I spent a morning in Kansas with credit managers, working on a question most leaders carry quietly: if I make room for another generation’s way of working, am I lowering the bar?

I met folks from Kansas, Missouri, Ohio, Colorado, Oklahoma, Illinois, Nebraska, and Minnesota, all working in agriculture credit. The conference was at Margaritaville, a beach resort in the middle of a Kansas field. With summer weather in October, it felt a little surreal, delightfully so.

My session for the National Association of Credit Management (NACM) Heartland Unit, “Leading Across Generations Without Lowering Standards,” started at 8:30 a.m. with a seasoned crowd, many with decades in the business. Not an easy room to get talking that early.

That worry about the bar usually doesn’t sound like a question. It sounds like “She never picks up the phone.” Or “He won’t write anything down.” Underneath is a fear: if I let that go, standards slip.

So I asked the room to look closely at what the bar actually is. Answering the phone is a method. Reaching the customer, resolving the issue, and keeping the relationship: that’s the standard. Those aren’t always the same thing.

A story about meeting Millennials in my classroom, and how pressure pushes us to scapegoat each other, got heads nodding.

Meet Dale and Kayla

Dale has run credit at a feed and fertilizer company for 26 years. Kayla was hired 10 months ago. Dale retires in about 18 months, and Kayla will take over.

Kayla asks how he decides to extend terms past a customer’s limit. Dale says, “You’ll get a feel for it.” She asks again a month later. Same answer. So she builds her own rules from the aging reports, and twice now Dale has caught her getting it wrong.

Dale has told his wife Kayla isn’t ready. He hasn’t told Kayla.

The first assumptions came fast. He’s lazy. He doesn’t really want to retire. She’s too pushy. She should figure it out herself. These things take time.

Then the room started speaking as Dale, and he got complicated quickly.

“If I teach her everything before my 18 months are up, what’s to stop them from retiring me early?”

“Nobody trained me. I figured it out on my own.”

“I’ve given this company my best for years. Now they want me to keep my full workload and train someone too? Why would I?”

You could feel the room shift. Heads were nodding, especially among the people closer to Dale’s stage of career. There was real frustration in those lines. Whether anyone had lived it didn’t matter. They knew Dale. They could make him a whole person, and that made it safe to say what usually goes unsaid.

Then someone offered a quieter possibility: “I don’t know how to explain what I do. I just do it.”

Kayla’s side

Kayla took a little more coaxing, but the room got there.

“How can I start my career if no one will help me?”

“I haven’t been here long enough to figure it out myself. This is going to make me look like I can’t do the job.”

If nothing changes, Kayla leaves, Dale takes 26 years of judgment with him, and the customers absorb the learning curve.

The Remix

Teams worked through an exercise from Lindsey Pollak called the Remix: three columns, Keep, Stop, and Add. Keep comes first, on purpose. And Stop is a practice, not a person. Nobody gets to write “Boomers” in the Stop column.

Here’s what the room built:

Keep Dale’s knowledge and Kayla’s tech skills.
Stop avoiding the time to sit down together.
Add regular conversations about real decisions, case by case, with Kayla capturing what they decide.

One idea I loved: let the Dales simply tell their stories, like what went wrong, what they learned, and how they built their judgment. Then the Kaylas record those stories and turn them into a handbook with AI or whatever tool works. Dale doesn’t have to explain how he does what he does. He only has to tell the story.

A small irony: I suggested teams sketch their charts on paper. As a Boomer, I find real comfort in picking up a pen now and then. The tech-savvy generations in the room would have none of it. Nearly every chart ended up on a laptop. Another way to clear the same bar.

What I’m taking with me

We talk a lot about knowledge transfer and succession planning. This morning made something clear: knowledge transfer isn’t a training problem. It’s a trust problem.

Before people share what they know, they need answers to two questions. How have I been valued? How will I be treated once I’ve shared it? Then the organization has to back it up with real time and lighter workloads, not just good intentions.

If you have a Dale on your team, try this before you assign a training plan: ask him for a story.

As I made the rounds, one participant took my hand and told me it was the best training she’d ever had. I don’t think it was anything I said from the front of the room. People had room to work it out for themselves, through Dale and Kayla.

My thanks to Maggie, Angie, and the NACM Heartland team for a beautifully run event.

Look at what the room did. They held on to what the standard actually requires: sound judgment on every credit decision. They let go of the habits that had been standing in for it, like “You’ll get a feel for it” and never finding time to sit down together. And they found a new way to meet the standard, with Dale’s stories and Kayla’s tools.

Nobody lowered the bar. They found another way to clear it.

More soon,

Mary

Nobody Lowered the Bar