I’m not a big fan of just cutting and laying off people like some in our industry do when volume goes down. That is not very loyal to your employees. It’s not a smart way to run your business, not only from the culture and employee morale standpoint but also a quarter or two later, your business may be back up and you’re rehiring. If you see it as a permanent decline in your business — which is pretty hard to see for IndyMac given our growth rates — then you lay off. If you see it recovering in a year or so, you don’t lose those layoffs.
The biggest thing I see in growth is you fear hiring and fear making the capital investment. You’re worried you might have to retrench. That fear sometimes makes certain leaders grow at a slower pace than they otherwise could. If you’re in a business that has good long-term growth potential, you don’t want to be afraid of making the proper investments in your business. The old adage — you’ve got to spend money to make money — it’s true. A lot of financial leaders may get obsessed with the cost and not the revenue opportunity. I’ve always looked at it as any great person I hire is going to generate way more revenue or save me more in costs than their cost.
I’m not a big fan of management training. You can give me golf lessons all day long, but I’m not going to be a pro golfer no matter how many lessons I take. We’re a professional organization here, managing people. If you don’t have the innate leadership ability — and it truly is some innate skills — it’s part of that thing called the emotional quotient. If you don’t have the ability to articulate your vision, get your people to understand it, get them behind it and get a sense of when they think you’re full of it, they’re probably right. You need to listen to them.
I’m a big believer in getting 75 percent of the facts in, and then making your decision, moving forward. Monitor those decisions. Be humble. Admit the ones you screwed up on. You can fix them quickly, and they won’t cost the company much. Waiting until you have 100 percent of the facts in or never making the decision, that is just paralysis. I want people to make some mistakes.
For a lot of my career, I worried about the pace of change — change was going to overtake us. I was always fearful that change was going to wipe out our business. I’ve learned, over time, very few things change that quickly. If you prudently move your business toward change, you won’t get left behind, and your business will succeed.
HOW TO REACH: IndyMac Bank, www.indymacbank.com or (800) 669-2300
