Meet Renee Harmon, they call her “coach”  and they acknowledge her with a slight tip of the head as they pass her by in the hallways and wide open spaces at United Wholesale Mortgage and you can feel the level of respect and warmth toward her servant leadership approach.

In this episode you can expect to hear more about the coaching culture at UWM and the training program that supports over 500 + leaders and placed UWM in the top #5 ranking of training teams across the country.

How technology plays a part in improving employee engagement and a very different approach to the traditional performance review.

“We’re not the culture police” states Harmon

There are valuable insights to share as we pursue our quest to find GRAVITAS.

01:38 Renee’s story

03:37 The leadership development program

05:58 People are our greatest asset

06:31 Did she say retention rate of over 90% ?

09:34 Not the culture police

10:12 The team huddle

12:50 Automotive culture – impact ?

15:07 Service level agreements

16:46 Where did the dance party idea come from ?

23:28 Nurturing psychological safety

24:54 Technology and the impact on employee engagement

27:43 Advice to your 25 year old self

28:24 What’s your legacy ?

[Transcript]

Welcome to the Finding Gravitas Podcast brought to you by Gravitas Detroit. Looking to become a more authentic leader, Finding Gravitas is the podcast for you. Gravitas is the ultimate leadership quality that draws people in. It's an irresistible force encompassing all the traits of authentic leadership. Join your podcast host Jan Griffiths, the passionate rebellious farmer's daughter from Wales, entrepreneur, leadership coach, keynote speaker, one of the top 100 leading women in the automotive industry, as she interviews some of the finest leadership minds in the quest for gravitas.

Today's episode is a further in-depth look at the culture at United Wholesale Mortgage. In our last episode, we interviewed Laura Lawson, Chief People Officer, and I was particularly struck by the number of times Laura mentioned coaching. Supporting the employee development, the leadership coaching is of paramount importance here at United Wholesale Mortgage and I wanted to know more. Laura kindly suggested that we interview Renee Harmon. Renee is the Vice President and Leadership Coach for the company. She heads up the leadership development team. So today please welcome to the show, Renee Harmon.

Hi Jan. Thanks for having me.

It's great to have you here Renee and I am very excited to dive deep into coaching, into leadership coaching, your passion and mine.

Yes. I am so looking forward to our conversation today.

Good. So tell us a little bit about yourself, Renee. What's your story?

Well, I started in the mortgage business about 35 years ago out of college and was in secondary marketing at the time. I eventually opened up my own broker shop which I had to close in 2010, just because of the market and the crash and everything that happened at that time. And in 2011 United Shore reached out to me for an interview for a sales position and I immediately started a couple of weeks thereafter and was an account executive for the sales team.

Wow. So you've been in the mortgage business for quite some time.

Yes, and I am very passionate about what we're doing here. I think that's why I'm so aligned. We are true partners with our mortgage brokers.

So what got you into the leadership coaching side of the business? How did that evolve?

Well eventually I became a team lead in sales and then was promoted to a division leader and I had a much larger scope at that time, probably about 30 AEs and we really enjoyed coming into work. Not that I never did enjoy, but I seemed to have found my passion and helping people. They were younger individuals and to see their confidence grow just through encouragement and some coaching, it was my passion, definitely. I just loved it. Then eventually we formed a leadership team in 2017 and that's when I became the leadership coach.

So tell us about the coaching program. I mean, I don't know what to call it. What do you call it and tell us more about it because I'm sure that many of our listeners are anxious to understand more about the program?

We have a leadership development team now. What we do is initially we provide a lot of support for new leaders through what we call bootcamp. It's a half hour day really to get them introduced to servant leadership and our 12 How we do it behaviors here that we have in our pillars. Then we have them go through a 12 week program every Tuesday for 45 minutes. It's called our LIT program, leader initial training. And what that does is it builds a lot of relationships throughout the company where they can share any struggles they're having or best practices. It's really about all of them building relationships as that's one of our pillars, we're relationship driven. Then we have another leadership coach, Mateen Cleaves. He played basketball at MSU. He's a co-coach with me. We meet quarterly with all leaders. And then after about a year of leadership, we take them through a five week course, every Thursday, all day actually. It's a leadership excellence program. And it typically is from 10 to 12 leaders at a time.

