Appraisers don’t provide appraisals, they provide trust. Fee appraiser or bank appraiser, it’s all you got.
Trust is created through leadership resulting in employees loving their career.
Provide confidence
USPAP is voluminous. Don Quixote long. Why’s that?
Commercial appraisals are often 100+ pages just to report one number. I was talking to some newbies about valuation and found myself saying all these pages were necessary to believe the reported market value.
Trust is the new currency
Some fee appraisers feel that they are independent purveyors of truth disconnected from the business world. I contend that the valuation industry is like any other business. It should be grounded in customer (service) success. The baseline required is strong ethics of course. But what’s next level?
Your leadership environment
You’re asking your team to work with a certain amount of tools, co-worker capabilities and corporate structure. Leadership requires clear expectations, not just trying to squeeze the most labor out of your people. People leave bosses not companies. People leave due to a lack of leadership. People stay when clear leadership makes them feel valued for their contribution.
If you don’t trust your team, the negative fallout is enormous. It shows itself in lackluster performance, poor quality and lack of collaboration. Overall bad mojo.
Career not Job = Fun
I “love” my job is 1000x better than I “like” job.
Working in the appraisal world, are you working through the day just to collect a paycheck?
Do you have team members that are just keeping their head low and hope they get through the day unnoticed? Working remotely is a great way to hide and not participate, but the results are poor on many levels.
“A team is not a group of people who work together.
A team is a group of people who trust each other.”
Simon Sinek
Dream Team
If you want to play to win, create trusting teams. Just like working out, it takes a daily mindset to get results. It also takes patience since those results will not be seen in the short term. It’s a process that needs to be created and repeated over and over. Leadership is a mindset, a lifestyle.
Conversely, if you have a non-trusting team, most have been compelled to lie, pretend to have expertise, hide their mistakes and not ask for help. This office environment can build up to toxic levels.
Trust your people to do the right thing. Provide training and guidance to coach them to success. Your employees need to feel safe to communicate new ideas, safe to fail. If not, effectively you as a leader don’t trust them to do their job for which they were trained. The outcome is suffering for your organization, customers and employees.
Lift others
With leadership, create an atmosphere in which your people feel safe in their jobs, this creates trust, which in turn benefits the organization, the customer and your employee.
Simon says, “Leadership is not being in charge, but taking care of those people in your charge. Leaders are not responsible for the results, but are in charge of the people who are responsible for their results.” The goal is to have your team members feel relaxed enough to operate daily where they “feel like myself.”
How to make appraising fun? Reduce the frustrating aspects of your job, typos, late appraisals, annoyed loan officers, managing excessive workload, yada yada. Consider software to make your life easier. YouConnect for your bank’s appraisal and environmental workflow. DataComp Suite for a commercial comp database, report writing and workflow for fee appraisers.
Appraisers provide trust. Trust them. Build your team. Be a leader. It will make appraising fun.
