Developing Leadership and Culture to Drive Analytics Value

Executive Summary

Through its work with the Center for Data Analytics, Filene has developed a series of reports focused on analytics readiness, specifically six levers a credit union needs to manage to accelerate value creation from its investment in analytics. Previous reports have focused on building the modern data stack and data literacy. This report focuses on change management and the two leavers that play a role in it, leadership and culture.

Since culture is shaped and nurtured by committed, creative leaders, it is impossible to discuss the culture and leadership levers separately. Credit unions will need to leverage these two crucially intertwined forces to generate value for their members. Regardless of how a credit union begins its analytics journey, the leadership team will need to fully embrace data-driven decision making as a critical and necessary strategy for realizing enterprise-wide capabilities.

Why it Matters—A Credit Union Perspective

While the definition of growth and success varies considerably for credit unions of different asset sizes, the most useful and effective tool that leaders have to measure this growth and success is data. Data literacy—the ability to read, write, and communicate data in context—is an emerging skill for many.

At Together Credit Union, the leadership team began shaping their data-informed culture in 2020. This plan relied heavily on increasing market share within the St. Louis metro area and uses data to grow key performance indicators in safe and sustainable ways. More importantly, they wanted data literacy to inspire employees and reward their curiosity, through “test and learns.” Employees are able to experiment and adjust, measuring results with data to achieve company objectives. This eliminates the fear of failure. To do so you must develop human capital by investing in data-driven people and ensuring you bring in the right leaders to drive the data culture forward.

Download the report and learn how you can unlock the potential of two powerful levers, leadership and culture, to drive data analytics value in your credit union.