Now when you say leaders in the company, can you define exactly what you mean? Cause I mean, some people could interpret that as just the top level people in the company, you know, maybe the direct reports to the CEO and then others would define it all the way down to maybe somebody who's on the floor leading a team of people, a small team of people. How do you define that here?

So how we define leaders here, as we call them captains, and a captain or leader leads a team of six or more people. That determines the support that we give them at that time.

So roughly how many people would you have going through a leadership program?

We've had so much growth this year that at one time we initially started off with having one LIT class and now we're up to three per day. More recently we had probably about 120 leaders or captains in the program at one time.

That's a big commitment both financially and in terms of resources. Why is it that United Wholesale Mortgage feels so passionately about this leadership, coaching and development?

Pillar number one is, People are our greatest asset and in order for people to feel valued and appreciated and cared for and have a sense that they can grow here - hire to retire - that we need leaders that are serving the team and serving their team members.

Cause I'm sure some people out there would argue that that's soft, that's nice to have, that's HR kind of stuff, right? Where are the hard numbers? Where are the metrics behind it? So what does the retention look like here?

Right now our retention rate is 90%. We do have a goal for 2020 to increase that to 91%. We feel if we hire the right people and to fit our culture, which is have a good work ethic and attitude, we can do the rest. We can help them grow. We have a very young workforce, highly engaged. We do measure engagement. And it seems to be working obviously from the exponential growth we've experienced since I've been here, which is eight years.

Yeah. So you've hired, I think 3000 people this year.

Yes, that was our 2019 goal was 3000 and as of today, I think we're at 2,932 new team members.

So you mentioned employee engagement. There's a Gallup poll that came out several months ago and it measured different industries, different people, different countries. It was a global poll. And it said that only 15% of people in the workforce felt inspired and engaged at work. How do you compare to that number and what do you think influences that number?

I think it's leadership that influences that number. It's how you make people feel. So back in 2016, we had the highest engagement score since we started measuring it in 2014 and we came in at 73%. More recently in June of this year, we were at 59% and that could be attributed to a lot of new people that we don't have relationships with yet. We're so young and the growth and we recently moved from Troy to Pontiac. So team members having to move, they didn't know what to expect. Obviously change is hard. So it was a whole new drive into work even. So 59% was very, very good. Our goal is 68%. So you know, we take that very seriously and when leaders do get their scores we work with them on their action plans and how they can improve and get that score up.

That's great. So you have this leadership development program, so you're setting people up for success right away. So many companies out there put people into a leadership role without the required training, and then they sink or swim, right? Some people get it. Some people will find a mentor, a way through it and others will not. So that's great to get them right from day one with the right leadership and the right mindset about leadership. But what happens when people on the team don't follow the culture, the philosophy and the six pillars that you talk about here? When they start to drift out of line, or maybe they're new, they come in from another industry and this is a totally different culture for them and they can't quite deal with it. How do they handle that?

I think, with our resource or the leadership development team, we like to say, we're not the how we do it police or the culture police. We're a resource and we're responsible for holding our culture together. So we would have a coaching conversation. We do do 360 survey feedback. We get that twice a year. Leaders get their scores and we take action. We talk about how they can improve. So it's all very transparent and the expectations are very clear because we do have a set of behaviors that leaders should live by daily.

And I understand from the discussions with Laura, that the team huddle they call it, right? Because I don't remember daily, weekly?

Yes. A lot of teams do a daily huddle. Some teams could do two or three times a week depending on their function. But it's a daily where we recognize team members for their achievements, communicate at that time. We actually even have a huddle class to help our leaders prepare in how to lead good huddles to set the tone for the day.

And in those huddle meetings, they're really starting to, if a metric or a number or somebody or behavior is starting to trend out of line, out of line sounds like a strong term, but in a direction that you don't want it to go in, then you're catching it early enough so that you can correct either the metric or the behavior to bring it back. Is that part of the thinking behind it?

Yes. You're exactly right. So we can catch it quicker before we do start to experience more team dysfunction. Say, if maybe a leader is not being positive or their body language and tone is sending the wrong signals, it could be as simple as that. So that's very correct. We try to get it quick before problems start to fester.

