Drawing upon interviews with executives and senior stakeholders, Organizing for effectiveness and growth in cooperative financial services: A focus on the Americas shines a light on key organizational levers that cooperatives can – and should – exercise to optimize their long-term success.
Regardless of their individual circumstances, the report argues that all financial cooperatives stand to gain by addressing seven key imperatives:
- Being conscious and deliberate about their purpose
- Creating an organizational structure empowered for growth
- Optimizing governance processes
- Allocating resources for growth and effectiveness
- Building a high-performance, entrepreneurial management model
- Aligning their human capital – their employees and managers - with the growth agenda
- Attending to the importance of informal organizational activities
We establish the strategic case for growth in the cooperative financial services’ agenda by examining market penetration, resiliency, and other factors. Our focus next turns to the ways in which these agendas take shape through organizational design and decisions at the individual cooperative and sector level, the extent to which prevailing organizational practices aid or hinder the pursuit of an effective growth agenda, and the key dimensions of an organizational blueprint that will best enable financial cooperatives to achieve their goals.
