Servant Leadership that Elevates Others

04-23-2026

“Not everything revolves around money, but it impacts everything we do,” Purdue Federal Credit Union CEO Darrick Weeks told the Daniels School’s Executive Forum recently. When Weeks was a young teenager, his parents divorced, and in the midst of that, they had to file for bankruptcy.  “I could see the stress and strain on my parents, and I vowed to myself that I didn't want to ever have to go through that.”

Weeks committed to understanding finances, “learning the power of money and how I can use it to my advantage if I was smart about it,” he said. “It informed the core of who I am.” It became his why.

He began in banking as a teller during high school and early in his career, Weeks was driven primarily by outcomes. He became the CEO of a small credit union in his 30s.

When his father remarried a successful businesswoman, she became a trusted source of leadership wisdom. Weeks recalled her challenging him to rethink his approach: he “always talked about the results,” and she urged him instead to “think about people and the impact you have on people, because that's what great leaders do.” That advice pushed him toward a servant-leadership philosophy that now shapes how he leads teams and stewards a $2.1 billion institution.

Today, Weeks describes his leadership model as the three-stakeholder model: treat employees better than anyone else can or will, so they in turn treat members better than anyone else can or will, and customer-members will trust them with more of their hard-earned money. He notes that “if you want to go from good to great, that's what you need to do,” emphasizing that long-term performance emerges when people feel genuinely supported, heard, and invested in.

Weeks learned in the course of his career that reputation is not only on what you deliver — build it on how you elevate others — not just, “Did I hit my number?” but “Did people do their best work because they worked with me?”

Hear Weeks’ entire talk and full set of insights.