. And so to say you need more people, we need to challenge our people right, to work harder, work smarter. But we need, we need to give them the opportunity to do so, and if they really love what they do and where they work, they'll put in that extra effort. And then, as we start to see those numbers go down or, over time, go up, then we can start thinking about adding the staff and so just.
Brian Waldron:But having that very transparent conversation is tough for a lot of leaders. Right, we say, oh, we need more people. Yep, I understand, let's do it. Right, that's how you throw numbers or you throw people at numbers. I just don't think that's the right answer on the test. But I think people in leadership positions are so afraid to have the appropriate conversation or that tough conversation. But what I have found out throughout my career is if you're willing to have that conversation and teach and engage the staff. They're much more willing to listen and they truly appreciate the feedback.
William Gladhart:Yeah, no, I love that you address that, because all the people, process and profits really truly are wrapped together, but individuals understanding their role, how they're contributing to the organization, but at the end of the day it's appreciated by all across the organization.
Brian Waldron:Yeah, you know, I do say in front of our we have an all team meeting once a year and there's over 400 employees that attend this and I get to stand up in front of all of them and I do get to be very honest with them and say what keeps me up at night is making sure that you have a place that you can come to work every day, right? So that incorporates people, process and profits. So it incorporates all three Ps and I think making sure that they're the center of my thought when we reach out to do that is really important.
William Gladhart:You kind of identified that people challenge. Was there a specific instance or specific challenge within the organization and, if so, did that negatively impact the organization?
Brian Waldron:Again, talking poorly about a past leader is not really my forte, right, and that's not my intention here, but I will say that people come from different backgrounds, right? So when I took over the organization, we did an employee engagement score and it came in fairly low. In fact, it was lower in all categories across the board and including all comparative statistics. Now, that wasn't to say we had bad leadership, but it was just a different type of leadership. The previous CEO had come up through the financial realm, right. So chief financial officer into a CEO role and in some of those ways, they're always challenged by more of the profit role, right? They're less engaged with the people, and that's just what I've seen across my career. However, I came up through more of a lending route, always been engaged with people, whether it was making people alone, talking to staff and engaging and cross-selling and things of that nature. So people has really been my priority and over that time March 2022, so we're almost coming up on three years we have improved employee engagement to the point now where we are higher than all comparative metrics across the board. We are higher than credit unions 1.5 billion and above. We are higher than credit unions who employ 300 to 400 employees and we are higher than credit unions in our region and that's really important.
Brian Waldron:But we didn't do it by throwing money, salary dollars, incentives at people. What we did is really going back and looking at our value statements empowerment, community service, right and looking at those different things and there are others but really taking a look at that and training the staff on what that meant for us, right. What does empowerment mean? It means that you can make a mistake or you can make a decision and you know what. There are consequences to some things, but most of the time mistakes are minor and not intentional, and so we can kind of learn from those things. If you waive a fee or you do something that you're empowered to do and it's not the right choice, we don't terminate or we don't look down on you. We simply have a conversation and we try to learn and teach from that.
Brian Waldron:We have really learned from this lesson and we have started to engage employees who wanted to make a career and how do they advance, right, and so coming up with an emerging leaders program where we teach people different leadership skills and how they all come together and so really just again, engaging with that staff and moving that needle forward and worrying less about the member service or customer service has actually improved our customer service has actually improved our customer service.
Brian Waldron:I hear more good things from customers now, when I see them out and about, than I did before, and it's because we have an engaged work staff and so we really sat down, we explained our mission, we explained our core values and we actually have annual training on these. But they're fun, right. They're really fun trainings. The other thing we've really done is we've really dove in and we have really focused on generational differences right, because if you look across our workforce right now, we have four different generations that are working under the same roof and they operate very, very differently, and so we have generational training on how conversations affect each one of us and how we hear that or how we view that, and so, again, just taking our differences and really learning from them and leaning in has been awesome for our organization.
William Gladhart:Well, I always love it when I get a two-fer from a leader, which is they address the problem, but then also they share how they identified it, how they made it turn it into a positive, and I think that's a fantastic testament that you not only hear from your customers and people in the community that they've noticed a difference. They actually are feeling like the customer should, and their customer experience journey is very different, as you noted. Taking those steps to help employees understand their next steps in the organization, giving them an opportunity for leadership whether they want to step into that or not is huge. So, as we wrap up today, brian, is there anything else you'd like to share for fellow leaders?
Brian Waldron:You know, I think, for leaders, I think employees are just always looking for answers. Right, they're looking for more and I don't think we give them enough credit for why they're looking for more. Sometimes in that leadership role, we want to just sit there and say, well, it's because we need to do this. If people understand the why behind the statement or the why behind the process or the why behind the profit right Again, going back to those three Ps when you engage people where they are and you explain the way that they can relate, I think it creates such an engagement from them that they want to do that. Next right I'll leave.
Brian Waldron:One piece of information that I just think has been so informative in my life is when people look for a promotion, they look at the job description and it says must have I'll use in my career in the credit union space. I list this long right you must qualify for five years of lending. Sometimes that can be really tough, especially if you have been in a branch or you've been a teller, you've been more of a back office role, and you might not meet that qualification. So the other thing that we've done is we've created more kind of like a university type process where we will teach you how to do real estate lending or we will teach you how to do car loans and things like that. And then that job description now says either you've completed five years of experience or you've gone through the Dort University of Lending.
Brian Waldron:And let me tell you when you can have a staff member get that promotion because the workplace provided them the next step. That is awesome. And so internally this year we had over 76 promotions internally. We didn't have to go outside, and I'll tell you what. That speaks volumes, right, and not only does it talk to the people who got promoted or who received the promotion, but it talks to the incoming staff members saying, wow, this is a great place to work and I want to make a career here and they will allow me to do so and it's a really cool experience.
William Gladhart:Yeah, that's well, and I think that that wraps back in what you mentioned about some of that generational communication, generational training, but also that's a fantastic number 70 plus individuals that internally were promoted because they were given the resources by the company to be able to do that, so that's right. Brian, I've enjoyed having you on our Leadership Lovers podcast. Thank you again for your time and insights.
Brian Waldron:Oh, I loved being here. Thanks so much for asking me to be here.
William Gladhart:Thank you for joining us on the Leadership Levers Podcast. Find our Leadership Levers at The Culture Think at www. theculturethinktank. com or listen on your favorite streaming platform. We'd love to hear from you about the challenges you have faced as a leader. Tune in weekly as we invite leaders to share their experiences in strengthening culture and performance, one action at a time.
