Meet Joseph Christian
JOSEPH CHRISTIAN — PRESIDENT/CEO, NUSENDA CREDIT UNION
Joe Christian, a self-described tech guy, says he hasn’t been affected much personally by the pandemic because “I’m a natural social distancer.” But Christian, the head of Nusenda Credit Union, and his leadership team have been working hard to keep customers and employees safe.
They try to keep remotely-working employees connected through such means as delivering Girl Scout cookies, holding online sessions about dealing with the pandemic’s challenges and sharing home office pictures — “Typically it involves a cat or a dog on a keyboard.”
Christian has been at Nusenda for 35 years and was named president/CEO in May 2019.
He began his work life by digging ditches, acting as a mason tender and cleaning bathrooms at a Florida gas station in a lousy part of town.
“As a young man, I had to work a lot of blue-collar jobs and manual labor jobs, so that I could save money to go to college and help my family,” Christian says. “And so whenever I look back, I feel so blessed that I’m in an airconditioned environment, working with some talented people.”
His first white-collar job, with a WIPP contractor in Carlsbad, sparked his ongoing love for technology.
“I worked for Westinghouse ... and I got to interact with personal computers, and I kind of fell in love,” he says. “As my career moved on, it became less about technology and more about leadership and more about project management and strategy.”
But Christian says he still has something of an “engineering mind,” which helped him find a novel approach to his daughter’s celiac disease and gluten intolerance.
He found a group in Missouri — Canine Specialty Training — that trains dogs to detect gluten. Lacey, a lab mix rescue dog, can sniff out minute bits of the substance, keeping Christian’s daughter safe from the autoimmune disease.
“That dog is an absolute genius,” Christian says.
What do you think will be some
of the pandemic’s lasting effects?
“I’m an optimist in terms of using technology. When I started with the credit union ages ago, I started through their data processing department, so what I see as a benefit is that it (the pandemic) is going to force many organizations to be more flexible. So I think what we’re going to see is the demand for that kind of experience from a customer perspective. I think we’re also proving that we can be more understanding of our employees. Nusenda has some tremendous employees. We try to work and act as a family. For now, it’s kind of like they can work remotely, and they can do a fine job remotely. That’s why we have all this technology. I think organizations in the future, if they want to retain talent, they’re not going to be able to say, ‘Well that won’t work.’ Because we’re proving that it does work.”
How do you spend your free time?
“I love to read, and I love to twiddle with technology. I like home automation things, kind of really geeky stuff. There’s so much you can do integrating phones and laptops on a network. I’ve been having a lot of fun automating my home. I even have music distributed throughout the house. Drives my family a little crazy when things don’t work.”
Tell me something about you that few people know.
“I love to watch period dramas with my daughters. I know this is just really weird and maybe geeky. ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ the 1995 version, and ‘Sense and Sensibility,’ 1995 version. We’ve watched that numerous times with my daughters. I think that would just shock a lot of people.”
You won a Journal leadership award last year. What’s your approach to being an effective leader?
“I have an interesting story about my childhood that relates to that. When I was in high school in Port Orange, Florida, the wrestling coach, Ron Pinnell, was a big influence on me when I wrestled. Years later, we started talking about leadership. He shared a lot of great leadership ideas and books, and it was at the time when I was realizing here at the credit union that you can come up with a great project plan, you can have great technology, but how do you get people to work together in a way that really magnifies exponentially what you’re trying to do? He had a very complex role in a large school district, so we started trading ideas, and I took that and I started to inject some of the leadership concepts into Nusenda. Because we didn’t have a lot of resources. We were a fairly small credit union. And really it comes down to people, and it comes down to the team and trying to understand how to connect all those things. And it’s still an ongoing journey for me. How do I be a better leader, how do I communicate more effectively?”
Tell me about Lacey, your gluten-detection dog.
“First of all, service dog means you have to work with the dog all the time. So you work with the dog to keep it kind of in shape to detect gluten. If you’ve been at a banquet, there’s those little silver covers they put on plates, so you present the dog with the silver cover, and the dog sniffs. It will bite the plate when there’s gluten on the plate. And then there all those other comforts that a dog brings.”
What’s an example of a difficult experience that you learned from?
“I can tell you when I got out of grad school, I couldn’t find a job. This was in 1984. The economy was terrible. I had my MBA, and I had to work as a mason tender on this construction crew, and I was living with two strangers who were working on the construction crew. I thought I had made it and I was going to make it, (but) I was back to where I started. I’m a young man, and here I am at the bottom rung of any possible career, and it taught me that I could do whatever I had to do. I just had to keep plugging away.”