Building an HR Model for the Future

How Navy Federal Credit Union’s HR team turned a high-stakes initiative into a story of sustainable change.

Operating Model
mission-based teams
Cross-Functional Collaboration
Project Snapshot
Who

Navy Federal Credit Union

When

January 2024 - December 2024

Our Impact

Self-Sustaining System

Equipped HR with a sustainable model for change and new ways of working now taking root and expanding across Navy Federal.

The Challenge

Navy Federal Credit Union's Integrated Talent Strategy (ITS) was a first-of-its-kind shift in how leadership was cultivated and performance was managed. This high-stakes initiative required many roles across HR to work together to pull it off.

The Project Team

Sharan Bal

Meg Saxby

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Project BrIEf

Coach Navy Federal's HR team through the successful delivery of ITS and build a sustainable operating model HR could use to enable change at scale across the business.

I now have the confidence that we could support other teams to develop similar horizontal and customer-centric models.
Holly Kortright, CHRO
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Diving deeper

A First-Of-Its-
Kind Initiative

Navy Federal Credit Union is the largest credit union in the world. To keep pace with workforce trends, they needed a more rigorous system to assess performance and build a dynamic talent ecosystem. When The Ready began working with Navy Federal’s HR department (roughly 500 people within an organization of 26,000), HR leadership had created an Integrated Talent Strategy (ITS) they needed to deliver and operationalize across the organization. But from the jump, ITS faced operational hurdles.

  • It was the first HR initiative of its kind at Navy Federal to require this kind of cross-functional collaboration—and the HR leadership team tended to operate like representatives from centers of excellence, not a cohesive strategic body.
  • ITS program work itself was largely being done through siloed workstreams.
  • At first, the initiative was a few pages in a strategy brief. Clear mechanisms for ongoing development, feedback, and delivery needed to be built.

HR knew ITS carried cultural ramifications (this shift would directly impact people's performance ratings and compensation) and would set new expectations for how to be an effective leader at Navy Federal. On top of that, HR leadership recognized the need to organize around this work in a way that wouldn't burn people out.

Our mandate: Coach the HR team through the successful delivery of ITS and apply lessons learned to build a sustainable operating model HR could use to enable change at scale across the business.

The Missing “How” of Cross-Functional Delivery

We diagnosed challenges at three levels.

the structural level

On the structural level, ITS wasn’t a unified team chasing after a critical mandate; it was a large, complex program organized around various workstreams that represented existing silos and centers of excellence. This made it hard to orient around ITS’s products and users, because design conversations were fragmented.

the strategic level

On the strategic level, ITS needed consistent strategic dialogue to create cohesion across the team. Team members were used to planning from their lane—performance management, compensation, HR tech—and their lane only. It was challenging to make separate roadmaps and try to bring them together. The ITS steering committee also needed new strategic tools to turn vision into reality—to choose principles, make trade-offs, and engage with the literal design of how to deliver this work.

the individual level

On the individual level, people were being asked to do new, hard work in public—like sharing progress with new teammates across silos or demoing a product prototype with actual end-users—and reactions ranged from confusion to discomfort. Team members didn’t know when or how they could best step up to make decisions or suggestions.

With the traditional model of COEs and business partners, a lot of those folks are used to doing excellent work in their lane. The need to bring it all together is where a lot of our learnings came from.
Mike Kosiarek, VP, Learning and Talent Development
From
A series of siloed projects and updates
Organizing teams around common expertise
Loyalty to individual responsibilities or home teams
Extensive review chains with senior leaders
To
A mini-organization running with integrated ways of working
Organizing teams around customer needs and a shared mission
Collectively holding the success of ITS
Delegated authority and clear guardrails to those closest to the work
Scroll

Making the Mandate Come to Life

We had to co-create structures that supported new ways of being, deciding, teaming, and making. We focused our shifts on key intervention points.

Strategy: To deliver this initiative, the team had to see their effort as a change initiative instead of “another program to deliver.” This required facilitating conversations and exercises that helped put the end-user's needs and experiences at the center of ITS's design process and choices. It also meant encouraging the steering committee to clarify critical trade-offs and ask higher-altitude questions like, “What behaviors are most important to shift? What guardrails do we need to give people so they execute without us?” We also helped ITS leadership just below the steering team create quarterly shared outcomes, which increased their sense of ownership.

Structure: We designed an operating model organized around the value ITS had to deliver, not traditional reporting lines or COEs. That meant chartering new teams to steer the program in a product-informed way and introducing tools to support the model’s impact. From decision rights to retrospectives, live demos to feedback rhythms, we installed practices so teams could execute and iterate more effectively. One specific structure we introduced: Mission-Based Teams (MBTs), a time-bound teaming format designed for chasing after specific opportunities (like running mid-year performance calibration for the first time) or building specific products.

Individual behaviors and mindsets: An organizational structure is only effective if people can live into it. Structural change and behavioral change went hand in hand here, because working in a more integrated way requires greater comfort with navigating ambiguity and figuring out solutions to problems together instead of expecting others to do it. We coached leaders by inviting them to work differently, question assumptions, engage in reflection, and normalize the messiness of change for both themselves and their teams. Our interventions were designed to increase resilience and get people to lean into their new horizontal teams, while simultaneously fostering empowerment and accountability.

We’re seeing the use of Mission-Based Teams in not only other parts of HR, but also other parts of the business.
Mike Kosiarek, VP, Learning and Talent Development
The Impact

By the end of 2024, the ITS program launched successfully to Navy Federal’s VP+ population, with many lessons for how to scale to the rest of the organization in 2025. The HR function learned how to deliver transformation effectively and sustainably. 

A new layer of leadership stepped into ownership roles and mission-based teaming became HR’s default way of organizing around enterprise-wide priorities. The HR function has a reusable playbook for cross-functional initiatives and a culture more willing to organize around customer needs and ask questions like, “What does it look like to be builders of products and services for the business? What skills are needed to tackle this challenge? Org chart aside, how do we build the best team to solve it?”

That’s the key thing we transferred: Not simply strategy or practices, but a deep sense of confidence in their new capabilities.

We recently had an event completely run by business users in the performance management space. We had no HR folks up there saying, “This is the tool. This is the process.” It was users at different levels saying, “This is how I think about this change.” Once the program’s products are in the hands of the users, it’s their story.
Mike Kosiarek, VP, Learning and Talent Development

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