The Best Loan Officer in the Building

I want to tell you about a leader I worked with not long ago.

He was, by every measure, the best loan officer his credit union had ever had.

Members loved him.

His numbers were consistently at the top.

His manager called him a natural.

So when a branch manager position opened up, the decision felt obvious.

Eighteen months later, he was miserable.

His team's engagement scores were the lowest in the entire organization. Good people were quietly looking for the exit. And he was doing the same thing, sending out a resume he hadn't touched in six years, wondering how he had ended up here.

Here's what I want you to see clearly: this was not a performance problem. It was a preparation problem.

He was exceptional at what he had been doing. Nobody had ever asked him to do what he was now responsible for. And nobody had given him what he actually needed to make the transition.

What "promoted without preparation" actually looks like:

• A high performer placed in a leadership role with no coaching framework and no real development plan

• A team that senses their manager is uncertain, even when he is trying hard not to show it

• Engagement scores that keep sliding because the manager doesn't know how to have the conversations that would turn things around

• A leader who is working harder than ever and seeing less results than he ever has

That gap (between what made someone great as an individual contributor and what makes someone great as a leader) does not close on its own. It closes with the right investment and the right systems built around it.

This is one of the most common things I see across credit unions and organizations of every size. 

The best producers get promoted because they earned it. And then they get handed a title, maybe a small raise, and very little else. No coaching rhythms. No development plan. No framework for how to lead the people now reporting to them.

And then everyone wonders why it isn't working.

What we did with this leader was start from the ground truth. We used the ABC Framework to get a clear picture of where he actually was, what his team was experiencing, and what gaps needed to be addressed first. From there we built a real coaching plan — one that was specific to him, not a generic leadership curriculum someone pulled off a shelf.

We focused on a few things that made the biggest difference right away:

• How to have direct conversations with team members who were missing the mark, without blowing up the relationship

• How to delegate effectively so he stopped carrying work that belonged to his team

• How to run a one-on-one that actually built trust and gave him real information about what was happening on his team

• How to coach to strengths instead of defaulting to correction every time something goes wrong

Within a few months, his team's engagement scores were moving. Within six months, he told me he finally felt like he knew what he was doing: Leading from a place of clarity instead of anxiety.

The potential was always there. It just needed someone to invest in it.

If you have a leader on your team who got promoted because they were great at their job (and you can feel that the transition isn't going the way you hoped), I want to help.

The free Leadership Snapshot at michaelwolsten.com takes about five minutes to complete. It will give you a clear picture of where your leaders are, where the gaps are, and what to focus on first. It is the same starting point I use with every client before we build anything else.

Lead boldly,

~MW

P.S. — Leadership pipelines don't build themselves. The best time to develop your next branch manager is before they need to be one. The second-best time is right now.