Becoming The Attractive Leader

Hey everybody, it's Richard Milligan here, and we're getting started on a pretty cool journey of learning how to recruit well as a recruiting leader. Now, um, if you aren't already clear on this, you recruit differently than the corporate recruiter recruits, and there's a lot of reasons why you recruit differently. But at the heart of this is that the corporate recruiter Has, um, this, um, permission from people to pursue people differently. And so they get to use the large seining net. They get to throw a really wide net out on LinkedIn, throw a really large net out via the phone, use really strong scripting to try and find out who's warm, who's hot, and then trying to move them to the next steps. But you as a recruiting leader, you reside in your market. You know the people in your market, you see them at events. Um, you cross paths with them at title companies, you go to, you know, um, you know, MI rep, you know, events, um, you know, Mortgage Bankers Association, um, events. You, you see each other consistently and you will for as long as you're in this business. And so you have to pursue completely differently. Now I'm going to share with you some epiphany moments that I had along the way that said, lean in, you're doing something right, or lean out, you're doing something wrong. in this space of being the attractive leader. But at the heart of this is how you fish as an attractive leader is differently than how the corporate recruiter fishes. You fish with your attractive leadership on the end of a single pole, not a seining net, a very individual single pole. And you have to be able to represent yourself to the larger market, what you stand for, what your core values are, what your core convictions are, what's your vision. And then you have to live in accordance and act in accordance with that. So we're going to talk about that, but just know you need to get this from the very beginning because we're going to build on this as we go through the Recruiting Made Simple system. What that means is that our phone scripting is tied to the attractive leader. This— our presenting when we're face-to-face is tied to being an attractive leader. How we act and what we do on LinkedIn is tied to being an attractive leader. How How we pursue people and through the lens of the pursuit that we actually, in our step-by-step system, what we actually do is through the lens of this. So I start with this because I want to build on this. We start here. If you get this, then everything else is going to make sense. And when you get to the end, you're going to be super proud of what you actually have in terms of a system. And you're going to be really proud of how you actually pursue people because it's going to be different. And you're, because of that, You're going to get results. Okay? I know this. I've coached several hundred leaders through this at this time. This is the beginning of 2018. At this time, I've coached several hundred leaders through this. They are all getting results because they're activating on this. Okay? So we're going to start today and I'm going to transition to the actual presentation now. And so you won't have to see me anymore. Beginning now. So we're going to talk about becoming the attractive leader. So let's just start and discuss what is an attractive leader. An attractive leader really represents 3 things. It's a leader who has a clear vision. It's a leader who can clearly articulate their vision. And then it's the same leader who lives and acts in accordance with that vision. Now, if you miss any part of this, You are missing the largest opportunity in the time that you're going to spend recruiting because a year from now you will want to be the attractive leader. 3 years from now you'll want to be the attractive leader. 5 years from now, you're going to build momentum by being this person in your market. Now I'm going to show you how to do this in LinkedIn. I'm going to show you how to do this through how you pursue people, but you have to understand If you answer the question, do I have a clear vision right now? And you can't very clearly articulate that in this moment without having to go refer back to something, then you don't have a clear vision and you'll need to work on this. Now, in lesson 2, we're going to talk about this. So don't pause here. Just, I just want you to receive this and understand this principle. Okay? So you need to be able to clearly articulate this. And then beyond that, listen, if you've got a vision, you understand what your core values and your core convictions are. But then you go and don't live in accordance or act in accordance with those, then you will lose because people will see you as not being the attractive leader. Okay, so this is really important that you get this from the very beginning. Let me share with you my aha moment. This was around 2010. At the time, I had just recruited a good producer in my market. This is a person who's doing 10 to 12 units a month. This individual, from the time that I actually met them over the phone, the time they actually joined my group was 2 and a half weeks. And this individual did not have any pain points. And, and so I was actually in the moment kind of relishing it, thinking, man, you're really good at this recruiting thing. When 3 days into this individual being in my branch, my door was open. Their door was open and I could hear them on the phone talking to their referral partners, builders, realtors, financial planners. And the things that they were sharing with them as to why they had left their previous company and why they were with my existing company was that what was the— was being shared my core values, my core convictions, my vision. Now, granted, There are a lot of companies that have great core values and core vision statements. Um, the company that I was with did not, so I created my own. So understand that you don't necessarily have to have your own vision, but you do have to adopt a vision. So if your company has a very clear vision, then