Dan Berger would like a sabbatical, time to go fly fishing and to spend some time with his wife and college-age daughter in their new home in South Florida. But he’s had no shortage of people contacting him with new opportunities since wrapping up a 10-year tenure as CEO of the National Association of Federally-Insured Credit Unions (NAFCU) following the group’s merger with its sometime rival, the Credit Union National Association (CUNA), at year-end. 

CUNA CEO Jim Nussle will lead the new organization formed by the merger, America’s Credit Unions. 

“I was putting in 60, 70, 80-hour weeks and traveling 100,000 miles a year. So, a little break would be nice,” he told CEO Update in a video interview a few weeks before his departure. 

All that effort enabled Berger to build the culture he wanted and helped NAFCU enter the merger in strong financial shape, having weathered the pandemic well, he said. 

“If you have a really solid culture, it’s resilient,” he said. “So, you can go through a financial crisis and go through a pandemic. And if you have a good culture, you come out with flying colors, and I think our culture withstood the pandemic better than most” associations. 

Elements of a strong culture include communication — even over-communication — and hiring well.  

“We had a no-asshole rule,” he said. “It’s extremely important because you’re going to spend more time with folks at work than you do with your own family, typically. So, you want to be able to get along and respect one another. The front end is really, really important,” he said. 

“We hired slow and fired fast. You want to prevent that second part. It’s always on the front end, finding those people that have the same values as we do from a culture standpoint.” 

To identify good potential team members, Berger and NAFCU staff from multiple departments asked targeted questions in a series of interviews, such as how candidates would handle certain challenging situations or have handled such situations in the past.  

“It’s not a 100% success rate, but you can narrow it down, you kind of know who those people are,” he said.  

The art of communication 

The importance of communication was emphasized by an executive coach, John Spence, whom Berger worked with early in his CEO tenure. (Berger had been at NAFCU for eight years, leading advocacy, before being elevated to CEO.) 

“You have to have the ability to communicate your vision and your strategy,” Berger said. “And you have to repeat it often. The three things that (John) really helped me work on were communication, communication and some more communication.  

“You may say it two or three times, but people are busy, busy with their jobs and their families. They may or may not have heard it the first few times. There has to be ongoing messaging. Communication is number one. But number two is to focus on the culture of the organization.” 

Building trust also is critical, with both the staff and the board, and one way Berger did so was being transparent about the association’s finances. 

“We showed our financials to our staff on a monthly basis, and we did the same thing with our board,” he said. “To have a strong relationship with your board is extremely important. And that comes down to trust and having them be able to trust the financials, and trust that, ‘Hey, we tried something, and it didn’t work, this is what we’re going to do next.’ 

“No one hits grand slams every time. There are some strikeouts. Just being forthcoming on that and having that relationship with the board is crucial,” he said. 

‘Extreme member service’ 

Another aspect of NAFCU’s culture under Berger was an intense focus on member service.  

“You have to have really a good member service-oriented staff, and that type of culture,” he said. “It takes work. You have to find those people who are passionate about the industry and are passionate about member service. Internally, we call it extreme member service.” 

Board members appreciated that attention to their needs. “We have the utmost respect for both associations and their employees and look forward to working together as we integrate the two organizations to best support the credit union industry,” former NAFCU Chair Gary Grinnell said in an August 2023 statement in which the associations announced their intent to merge.  

“We appreciate Dan’s relentless focus on growing NAFCU and serving its members with aggressive advocacy and ‘extreme member service,’” Grinnell said. 

The decision to create a single credit union trade association was prompted by a decline in the number of credit unions, said Berger, who had worked at NAFCU for 18 years. 

“When I started at NAFCU, there were 16,000 credit unions,” Berger said. “There are 4,600 now. We’ve just consolidated because we’re looking for economies of scale. Everything’s more expensive. It’s just not a sustainable business model in a shrinking marketplace to have two national trade associations doing very similar things.” 

Berger, who has been a credit union member since he was 9 years old, said the two associations merged at an optimal time, when both groups are financially strong. “It’s better to do the merger while you’re both strong, so you get the best of the best and move on and create America’s Credit Unions.”