Happy Sunday Everyone:
Last month I wrote about quadrants to help identify our team members that need help, want help, and those that don’t. The 4 quadrants were positive and producing, negative and producing, positive and not producing, and negative and not producing. Whether you have one person reporting to you or thousands, every team member fits into one of those quadrants. I’m looking forward to not saying “we’re in a hard market right now” on these emails, but we still are. Any boss/manager/leader is making decisions on how and who to help, hopefully. In that same Sunday thought, I noted from sources that 37% of LO’s have left the business, 67% had closed less than 1 loan a month, and another 12% 2.5 loans, good times.
Many of hard conversations are being had across our industry, and certainly have been for a while now. When you’re a w2 employee, there are costs for a company to house you. If you’re a loan officer, you have to produce something (a loan). When the market shifts like it has, it’s hard to do this job, flat out. With that said, you have to be accountable to yourself to make it work. I’ve had many of conversations with loan officers on our own team, in our division, and outside the company, one in-particular where the LO was struggling but doing nothing to change it. I got off the phone thinking this person is indifferent to their future. It also crossed my mind from writing about Deon Sanders last week when he said, “I wouldn’t know what love is without the haters”….made me think of the great line “The opposite of love isn’t hate, its indifference”. I think you get clarity by asking honest questions of others and of yourself.
When I got off the phone with the indifferent LO, I thought about the questions below. Both for me personally as an LO as well as a boss/manager/leader. Causes anyone to reflect on actions/words being in alignment.
As a loan officer:
- Are you indifferent to your own success?
- Are you indifferent to your own failure?
- If you said you weren’t indifferent, is your daily activity reflective of that? If you’re closing no loans, and you’ve made no calls, you’ve met no people, you’ve studied nothing in our business, you’re indifferent.
As a boss/manager/leader:
- Are you indifferent to the success of the people that report to you?
- Are you indifferent to the failure of the people that report to you?
- If you said you weren’t indifferent, is your daily activity reflective of that? If you’ve done nothing, or very little, to help your team members succeed, you’re indifferent.
For me, these questions create accountability. You have to be honest with yourself first and foremost, but its also an evaluation tool for others. When you have someone committed to their own success working with someone who is committed to that same person’s growth/success, that’s where the magic happens. The opposite is obviously true if you have someone indifferent to their own success/failure working with someone who is also indifferent to their growth/success. Last scenario is one where one person is committed in either direction and the other is not. If you’re the boss/manager leader the thought “I can’t want this more than you do for yourself” comes to mind. If you’re the LO not getting the support, “I’m not working for someone not committed to helping me succeed” comes to mind. In either case, something has to give.
I’ve spent some time thinking about “indifference” since deciding to write about this. You can swap out loan officer and boss/manager/leader with any other relationship. Spouse, kids, friends, whatever. It’s okay to be indifferent. If something isn’t important to me, I’m indifferent to it. There are plenty of relationships that I’m indifferent to. With that said-understanding what relationships I need to be invested in and making sure my actions solidify the importance of the relationship and not my indifference towards it is critically important. The most important relationship not to be indifferent towards is your own with yourself.
It’s a worthy exercise to consider these questions for yourself.