you own that. Okay? If you can't own it, then go get your own vision, go create your own vision. Okay? There's a big difference between stewardship of vision and ownership of vision. Okay, if you think about this, if you said, Richard, I want you to come stay at my house in Florida, and we're going to be gone for a month, we want you to come stay, and we want you to take care of the house for us while we're gone. I would probably gladly volunteer to do that because right now I've got this upper respiratory infection because I'm stuck in Oklahoma in the middle of winter. And I would jump on a plane, I would go fly there and stay there for as long as you needed me to, to manage that house in Florida, okay? But the truth is that when I get there, I'm not the owner. I'm only a steward. So if I leave the pool pump on, you know, I'm gonna have a hard time having that conversation with you, but it's not gonna cost me anything, right, if the pool pump ruins itself. If I accidentally let a bathtub overflow, which I probably would do 'cause I have a 4-year-old and that those things happen at my house. But if that were to happen, that wouldn't be on me as a steward. If it ruined some hardwood floors or it got into your woodwork or it ruined your carpet or whatever, that would be on you, the owner. So there's a, there's a big difference between ownership and stewardship. If you're going to take on the corporate vision as your own vision, then you need to own it. Now the difference is that owners believe in things like blood, sweat, and tears. They believe in things like at all costs. They do not delegate problems, right? They take ownership of that. So what I want you to get in this moment is this. If you're going to own the company vision, then own it and figure out how do you pass on ownership to all the people underneath your group, underneath your umbrella that are on your team. You got it? So if you'll do this, you'll experience a similar moment as me. Now, I realized in that moment that that was intriguing and interesting, and I began to lean into that, and I began to become more clear on my values, my convictions, and my vision. And because of that, if you look at the timeline and the branches and the number of people that I hired moving forward from that, my recruiting game was completely different in that moment. Okay? So this is at the heart of becoming an attractive leader. Now, why is it so critical to recruiting? I mean, you've heard my story. Well, let's kind of go over this. Anyone can attract hot and warm candidates. And when I say anyone, anyone that can connect with people on LinkedIn can actually attract them. Anyone that is willing to pick up the phone and make a phone call can attract them. But the truth is that hot and warm candidates are typically the candidates that transition every 9 to 12 months. It's really difficult to build a branch The stable branch with a family, you know, a unit of people that stay together for a long length of time. If the only thing that you're attracting, or if what you're attracting is these hot and warm candidates, these are the ones that, you know, that, that kind of hop from one guarantee that they get for 3 to 6 months, the next guarantee for 3 to 6 months. And now that's a— that's quantifying, you know, some people in this. that probably don't deserve to be in it because there are people out there that have transitioned a couple of times back to back every 9 to 12 months that just have been in a place where they've been oversold and underdelivered. Okay. But as a whole, hot and warm candidates, you know, don't care about attractive leadership as much as they do, you know, the sign-on bonus or the guarantee that they're going to get. Okay. Now, who cares? Your cold candidates care, right? There's 3 groups. Hot candidates, warm candidates, cold candidates. How do you build a sustainable group that has long-term success? You do it by attracting cold candidates. Now, these are the ones that only move every 5, 7, however long, but it's definitely, um, every, you know, 5 to 7 years. You've got to be able to recruit those individuals. Okay. How you recruit them is by building epiphany bridges. Remember, the cold candidate, when you call them, will actually tell you, I'm happy where I'm at. I'm content where I'm at. Now, at the heart of every human being, we're not necessarily about contentment, right? So what we're about is we love to be on a larger journey. We love to be called into a larger story. We love to be a part of something that's significant. When someone says, I'm happy where I'm at, typically to me, that means that I'm content. Right, my deals are getting closed on time. You know, I've got a decent, you know, manager, my pipeline's being managed well, got a good processor, I'm content. How you build an epiphany bridge to get someone from content to discontent with a cold candidate is by being very clear on who you are as a leader. I call it being polarizing. Think about it. If you're very clear on your core values, your core convictions, and your vision, Then you will become polarizing. And what polarizing means is simply this: take a magnet, place it in the middle of a table. Okay, on that table, put some paper, put some rubber, put some plastic, but put some paper clips. And when you put— drop all that into the middle of the table, the only thing that moves towards the magnet is the paper clips, right? So polarization means that when we're clear, as leaders about who we are and what we represent, what we believe, then there are people that even when they're content are going to feel called to you as a leader. Okay, so it's important to grasp this concept, concept, because if you are Switzerland and you're neutral and you're not real clear but you're super nice, you will, you will have a hard time recruiting people. Now, on the other hand, if you're very clear, Not only will you have a much easier time recruiting people, but you're also going to have a much easier time pushing people away, and that's a win for you. So clarity