Happy Sunday Everyone:
I love flying, not really. Truth is I could take it or leave it but I certainly prefer smooth air over turbulence. My head starts moving around a bit when we get into choppy air.
Our flight home from Kona last Sunday was the most turbulent flight I’ve ever been on. It started about 30 minutes into our flight and continued to bounce the plane around for over an hour. It wasn’t a little bumpy, it was drinks spilling, plane moving side to side, dropping, basically terrifyingly bumpy. I’m sitting there thinking “why am in a metal tube 35,000 feet above the ocean with no control of this situation”. I’m looking around to see how everyone else is feeling and then the beep happens. I’m watching the flight attendant pick up the phone to see what the pilot has to say. His face doesn’t change much but I’m watching for any positive or negative reinforcement. 15 minutes go by and pilot comes over the radio and says in a monotone voice “We are in extreme turbulence, fasten your seat belts for your own safety” that’s it. Now I’m thinking…”well that’s comforting, thanks a lot jackass”. Another peep comes through, flight attended picks up the phone, I’m staring at him, he’s looking at me, he hangs up and can tell I’m just on the tad side of nervous and says “the planes ahead of us said it’s going to be like this for about 45 more minutes, everything is fine”.
I can’t think of a better alignment for what we do on a daily basis on the need for proactive communication. All the pilot had to do was jump on the intercom when the plane started bouncing and tell us in a calm/nice voice “folks, we’re going to be coming into to some turbulence, please fasten your seat belts for your safety. We’ve been alerted by planes ahead of us that this will continue for the next 60-75 minutes, thank you”. There were 160 people on our plane, some don’t care about the communication, most do. Most people on that plane would have felt a sense of “everything is going to be okay” if the person in charge had a belief that it was their responsibility to do just that.
I’d like to equate this to doing loans, but it’s really about everything we do. My team and I discuss it daily, proactive outbound communication always prevents incoming panic calls/emails/texts. One shows you care, the other doesn’t. If I asked this pilot, he’d say, my job is to fly the plane and get you from point a to point b, my job is not to bring you comfort along the way, and to a degree, he’s right. Can you imagine saying to a client or business partner “my job is to close your loan at X rate with X fees, in X time frame”, it is not to bring you any comfort along the way. This is basically what we’re telling people when we’re not out in front of them on communication. Our team is all on the same page when we have an incoming call for an update, something was missed on our end. The simplicity of this is almost silly but it is also so overlooked, underappreciated, and incredibly important.
Benefits of proactive/purposeful communication:
* Shows respect for the other person. How many times have you called someone twice only for them to say on the 2nd go around “I was just about to call you”….my new response is…”but you didn’t”.
* Shows that you care. Shows that you’re proactively thinking about them and their situation vs. them needing to jog your memory that you exist.
* Shows that you’re organized. You have to be organized to be out in front of your clients and business partners.
* builds/creates trust. My business partners trust us because they don’t need to track us down, we track them own.
Perhaps I went off track on the pilot vs. where this ended but it’s all correlated, it all comes down to how we make people feel through our actions, for better, and in this case, for worse.