Yeah. I think often in the corporate world, we have performance reviews that are conducted once a year, for sure and some companies twice a year, you know, maybe once a quarter, it varies, but there's still that period of time where things can drift and there's this sense of it's uncomfortable to have the conversation about behavior. Most people are very uncomfortable sitting down with somebody and saying, listen, I didn't like the way that you talk to that person in that meeting. So this is really forcing that discussion to happen.

Yes and what we're trying to build as a coaching culture. You know, we just rolled out an emerge class or course I should say. It was a 10 week course for team members aspiring to be leaders or to learn more about leadership behind the scenes and the type of culture in our message is that everyone's a leader because of our open atmosphere. We're all very open. There's no cubicles, very few offices. So if we develop a coaching culture where we care for one another and we're able to give feedback and then people don't get defensive from that. We're just trying to continuously improve, which is another pillar. And when you have the relationship, then the feedback is more easily digested and we can have candid and good conversations.

Yeah, yeah. I'm trying to picture somebody coming in here from another industry and just not knowing what day it is really. I mean, it seems so different to a lot of cultures that exist within the Metro Detroit area. I mean, automotive specifically. So you must have some automotive people coming in here, right?

Yes. We actually even have a few engineers that I know of that are now salespeople.

How do they deal with this?

I think initially it's a shock. And when I first interviewed eight years ago, I walked in and the sales floor was very open and it was a bunch of young men, mostly men at the time and it was very loud. Before I had a broker shop, I worked for a large bank and I'm used to cubicles and I'm thinking, what am I getting myself into? Probably two weeks in I realized the value of it and the relationships and how much fun we were having, but we were also working very hard and we were supporting one another. That's immediately what I noticed was people are here to help each other and I bought in very quickly.

Well, I can tell it's real just in my short time. You know, I've been here twice now. You can feel it when you walk onto the floor, you feel it the moment you walk in the door, the way the security guard greets you, the way everybody acknowledges you as a human being walking down the hallway. People are smiling. You know, you can just tell the disposition they're in a different place. The energy level is where it should be, so that you can have that positive engagement. How do you maintain this energy level that people have here in this office?

Well, being a leader, people will mirror your behavior. So if our leaders are aligned with our behaviors and the things that we deem important, such as positivity, communicating, and high energy, then they'll follow that. Or if people are negative, they mirror what they see as children sometimes mirror their parents.

Yeah. Yeah. That's so true. Let's talk about the six pillars. Could you tell us first of all what they are, and then let's drill down into a few of those?

Our pillars are our values. So our first pillar is, People are our greatest asset. So if we take care of our people, they'll take care of everything else because they'll care about their job, they'll feel valued and that will extend to our external clients as well. Number two is, Services everyone's responsibility. So we're here to serve each other. We have SLAs. We have things that hold us accountable to that.

What's an SLA?

It's a service level agreement. So if I get an email, I need to respond within three hours. It shows you care. It shows you're on top of things. Pillar number three is, We're relationship driven, not transaction driven. That's very key obviously to leadership because in order to lead anybody or influence anyone, you have to have a relationship. You have to have their trust. And that's for our external clients as well. They're trusting us with our business so we have to have a relationship with them. We care about them.

Number four is one of my favorites. It's, We are thumb pointers, not finger pointers. So we take ownership, we get better. Number five, another one of my favorites is, Continuous improvement is essential for long-term success. Being a leader you have to be an expert, you have to be in the weeds, but you continually have to improve in order to take people to higher levels. You can't stay stagnant or your team will stay stagnant. And then we do it all through pillar number six, Through fun and friendship. And to me that means we have fun, we care for one another, but we work hard.

Yeah. I still love the dance party idea on a Thursday afternoon, because I'm very big on energy and changing your physiology and what that does for the level of engagement and your behavior and the impact that it has on the outcome. And when I read that there was a dance party on a Thursday, but you don't just get up and dance. You do it. I mean, it's a serious thing, right? There's a DJ here and everything.

Yes. We have a DJ, we can have different teams host. It's just a fun way to bring the company together to prevent silos too. So it's a good place to meet new people, let loose, have some fun. It's just another phenomenal idea from one of our team members.

It's great. Silos, let's talk about silos for a minute. So in some corporate cultures silos, people get very protective towards their silos and sometimes the behavior is that I will protect myself, I will protect my silo, even if it means throwing somebody else under the bus. So I will assign blame to somebody else to make my actions look good or true, or just, and you see that play out in many different companies and industries. So you have a pillar that specifically says that this is a no blame culture, but I would imagine that people would have different interpretations of what that means. So how do you make that a reality and how do you train leadership around that value?