on who you are as a leader is going to ultimately not only pull people towards you, but it will keep the people that you might accidentally hire and push them away. Okay, now we're going to talk about more— we're going to talk a lot more about this in the next session, but I want you to understand the general concept of this. Because the truth is that cold candidates are intrigued by what I call surrogate leaders. Now, there are a lot of good managers in the business. Good, good managers make sure that your pipeline is being closed on time, that your processor is doing what they need to do, that, um, that things are running well around the office. But what great— what good managers don't do typically is become great leaders. Okay, so, um, you have to understand that people want to be stretched. People want to grow. Over and over again, I could share with you 20 stories of people that were cold candidates that when I'm— when I presented them with my core values, my core convictions, my vision, would move towards me. And I couldn't even put my finger on why. I'm asking myself the question, why are these people moving towards me? Because they said they were happy where they were at. Why are they still engaging with me in next steps when they're happy, when nothing's wrong? And the truth is that if you are a good leader, people will see you incrementally, especially over time. And when you do some of the things I'm going to ask you to do here over the next few weeks, when you do these things, you are improving your status in their eyes as a leader. You become a surrogate leader and people see you as a stronger leader who's willing to stretch them, grow them, challenge them. And these are the things that we as humans ultimately want. So how do you become an attractive leader? Okay. Now we're going to go over all this way more in depth in the next lesson, but you need to understand, you need to identify your core values. Okay. You need to create a vision. Again, if you're, if you can't say these are my core values right now, then you're not clear on that. I'm going to walk you through an exercise to do that. If you can't say this is my vision, Then you're not clear on that and you need to go through an exercise to actually do that. There's really 3, what I call the 3 stages of vision. The first stage is creating it. This is where we do a lot of thinking about it. We figure out what our core values, our convictions, like we figure out where do we want to go? What's the future? What do we want the future to look like? We spend a lot of time creating it. That's really stage 1. Stage 2 is finding clarity. How do you find clarity? You begin to tell people about your vision. You begin to articulate it. You begin to challenge all of the words that are in it. Look up the definition of the words that you've associated with it. You really begin to voice your opinion inside the vision that you have. You go to places like LinkedIn, you go to places like Facebook, you go to places like Twitter, and you begin to talk about your vision. The more you talk about it, the more clarity you get around it. And as you gain clarity around that, You find your voice in it, and the person who finds their voice and their vision moves on to the 3rd C of vision, which is casting. Now, those people that can cast their vision very well are what I call visioneers. Now, this may, this may resonate with you. There's probably a person that called you into the organization that you're, that you're at right now, or to some organization that you've been at. That you would say, I don't really know why, but I was really drawn to that person and I was really drawn to this organization. That person is most likely a visionary, right? They've gone through this process, creating their vision, casting their vision, finding their voice in the vision, or finding clarity in the vision, and then lastly, casting it consistently. And the rhythm and the routine of casting the vision moves people out of this, you know, basic stage of Trying to, you know, cast their vision of people to actual visionary status where they're so passionate about it that just grabs you and it pulls you in. This is where we want to move you. Now, as part of this, in one of the future lessons, we're going to discuss the importance of connecting your vision to story. Okay, so I don't want to spend a lot of time here, but I want you to understand your vision needs to also be connected to your story. Or 2 stories that really identify the importance of your vision. So how do you recruit like an attractive leader? Because the attractive leader recruits differently. Okay, we use LinkedIn as a tool to voice our core values, our convictions, our vision, and we do this by simply documenting over creating. Now, a lot of people know, and in one of your next lessons, we're going to go through the LinkedIn Jumpstart. That's a great lesson for you to go to and to spend a lot of time in because LinkedIn is one of the top 2 tools that you, that you're going to use to recruit with. Okay. Now I'm gonna take all the pressure off of LinkedIn because a lot of you right now are going, oh, I don't post and I don't want to post. I'm not good at writing. And, you know, whatever the reason being, you were not going to go create High-level marketing pieces. That is not what people are looking for. People want to hear your voice. Okay, so we're simply going to document the things that we're doing on an ongoing basis. You were holding a sales meeting, a weekly sales meeting. What was the one takeaway from that? That's simple. You've already got that. You just document it. You go help one of your loan officers present at a Board of Realtors meetings. You take a picture at the front of the room and you type something up as a key takeaway from that meeting. You're simply documenting what you're doing. As an example, in my home office, my 7-year-old daughter walked in a few weeks ago and put a sticky note on my desk, and she spelled some stuff wrong, and she had some letters backwards, and