Young Professional Leadership and Career Development in North ...

employee- sponsored groups, training courses for frontline staff, and
the credit union system in general (such as the Crash Network and
trade associations). I did not evaluate community- based programs in
my city or county, because I did not believe they could cater to my
target audience (employees of ECCU who were passionate about the
credit union system). I knew that my mission was to prepare ECCU’s
frontline staff for the jump to management, but I didn’t find anything
serving that purpose specifically. So, I resolved to go ahead and
create the “Young Professionals Network” (its infant name).
Generally, I am a consensus leader. My preference is always to get
a team together in a room and lead them toward making decisions
as a group. So it felt out of place for me to follow Angela’s second
step and create goals for the organization without consulting others.
However, in retrospect, I believe this advice was key to the group’s
success. In honesty, I had already envisioned what the group would
exist to do, so involving more people in hammering out goals would
have created needless conflict. Also, I found that it was much simpler
to recruit others when they had a firm vision of what the group was
trying to accomplish.
It turns out that to start a leadership network, you need to exercise a
bit of leadership by being the first to step out on the limb and show
people where you want to take them. For the CDN at ECCU, I
chose six goals. These goals are separated into two distinct categories:
three are specific to the work of the CDN, and three are reiterations
of one of ECCU’s six core value statements, highlighting how the
CDN’s work reinforces corporate principles.
Organizational Goals
1. Provide valuable career development opportunities.
2. Encourage peer networking.
3. Promote ground-up enterprise communication.
Core Values Focus
4. Build God- honoring relationships.
5. Reinforce passion for our work.
6. Foster creativity at all levels.
I chose these goals because my passion is to develop myself and others
for leadership. I want the next generation of ECCU’s leaders to
begin coming together now so that our relationships are strong when
the time comes for us to lead ECCU, and I want to improve the
feedback of valuable business information from frontline employees
to the company’s decision makers.
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