Leading A High Production Team 2

Front 1

This is your future and this is the equity you have in your business. Financial planners, attorneys, and insurance agents know this. You need to think like they do. The information you gather about your clients’ plans and expectations is the minimum you must have in order to move from a transactional loan officer to a relational loan officer who gets repeat and referral business from long term relationships with clients. This is your future book of business.

Back 1

Start with the applications you are taking today and begin serving your clients’ long term needs. Keep track of where they are today, where they want to get to, who is helping them, and what their current plans are. Annual reviews are a commitment to serving the long term needs of the client. When you let the client know that you want to help increase the likelihood of their success in achieving short, intermediate, and long term financial goals, it will set you apart from the pack. Without a client management system, you will not do this effectively.

Front 2

“Sales is a person to person business. You cannot send the sales manual out to make the sale.”

Back 2

No amount of letters will ever take the place of the actual phone and face to face call. Emerson said, “Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain.”

Front 3

%. If you look at the list of the top 200 Originators in the United States, as published by Mortgage Originator Magazine, you will see people who have employed these models. These people are not magically gifted. They simply spend much more of their time on lead generation than the originators who are not listed there.

Back 3

“The problem for most people is that they assemble everything they need to pursue success and then, instead of pursuing it, they decide to think about it some more.”

Front 4

Develop the habit of keeping score. Know your numbers. You need to spend time on activities that will generate leads. The scorecard asks you to track the amount of time you are actually spending on lead generation activity. Each activity has been given a point value.

Back 4

Most consumers could not remember the name of the person who originated their last mortgage.

Front 5

“Success(in this business) is the study of the obvious. Everyone should take Obvious 1 and Obvious 2 in school,” according to Jim Rohn.

Back 5

Each week, take time to reflect. What did I do well? What were my areas of weakness? What must I do to close the gap? “Ready ready ready …” doesn’t do it. Sometimes the most important word in action planning is the word action. “Ready enough, aimed as good as it gets this time, fire!”

Front 6

“If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing lousy(practice makes perfect)….if you wait until you can do it perfectly, you run the risk of not doing it. Ever.”-Jack Trout in Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind.

Back 6

There is a great book called, The Power of Focus by Canfield, Hansen and Hewitt that addresses the power of habits. By creating new habits, you can create behaviors and actions that will take you to your goals. I highly recommend that you purchase and read this book for a complete understanding of the power of focus on the right activities.

Front 7

Time blocking effectively takes practice. You will have to think through the activities that are necessary for you to complete and then map them out into an ideal week. The Disciplines on your business plan will identify the daily recurring activities that you need to set aside time to complete. The project list will provide the activities that you will complete in the ON Time that you schedule.

Back 7

When you first start practicing the Discipline of Time Blocking, leave plenty of “white space” in the calendar because you are in transition from reactive to proactive mode and you need to make sure everyone you need is on the bus before you take off.

Front 8

Learn to say No. It is a very tiny word with a lot of power. When you are clear about your purpose and plans, they begin to filter the things you will say yes to and the ones you should say no to. If you hate conflict, a gatekeeper with a great attitude and customer service focus can pay big dividends almost immediately.

Back 8

Once you have designed the ideal Time Block, resolve to stick to it for a minimum of 90 days. It takes time to change and get comfortable with new habits.

Front 9

Brian Tracy, in his book, Eat that Frog, says, “ If you have to eat two frogs, eat the biggest ugliest frog first!”
If you have developed habits that are excellent, you are eating the ugliest frog first, and saying no to everything but your top priorities, and you are still out of balance, it is time to employee the Law of Leverage.

Back 9

1.) “If you hire great people, they will more easily adapt to a changing world. What happens if you’re 10 miles down the road and you need to change direction?”

Front 10

2.) “If you have the right people the problem of how to motivate them and manage them largely goes away.”

Back 10

3.) “If you have the wrong people, it doesn’t matter whether you discover the right
direction…you still won’t have a great business. Great vision is irrelevant without great people.”