I took a picture of that, and it said something along the lines of, I love you, Daddy, thanks so much for working hard, and put a heart on it with, I think, an arrow through it, and put it on my desk. I took a picture of that and then posted it through the lens of business. I was simply documenting an experience in that moment, And I post it through the lens of business, which is that, yeah, I'm in a season of building a recruiting coaching business. There's nothing like this in the industry right now. And so I'm doing a lot of firsts in, in, in my business that there's no one's gone before. There's no one to model it. And so it's been a busy season for me with a lot of time invested, and she's recognizing that. And so I put that through the lens of business, and guess what? I had over 10,000 views. On that, on that post. So I was simply documenting that moment. Okay, that's how you, that's how you use attractive leadership to recruit. Now, the attractive leader recruits not, not through focusing on his moving people through the recruiting funnel or moving people through next steps. They focus on relationship building. And the reason why is because relationship building is recruiting. And recruiting should be relationship building. But what happens with most people is that we move out of this right-brain thinking and we move over to left-brain thinking. Left-brain thinking is, let me tell you how my opportunity is better than your opportunity because I've got more products, I pay better comp plan, our marketing's better, our CRM's better, we use a cool LOS. I mean, these are the things that people recruit with. That's all left-brain thinking. If you recruit through left-brain thinking, which is vetting, people will out-vet your opportunity. Okay? That will happen. If you move people to things like core values, core convictions, and vision, and you focus on building relationship through that lens, it's the most powerful thing that you can do to recruit. And that's what the attractive leader does. One of the things I will teach you in the lesson, 4 stages of presenting. Now, that's when we're face-to-face with somebody. How do we present? The thing I'm going to teach you is this, how to recruit through the, through the lens of why. Okay, so this is how the attractive leader recruits. They figure out the people that they're pursuing. What is it that motivates them? What is their why? So ask yourself the question, the people that I'm pursuing right now, can I clearly articulate their why? And if you can't, Then, then, then you have got to get to a place where you figure that out. And moving forward, you know, you can go, you can go watch the lesson, the 4 Stages of Presenting. I teach you how to do that in a face-to-face meeting with somebody very easily. You figure out their why, and then not just figure it out, but you gain clarity around it. So, and here's why the why is so important. There's really only one thing that your recruit must believe about you. Okay, so let me just oversimplify recruiting, put a really nice bow on one statement. Okay, if you can get your recruit to believe this one thing, they have to join you. Maybe not today, maybe not next month, but at some point they have to join you. Okay, so let me tell you this story and I'll finish that statement. Over the course of 2012 to 2016, when I left the business, I probably had half a dozen recruiters, external recruiters, reach out to me and say, I had to meet you. And the reason why I had to meet you is I was talking to a candidate in your market and they said, if I leave, if I ever leave my current organization, the only person I will ever go work for is Richard Milligan. Okay, that is a true statement that happened. The one thing that I focused on when I was recruiting and getting people to believe about me Which was true, is that if you came to my team, I would be all about helping you accomplish your why. That's it. If you can get them to believe that one thing, that you above all other leaders will help them accomplish their why, then you win. That's it. That's the— I'll tie the bow on top of that. You don't need to watch any other videos. I'm just kidding. But that's really it. That's the one thing in recruiting. Okay? So if you have missed out on understanding your recruit's why, now's the time to just recognize that and make sure that you change it. Okay, let's talk about next steps. I want you to figure out your core values. I want you to figure out what your vision is going to be. We're going to talk about this in the next lesson. But you can start by beginning to ask your family, friends, employees this one question. What do you see as a few of my core values? What do you see as some of my real convictions? Just ask them and see what they say. Okay. One of the things that will be helpful in this is if you create a top 10 list of statements that you believe are true about your current leadership. Okay. Do you believe that growth is important? Do you believe that leadership development is important? Do you believe in personal growth, personal development? Do you believe that systems are critical to success? Do you believe that processes are at the heart of, of, of running a successful mortgage operation. Come up with 10 statements that are true about you. It doesn't have to be about the mortgage business. It can be true about you in general. My family has, has a mission statement. And then my family also has 19 purpose statements, right? I could very easily come to what are some statements that are true about my leadership, just even inside my family. Okay. And then write out some I believe statements, just write them out. Like, I believe one of the cool things that will come from this is you just gave yourself a shortcut for how you're going to post on LinkedIn. So I challenge you to do this before you go on to the next lesson instead of just breezing over this. This will help you become a better recruiter. Okay. So with that said, that's the end of lesson 1. Look forward to chatting with you in lesson 2.