Management is about a lot of things, but at its core, management is first and foremost a story about a leader’s philosophy.  Those stories, and that philosophy, need to take into account a multitude of diverse needs and perspectives.  From a people management perspective, leaders need to assemble and direct a diverse array of talent, understanding the best way to translate potential into performance on an individual basis while also setting up a collective environment of trust, whereby the focus is centered on meeting the needs of the greater good.  From a product management perspective, leaders need to create products that fill a real need within the market, while simultaneously achieving a resonance with the people who are entrusted to deliver them – you can’t buy what you can’t sell, so to speak.  And lastly, from a process management perspective, leaders need to oversee internal processes that have the ability to serve many masters at once – production and quality needs to be balanced equally, operational scale needs to be able to account for both volume spikes and lean times, and defined goals need to be continuously exposed to new ideas.  Or to put it another way – management is about bringing a group of unique perspectives to bear around the energy of a necessary product, meeting a diverse set of needs with a variety of solutions.  If necessity is the mother of invention, leadership is what gives the invention wings, and lets it fly into an ever-changing world.

So how do you grow those wings?  It really comes down to one simple thing – communication.  And what this really means is that communication needs to be effective at providing the right answers to problems that will continue to change and grow as the needs and perspectives change.  In other words – your philosophy is only as strong as your ability to communicate it.

One of the things that struck me the most when I first began managing Asset Sale activity 16 years ago is how different the perspectives were within the same overall process.  The housing market crash of 2008 created a fulcrum point within the secondary mortgage market.  The sheer volume of distressed assets suddenly going to market, the speed with which some companies sought to acquire or divest themselves of those assets, and the way in which previously disparate servicing areas for mortgage companies began to overlap with each other for the very first time within that sale environment, created a vast and sudden melting pot of diverse needs.  Between the capital markets teams focused on selling the loans, the mortgage servicing areas trying to balance the ongoing internal needs of their servicing portfolio against impending external sale requirements, the document custodians dealing with an explosion of document review and file shipping requests, and the external mortgage vendors being hired to create thousands of post-sale documents with a demand and scale attached to the requests like they had never seen before, it almost always seemed like the same stakeholders in the process were not even remotely speaking the same language to each other.  People, products and processes had to come together around the changing demands in real time, and it wasn’t easy.  Focus on the capital markets side was rightfully placed on contracts and deadlines.  Servicing areas needed to figure out how to essentially complete a 180 shift in their operations – from hunting out payments, documents, loan statuses within their portfolio, etc., to now being hunted for the exact same output by external purchasing parties.  For custodians, it was about scaling up effectively.  For vendors, it was also about scaling up, but also about finding a balance between meeting a client’s needs while maintaining their own needs at the exact same time.  Early on, the disconnect between groups was real.  As I spoke about earlier, a diverse set of needs required a variety of solutions.

As I managed asset sale activity throughout my career, finding that common language became the number one goal of MY management philosophy.  As you might guess, a lot of this was about communicating in the right way, at the right time, to a diverse group of people.  The common language I discovered to unite all of these disparate voices was risk – specifically, management of risk.  The through line that united the disparate parts, from the time a deal was first put out to bid by capital markets, on through the various servicing and custodial tasks required to get the loans ready for transfer, until the sale itself and the creation and recordation of all the various documents by the external support vendors, was the risk of improperly managing the contractual requirements for the deal between the seller and the purchaser.  This was nowhere near as obvious or as easy as it sounds.  In those days the capital markets teams were the only ones who were truly acclimated to an environment where contractual needs were driving everything they did.  Servicing areas and document custodians had their own demands, but they were driven more by internal processes, often with more relaxed timeframes for completion.  Vendors were more often filling a smaller niche role, so their transaction level impact tended to be minimal.  Through trial and error, the philosophy shifted to better and wider communication – understanding needs, and how to execute on them.  Contracts were vetted and shared throughout multiple groups.  Managing processing outputs against deadlines, and being able to scale up and scale down to differing volume needs, became more important and better defined.  Vendors became partners – regular meetings were held with them, and status reports were built and exchanged on an ongoing basis to track performance.  The “why” became a bigger part of the story we needed to tell – giving a timeframe for completion hits harder when you explain to someone that failing to meet a contractual requirement could lead to a repurchase demand and subsequent financial loss for the business, especially when they’ve never had to think about their work that way before.  I listened more than I ever had before in this environment – every single one of the various teams involved in this work had their own stories to tell, their own feedback and concerns, their own perspectives to offer to differing problems.  Working together, we were able to accomplish exactly what I talked about to start here – bringing a group of unique perspectives to bear around the energy of a necessary product, meeting a diverse set of needs with a variety of solutions.

My approach to all of the work Grid151 does supporting our client’s needs within the secondary mortgage market is informed by these lessons I learned many years ago.  We treat whole loan transactions with the deference they deserve throughout every single part of their lifecycle.  We examine and define needs from the inception of a transaction all the way through to its end.  We constantly communicate, across teams and processes, with a philosophy I honed from being in the room with a lot of talented people offering very different ideas to solve the same problem.  One leadership voice – my own – unites all this dialogue.  No one in the vendor space manages this work with a more informed perspective on the mortgage process as a whole than we do, and that is a direct result of our people’s history working directly in the asset sale space with a wide spectrum of stakeholders.  We can do great things for you, and we can do the RIGHT things for you, because we know the right questions to ask.  That is the story behind our philosophy, and we can put it directly to work for you.