Front 11

We, as an industry, have the ability to make a huge impact on lives.
There are tons of talented people who can leave a lasting legacy with a little more long term planning. The reputation of the industry is “at risk” because we have too many of the wrong people on the bus. Your people will be a reflection of your mortgage practice and your company.

Back 11

When I think about a statement John Maxwell made, “It takes teamwork to make the dream work”, I’m amazed at how profound the statement is and how little time is devoted to the development of teams within our industry. While teaching a class recently, one of the participants commented that he didn’t want a team because his friends had teams and all they ever did was complain about how miserable their lives were. Instead, he was willing to work 85-90 hours a week at the expense of time spent with his beloved wife and daughter.

Front 12

We have a lot of generalists in the business who are trying to do it all. The trouble is, we cannot, any of us, do it all. Another blinding flash of the obvious(BFO) occurred to me when I heard John say, “One is too small a number for greatness.”

Back 12

If we accept the premise that each of us is blessed with about 3 things we can truly ever be great at, then we must also accept that there are things we will never be great at. If we would take this line of thinking one step further, we ought to assess what we are good at, gifted to do, and then each of us should create a “Not good at-Not to do list” of things we should delegate to others.

Front 13

In his book, Good to Great, Jim Collins made the point that “you’ve got to have the right people on the bus in the right seats,” or the dream won’t work. Further, you need “Capacity, not Cul-de-sac” talent, according to Gary Keller. To paraphrase Gary, ‘Capacity talent does what you asked them to and then some and cul-de-sac talent does exactly what you told them to do, period.’ The problem is, that you don’t always get it right or good much less great and the team player who can see where you were going and add value by taking it one step further is going to make or break you.

Back 13

Productivity and balance are the result of getting and keeping the right people and aligning people with tasks according to areas of strength.

Front 14

It is critical that you have a staffing and training plan, and that you have and continue to refine your job descriptions and systems. It is even more important for you to have regular and predictable communication with your team members and that you constantly encourage them and lift them up to higher levels. According to John Maxwell, “ If you think you are the entire picture, you will never see the big picture.”

Back 14

The leader has the responsibility to share the vision, share the goals, and prepare the team members to succeed. All team members must know their role and the goals of the team. We often find ourselves too busy to create a job description or to complete the training or coaching needed in order to help the team succeed. Failure to set clear-cut expectations generally results in a failure to meet our expectations. We often treat other members of the team as clairvoyants. You must schedule time with the team members to solve problems, collaborate on service issues, and communicate team successes and challenges.

Front 15

Coaching, for the athlete or the business professional, is the art of taking what you know in your head, and making it a part of your heart for the purpose of affecting positive change. Building Champions does this by utilizing the proven One-on-One Coaching System, which empowers our clients to gain clarity of purpose, develop a life strategy, and see their plans to completion. The result are lives that measure up to their potential.

“When opportunity arrives, it’s too late to practice!”-John Wooden, coach.

Back 15

Your role as the Leader: Coach

Your role is to help the team win!
Keep the team focused and energized on the task before them.
Know the Rock n’ Role. Measure the behaviors and actions objectively.
Coaching does not take the place of training.
Everyone needs a coach.

Front 16

According to Don Shula, in Everyone’s a Coach, there are five attributes of a high performance coach. “They are conviction driven, constantly overlearning, audible ready, consistent in their message, and honesty based.”

Back 16

Show up and practice and practice and practice each and every day and learn from yesterday’s mistakes. Yesterday is just that….yesterday. Once you have gleaned from it the lesson, let it go. Play to win! Assess, encourage, praise, and re-direct.

Front 17

“The difference between average people and successful people is in their perception of and response to failure”-Failing Forward by John Maxwell.

Back 17

The US Military Academy cadet maxim reads as follows:

Risk more than others think is safe
Care more than others think is wise
Dream more than others think is practical
Expect more than others think is possible

Front 18

Summary: To Lead a High Production Team, you have to engage in leadership activities. Coaching is one of them. Accountability is key to the success of any team. Everyone needs a coach.

Who’s coaching you?

Back 18

Coaching needs to be frequent enough to help the employee clarify their objectives, adjust their behaviors and create action plans to take their goals to completion.