Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb, said something recently that I haven’t been able to shake: “Detachment breeds drift.”
And man… that hits.
Because if you’ve been around the credit union movement for any amount of time, you’ve seen it. Not in a loud, everything’s-falling-apart way. It’s quieter than that. It’s drift. No one plans for it. No one puts it in the strategic plan. But it shows up anyway. What makes it dangerous is that it doesn’t feel like a problem while it’s happening.
Drift doesn’t look like failure. It looks like… things are fine. Loans are steady. Membership is growing (maybe). The team is busy. The board isn’t raising red flags. But something’s off. Strategy turns into something you present instead of something you use. Decisions get made a step further away from the member than they used to. Conversations start sounding like summaries instead of stories.
And slowly, without anyone really calling it out, you start running the organization based on what you’re told is happening… not what’s actually happening. That gap is where drift lives and detachment happens.
We love to jump straight to “we need a new plan.” But most of the time, that’s not it. Most credit unions don’t have a bad strategy problem, they have a distance problem. Leadership gets pulled up. More meetings. More oversight. More layers. It all makes sense. It’s what growth is supposed to look like. But if you’re not intentional, that distance turns into detachment. And detachment turns into drift. You don’t feel it right away. That’s the problem.
Now, let’s be really clear about something. This is not a call to micromanage.
No one is asking you to sit in every meeting, rewrite marketing copy, or approve every decision. That’s not leadership. That’s how you slow everything down. But there’s a big difference between micromanaging and being in it.
The best leaders I work with aren’t hovering. They’re not controlling everything. They’re just close enough to know what’s real and they show up when it matters. You can feel the difference in the credit unions that are getting it right. Not because they have a better tagline or a shinier campaign. You can feel it in how decisions get made, in how the team talks, in how clear things are.
It starts with leadership. Leaders like Ryan Roberts at Great Meadow FCU and Pamela Stelly at Maple FCU aren’t operating from some office in the sky. They’re in conversations. They’re asking questions. They’re pushing thinking when something feels off. They’re not micromanaging, they’re engaged. They’ve chosen not to drift. And yeah, their numbers tend to reflect that.
There’s a lot of noise right now about “founder mode,” but I think people are making it more complicated than it needs to be. It’s not about being a founder. It’s about giving a damn. It’s about staying close enough to your organization that you can feel problems before they show up in a report three months later.
It’s about being present in the moments that actually shape the experience not everything, just the things that matter.
Steve Jobs was wired this way. Chesky is too. They don’t disappear and wait for updates. They stay connected. Not because they don’t trust their teams, but because they care too much not to.
Because here’s what I see over and over again when leaders get too far removed: nothing breaks… it just gets bland. The messaging loses its edge. The experience becomes interchangeable. The strategy still exists, but it’s not really doing anything. And eventually, you look up and realize you sound like everyone else. That’s drift.
And in a world where members have options, “we’re basically the same as everyone else” is not a great place to land. So what does staying connected actually look like?
It’s not complicated. It’s just intentional. It’s being in enough real conversations with members, with frontline staff, with your team, that you don’t have to rely on secondhand versions of reality. It’s asking why a lot more than when. It’s calling out when something feels safe or generic, not to critique, but because you know it could actually matter more.
It’s choosing to stay close to the parts of the business that shape the experience… and trusting your team to run with the rest. And if we’re being real for a second.. Where have you drifted? Not as a leader overall. Not as a person. But where are you a little further removed than you used to be? Where are you relying on reports instead of real conversations? Where has “I used to know this” quietly turned into “I assume this is still fine”? That’s the place to start.
Because you don’t need to micromanage to lead well. But you do need to stay connected. Chesky’s right. Detachment breeds drift.
And if you actually want to build something that matters, something that serves your members in a way that’s real and not just well-marketed, you don’t get to drift. If you’re feeling this a little more than you expected, that’s probably not a bad thing.
We spend a lot of time with credit union leaders in this exact spot. Good organizations, good people… just a little too far removed from the things that actually drive relevance and growth. Not broken. Just drifting. And the work isn’t blowing it up and starting over. It’s getting reconnected to what matters and building from there.
That’s where the good stuff happens.