Good Morning,

I remember a few Mondays ago, in a 1006, sharing how I had left on Friday afternoon, not wondering if we needed to lay-off some people due to loan volumes and other problems, but praying about who those people would be. Yet, as the weekend progressed, I felt God moving me more towards resolving overall performance problems; Alethes needed people who were performing; we needed people getting good results; I needed people working together. Though our industry was constricting and changing, our problems weren’t really because of that. Our problems were because of people performance problems. Our problems were because of us not getting results we needed with our own performance.

On Monday morning, I had zero doubt; Alethes needed performance and if I did not get 360 degree Performance, the lay-offs that day would not be near enough.

We became Purposeful and began focusing on Performance and the Results have been Inspiring. What has been extremely Exciting has been the Intensity with which we’ve worked together in meetings. This is not surprising considering how Lencioni tells us that it is through an emergency that you really find out about your team’s ability to perform; one of his examples of a team that always performs well (if it has the right people) is a hospital emergency room.

The test for us now is to continue to perform well; our emergency status is still at “urgent and important.”

The trick is to then keep that “crisis management mode” behavior instilled in ourselves. We can’t apathetically lay back and let things “float along” ever again.

My focus is on INTENT.

Covey writes that “intent is a matter of the heart.” He further describes how Intent is about motive, agenda, and behavior.

My heart is focused on the INTENT to improve the performance of Alethes through you, the people of Alethes. We can have all the systems, strategies, scenarios, processes, products, and technologies that money can buy, but if we don’t have Performing People the spent money is a waste.

My agenda today will particularly pay attention to:
Our locked pipeline
What does it look like?
What are the Real loans?
How are the changes we made last week working?
Robust evaluation and correction of changes we made last week
How are the changes we made last week in the working?
Warehouse line turn-over ratio
What has it been?
Are the recent quick purchases at trend?
Review of the Corporate Branch/Processing Center’s processes
Position Contracts
Work flows
Loan Officer performance
Notification to existing loan officers of change we are making with whom we will be working with in the future
Release of memo about what level loan officers we are now working with
Training and Equipping
21 Minutes class today is on the Law of Respect. This covers the 5 levels of leadership.
Note: please review these levels. What level are you on? 360 degrees?
The Call: a discussion group will begin Tuesday night – 6 to 7pm – to discuss the book “The Call,” by Os Guiness
What does it mean to “be Called and not driven?”
I will send out a separate email asking for your list of meetings you attend on a regular basis
Note: this is one important area in which we have improved during this “crisis” time.
AUS strategy scenarios
Training
Reports
Pull-Throughs
Approved: submitted vs approved
Funded: approved vs funded
Overall and by AE

Undoubtedly, I’ll be asking questions about ProLender or expenses or hiring practices or….?

But, as we go about today, let’s behave our way into continued performance,


Danny