Oh, I think we are thumb pointers, it makes me think of ego and to be a good leader, a genuine, authentic leader, you have to be selfless and you have to do what's best for the team and be mindful of that. We do a lot of things here intentionally to prevent silos. We have what we call team ups, where leaders will have to team up with someone from another team and spend an hour together and share takeaways and again, build relationships. So I think when you talk thumb pointing, it means doing what's best for the team or the overall goal and not worrying about yourself or your metrics and being so defensive. Coming up with the best solution for the company and the team and our people as a whole.

Yeah. It's about outcomes. I have a slide in my keynote presentation that I include in several of the workshops and it's a 6 and a 9 and it says, who's right. And so many times you see this play out where somebody is taking a position and they say, no, it's a 6 and I've got all the data to prove it. And I've sent an email to 15 people, it's a 6. And the other guy, the other side says, no, it's a 9 and I've got all the data to support it and here's why. And I try to encourage people when you look at that, you know, who's right. Well, they're both right. It's not about being right.

Exactly.

It's about check your ego. It's about working together. It's about putting yourself in the other person's shoes for just a minute, understanding their perspective and agreeing on the outcome that you're trying to get to. And I think that, you know, often people miss that fact, right. It's about my position and I've got to be right, that the ego go adopt more of a servant leadership philosophy. What are we going to do together to achieve this goal?

Yes. I love that. I love that. I never heard of that, the 6 or a 9, but I'm going to use that now in some leadership trainings.

I will share it with you.

I'll reference you.

Thank you. Okay. So that's thumb pointers. Talk about continuous improvement, because so many of us talk about continuous improvement day in and day out, but what does it really, really mean, you know, in somebody's life, somebody working here at this company day to day, what does that mean to them?

It's continually improving your craft. I like to refer to our company as like a college campus really. We have so many ways for team members to grow here. We have a lot of team members that come in with no mortgage analogy at all and now they're in IT or they're underwriting. It's just taking those opportunities to get better. And we have the resources here and actually a training team dedicated to that. So it's a support training teams. We have training teams within each team. It's just amazing the amount of growth. If you embrace it you can do anything here. And I think that starts with Matt down. That's his message and that's what we try to do daily is, you know, seize your opportunities. There are so many opportunities here. We have so many great people. Our training team is phenomenal. In fact, they were recognized as a top five training team this year and last year, you know, top 10. So the last three years, I believe they've been in the top 10.

Top 10 of what?

Training by Training Magazine. So I know this year, I believe it's in Orlando, Florida down near Orlando Disney, I believe. And so they go down to that conference every year and you know, it's such a heightened focus in our company is to improve and get better.

I know that you have a fairly young workforce, but you have people from all generations here.

Yes.

How do they respond? Do you have to change the training? You know, do you have to adapt to that? How do you deal with that?

I think you do. You have to know your audience. I know when I'm coaching individuals, you know, I have to be mindful of my audience. Somebody older that came from like a background I came from back in the day, I'm older. So it was more command and control. Whereas now it's more inclusive, it's collaboration, it's communication and so we have to be mindful of that when we're training and coaching our team members.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I think sometimes we think that it's a one size fits all, right? Whether a training program or a coaching program, it's not. You've really got to understand who you're talking to first.

Yes. You have to build the relationship first in order to lead effectively and help people achieve their goals and dreams and aspirations, otherwise they're not gonna care. They're not gonna care about coming into work when they feel like a number and all that their, I'll call them boss, cares about is the numbers that are hitting daily.

We know that Google conducted Project Aristotle in 2012 where they analyzed 180 teams and they said that the number one success factor was psychological safety and right at the foundation of that is trust and empowerment and so many other things come off of that. And today we talk about not only continuous improvement, but innovation and we're not going to get innovation unless people feel safe. So how do you nurture this psychological safety? How do people feel safe here?

