When did you realize you were a leader?
This is a fascinating question. While the consensus today is greater than it was a decade ago, some folks I talk to still do not consider themselves leaders.
The truth is that we all have the opportunity to be leaders. My friend Drew Dudley says this well in his six-minute TED talk, Everyday Leadership.
Acknowledging and accepting that I was a leader was a pivotal moment in my life.
I had done leadership-type things for a long time, yet I still struggled with identifying myself as a leader. It was as if there were a set number of things that I needed to do or someone who needed to permit me to be a leader.
In 2003, I found the courage to leave the big bank I worked for and set up my own brokerage shop. In the early years, I found success, and eventually, a few of my peers from the bank followed me over and joined my newly formed brokerage.
Together, we built up a solid business at that time that amounted to about $200 million in mortgage origination. While that may sound like an impressive number, the reality was that we were still in the category of “mom-and-pop shop.”
The large national brokerages at the time were doing somewhere in excess of $4 – $5 billion in origination volume. Initially, I did not care to compare the size of organizations. Eventually, it became necessary since, as a smaller independent at $200 million, I did not have as much leverage with our lending partners as the more prominent nationals.
It was starting to impact myself and my team as we were not earning as much as the Super Brokers. I could have joined one of these Super Brokers and solved the problem. My pride made me loathe to pay a royalty fee to join one of the nationals to aggregate my same origination volume simply to get paid more, but I had to do something.
While on a road trip for a speaking engagement, Pretty Vegas, by INXS, cranked on repeat, an idea struck me. If the only thing these super brokers were doing was having smaller shops stand together and aggregate volume, why couldn’t I do the same thing as a non-profit cooperative?
So, I created the National Alliance of Independent Mortgage Brokers. Our mission was simple: To level the playing field for the independent broker-owner. To make a long story short, the idea worked well, and we did what we needed to do. The challenge was that I was now running what was effectively a national brokerage on a volunteer basis. That was not sustainable.
After about 18 months, I decided to change the model to a for-profit venture and returned to the 13 brokerages that made up the current co-operative with a new structure and pricing model.
All but one agreed to come along for the ride. I will never forget my conversation with the one brokerage that did not. Economically, he was too small for the new structure to work for him, so he had to bow out.
He said, “Mike, you are a strong leader and will do great things, but the economics just don’t make sense for me.”
I don’t know what it was with that statement or why it impacted me so hard. The truth is I had not considered myself as a leader.
At that moment, I realized that I had been waiting for someone to permit me to be a leader for external validation before I accepted myself as a leader.
Leadership is not about what you do. Leadership is about who you are. There is a massive difference between viewing leadership as something to be done and viewing leadership as someone to become.
This was a small shift in my self-perception but it had a massive impact. To this day, I still find myself looking for external validation to lead in some cases. Fortunately I catch myself and move forward despite that hesitation.
How many times have you had a thought, an idea or a plan that you did not execute because you had FOPO (Fear of Other People’s Opinions)? Only to find out an hour, a day or a year later that someone else had executed the same idea to find great success.
Yeah me neither ;0)
