I have a rule in my office that I would highly recommend you put in yours.
“If you come to my office with a monkey (problem), you have to leave my office with that monkey.”
What I mean by that is, when someone comes to me with a problem at work, I’ll give them help on the solution, but they have to leave my office with that suggested solution and either do my suggestion, or do what they already thought they needed to do before they come in to my office in the first place.
Otherwise, if people bring in a monkey (problem) to your desk, and don’t take ownership of it (the problem / monkey), they then leave you with that problem (monkey), and then you have a bunch of monkeys (problems) running around on your desk all day and there is no way you can think, prospect, or do anything with all that turmoil.
So if a loan officer assistant or a processor comes to me with an issue, my response has always been “Thanks for sharing, now go fix it.” (Don’t leave your monkey in my office).
While this may seem cruel at first, but you see, it’s actually an action on my part to make sure I don’t have to lay off any staff.
You see, as long as your team keeps issues off of your desk, you can spend even more time prospecting. When you spend more time prospecting, well, you will close more loans.
When you close more loans, your team has job security.
Otherwise if you / I try to solve all the problems (feed the monkeys), then we aren’t prospecting, and that means that our job and all of our support team is in jeopardy of having to learn how to mow yards for a living… (I’ve done that in the past… not fun).
So while trying to be helpful in the past by putting on my superman cape and taking care of all the monkeys, looking all knowing and all important.. I was actually hurting my team and stunting our growth. Totally uncool!
If you need some help with “who does what” in a top producing office, or how to have somebody else pay for your help for you, or perhaps, what are the exact action items that results in the best prospecting and most leads that actually close, just hit me up and I’ll hook you up… for free ☺
In the meantime, keep those monkeys out of your office and go prospect!