We talk about it a lot in leadership and coaching sessions and through our company surveys, you know, we asked the question, is your leader approachable? Do you feel comfortable asking or challenging the why? Because we want an environment that's not fear-based, but where they can come up with ideas. And, you know, everybody, I think has been conditioned when you're younger, maybe you say something silly and you get laughed at that. We don't want that environment here because who knows who's going to have the great next idea. And that's what our company is. We're very innovators and we're disrupting the mortgage business from all the technology and innovation that we've done over the last several years. So we encourage that and we even have a platform called Brilliant Ideas where team members can submit their ideas and it gets vetted through that team.

How'd you use social media with the teams? Do they use anything or I think you have an internal platform that you use, right, for communication?

Yes we do. We do have an internal platform. And it's interesting when we rolled that out, I believe it was in early 2016, that's when our engagement score went up to the highest it's ever been. So I think there's a direct correlation there that that platform helped us remove silos and for team members to be more engaged with each other.

Yeah and you've just got to make it easy, right. It's got to be very open, almost like a texting kind of forum where people can just communicate very openly and very freely. And you have a podcast, I believe.

Yes, we do. We do a podcast with Justin White from our marketing team and Mateen Cleaves, who's a co-coach of mine. It is very successful and it's the storytelling. It's the people's stories that really resonate with people and I think encourage people to realize that they can do whatever they want to do.

And what's the objective of the podcast? How do you structure it?

You know, that's a great question. I don't know much about it. I have been asked to participate in the future. But I think it was just more to build our brand. Again, we're thinking outside the box and it's just the inspiration. It's very inspirational.

Is it internal or external?

They do that internal here, but we've brought in people. We've actually even brought in a former team member who worked here, now has started her own cooking business, Cooking with Que. She's in Detroit.

Fascinating. Yeah, I get the sense there's no judgment here. You know, if you stay and you love it, great. If not, it's good. It's whatever you decide to do.

Exactly. Exactly. And that's how we want people to feel.

Yeah. Talking about feelings, I noticed when I'm in the lobby, you've got that, so it looks like a boat, but it's right in the center and it's words that light up and it says things like, be inspired here, be passionate here. And I mean, everything that you want to feel in a workplace it's right up there, right in front of you. So do you know, where did that come from? What was the genesis of that?

I think it's the BU here. That's one of our, you know, marketing. We want people to be themselves here. And Laura, your previous guest, she's been phenomenal at designing and everything is so intentional that we want people to be inspired and be themselves and just seize the opportunities.

Yeah. Oh, that's great. So Renee, you've been in this business quite some time. You've seen a lot, you've done a lot. You're successful. What advice would you give your 25 year old self in today's environment?

Wow. That's a great question. I think when I was 25, looking back, I think I deemed success as what you had, your square footage of your house, what kind of car you drove, how much money you made and that's not it at all. True success is doing what you're passionate about and everything else will fall into place.

Yeah, I agree. And what about your legacy? What is your legacy?

My legacy. That's a great question too and it really struck me a couple of weeks ago. I was watching Super Soul Sunday with Oprah and I forgot who Oprah's guest was, but somebody asked her a question. I think it was her legacy and Maya Angelou had a conversation with Oprah if I remember correctly and Oprah was so excited to start her college or her school, I should say for young girls. And she was so proud that she built this school and Maya Angelo said it's not the institutions you build, but the people you touch. So I guess my legacy, I would want it to be that I made a difference and when I had the opportunity to have a conversation with somebody. I made them feel better and encouraged.

Well, it seems that you're well on your way to doing that. I saw a video of you this morning receiving an award that you didn't know was coming at you and the applause in the room. I mean, it was the emotion, you could feel it and it was just a 20 second video that I saw. So it's clear that you're having a tremendous impact on people here. And I applaud you and the leadership of United Wholesale Mortgage for embracing a culture that really is all about authentic leadership and making it a reality every single day and continuing to improve on that every single day. It's not as if you just got this and you said, okay, this is our culture and this is it. You continue to question and improve and evolve, which of course, that's what authentic leadership is. But it's lovely to see that and feel that. And I have to admit I'm a little bit obsessed with the culture here at United Wholesale Mortgage.

Oh good. I'm so glad to hear you say that because it is something special and you can feel it. And it starts with Matt and our senior leadership team, Laura Lawson. There's such genuine real people that you feel their care and you just want to pay it forward.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's great. Renee, thank you very much for your time today.

Thank you, Jan. It's so nice to meet you.

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