Happy Sunday Everyone:
I’m testing myself on this one. I can tell you ahead of you reading what I’d like to avoid today, which is sounding passive aggressive, self-righteous, or pounding of the chestish (new word). So, I figure by announcing that ahead of time to you, I’ll stay more on the course, call it writing accountability.
We had an interesting week with both clients and business partners. It’s not in our team’s nature to terminate relationships but that’s what we did on 3 separate situations this past week. I’m talking about it today because I think it’s important to walk through some postmortem thoughts when a relationship ends.
Over the course of the past 15 years, our team has gone through many exercises to be intentional about who we are, and how we want our business to run. 3 of those exercises are mapping out in words our ideal business partner, our ideal client, and our ideal team member. The words we used took time to consider. I’ll not give them all here, but words like “trust”, “peek around the corner mindset”, “positive”, “hard working”, and “respectful” are words that hit those pages. In addition to that, 3 blanket statements that we use as our lens for everything:
- Our clients need to believe they have a better chance of homeownership working with us, or they shouldn’t.
- Our business partner needs to believe they will be more successful working with us, or they shouldn’t.
- Our team members need to believe they’ll have a better life working on this team, or they shouldn’t.
If you’re on our team, this is discussed daily. Every positive/negative experience with a client/business partner/team member can be run through these filters and traced back to the final outcome, for better and for worse. Important point here: creating the ideal client/business partner/team member exercise has less to do about searching for the perfect example but instead having it become glaringly obvious when the wrong client/business partner/team member appears.
I started to list out the 3 scenarios but they’re not worth it and certainly where I start heading down the path I wanted to avoid in my initial statement. The biggest and more important points for me are these:
- It’s important for your team to see you practice what you preach-We could have kept a reasonable amount of revenue and tolerated it. Our team was completely bought in to the decisions. Having team buy in and having them know you’re going to back them up no matter what is critical. For a long time, I had thought the bullseye was client, business partner, team member. The correct bullseye is team member, business partner, client.
- Understanding your ideal ‘everything’ is the best filter to keep what is out of alignment from coming in. The more you use the filters the more clarity you have.
A good friend who knew about one of these situations said “hunter, you have bigger expectations than I do of people to do the right thing, and I love that, I have accepted on the other hand that most people won’t”. There is truth to what he’s saying, no doubt! With that said, we can be more intentional and act more quickly in removing the relationships that are out of alignment with how we choose to operate by having filters in place to consider and act on.
Have a great week ahead.