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Employees closest to the work are often the first to notice when something is not working as it should within an organization. Someone in sales may hear the same customer concern repeatedly, while a compliance professional might identify a risk well before it ever reaches senior leadership.
In mortgage and financial services, those observations can have a ripple effect, affecting everything from internal processes and regulatory compliance to the customer experience and broader business decisions.
Brett Arsta believes employees should have an easy way to share what they are seeing. He has spent decades in mortgage and financial services, working in wholesale lending, third-party origination, regulatory compliance, business development and secondary markets.
Today, he is part of the executive leadership team at PwrTPO, a subsidiary of Lower LLC, where he focuses on growing the company’s wholesale mortgage platform and broker channel strategy.
Arsta’s time in the industry has shown him the value of employee input when companies are deciding what to change or pursue.
“Listen to your employees and customers and give them an outlet to make suggestions,” he said. “I’m definitely not the smartest person in the room, and so many people have fantastic ideas.”
But creating an outlet for employees is only the starting point. Companies also need to take those ideas seriously and consider what they could mean for the business.
Open dialogue does not mean everyone has equal decision-making authority. Senior leaders will still make the final calls.
However, employees can give them a better idea of what is happening across the organization before they do. Their perspective can help uncover problems, identify opportunities and lead to better-informed decisions. Sometimes, the person with the least authority in the room has the perspective senior leadership most needs to hear.
In that sense, listening is more than a workplace-culture idea, but a practical part of management and a potential organizational advantage.
Solution-Oriented Leadership: Promoting Psychological Safety at Work
Building a culture of open communication can be difficult when employees are worried about the consequences of speaking up. When something goes wrong, Arsta focuses less on assigning blame and more on understanding what happened, correcting it and preventing the same issue from happening again in the future.
Still, that does not mean mistakes should be ignored. For Brett Arsta, the distinction is whether leadership spends its energy finding fault or figuring out what needs to change.
“Scared employees don’t promote a happy workplace,” he said.
Fear can make employees hesitant to bring up concerns or acknowledge mistakes. If doing so could lead to embarrassment or punishment, staying quiet may feel safer. Leaders may then learn about issues only after they have already affected customers, coworkers or internal operations.
Arsta values employees who can remain calm under pressure, see the big picture and focus on solutions. He believes leaders should demonstrate those same qualities and be willing to step in wherever they are needed.
“Servant based means no job is too menial or big for you,” he said. “Always be willing to learn and look for flaws where you can be useful and help solve problems.”
As a company grows or goes through change, staying connected can become even more challenging. Senior leaders may become further removed from day-to-day work, making it easier to overlook problems or concerns that employees are seeing firsthand.
That makes fairness and transparency especially important. Employees need to feel comfortable questioning an idea, raising a concern or having a difficult conversation, particularly when a decision affects multiple teams. Otherwise, those issues may never make their way into a leadership meeting on their own.
Creating that type of environment starts with leaders who are willing to listen, understand what their employees are seeing and work alongside them when problems come up. Brett Arsta compares a growing financial services organization to an assembly line, with different people and departments responsible for different parts of the process.
If something goes wrong at one stage and no one speaks up, the problem can continue down the line.
The goal is not to expect every step to be perfect. Every organization will inevitably encounter problems at some point. It is to catch problems early, understand where a process is breaking down and make the necessary changes before the issue affects the final outcome.
Balancing Employee Voice With Executive Judgment
Creating room for constructive disagreement does not mean every suggestion should become company policy. Arsta believes ideas should be evaluated for their potential impact.
When considering whether an opportunity deserves further investment, he looks at the short-, mid- and long-term benefits and risks, including how a decision could affect the company years down the road. The employee and customer experiences should be considered as well.
“Bigger is not always better,” Arsta said.
An idea can be worth serious consideration and still create too much risk. It may improve one part of the business while creating problems elsewhere, or make sense in the short term without supporting the company’s longer-term goals. Arsta also sees responsibility for the company as something everyone shares.
“We all are rowing together like an employee-owned company,” he said. “We place an emphasis on doing the right things and not putting too much risk on our plates that could disrupt or corrupt our culture and livelihoods.”
From that perspective, disagreement can be a good thing. An employee who questions a plan may be pointing out a risk, consequence or operational issue that leadership has not yet considered.
The goal, then, is not to create an organization where everyone agrees. It is to create one where disagreement can be productive, where challenging an idea is seen as an attempt to make an improvement rather than an attempt to undermine the person making the decision.
Arsta believes that mindset should carry across the organization. Executive leadership, sales teams and operational employees need to have mutual respect and be receptive to one another when making decisions about strategy, policies and procedures.
“You can have superstars in every department but if they don’t have synergy or a team mindset, they may just not fit into your organization,” Arsta said. “Being part of a team requires pulling together.”
Individual talent matters, but so does being able to work well with people in other roles. Sales may see the customer impact of a decision, while operations may be focused on how it will work in practice. Meanwhile, the compliance team may be looking at a different set of risks.
Bringing those perspectives together can help uncover issues that might otherwise be missed and give leaders more to think about before making a decision. That cross-functional perspective is especially valuable when a decision appears to work well for one department but harms another.
Arsta has compared employees to utility players on a sports team. Not everyone has the same role or authority, and some may need more practice or be called on differently depending on what the team needs. What matters is that each person can contribute to the team’s success when given the chance.
Listening Is an Executive Leadership Skill
After decades in mortgage and financial services, Arsta’s advice to future business leaders comes back to a fundamental principle: listen. Moving up the ladder, he believes, does not make that mindset less important. If anything, it makes it more important.
“It’s lonely at the top,” he said. “Never underestimate the need for being more understanding and always be working to improve your own skills through personal and professional development.”
That commitment to learning applies at every level, including the CEO. Reaching the top of an organization does not mean reaching a point where there is nothing left to learn. Valuable insight can come from a coach, another executive or even an employee several levels below.
In fact, the higher someone rises, the more important it can become to seek out perspectives beyond their immediate circle.
Listening, however, is more than simply hearing people out. Executives are ultimately responsible for weighing risks, making difficult decisions and owning the outcome, but Brett Arsta believes listening should always be part of that process.
An employee may raise an idea or concern that does not ultimately change the decision, but they should still know that their perspective was genuinely considered, and, when appropriate, understand why leadership chose to go in a different direction.
When thoughtful disagreement is taken seriously, employees are more likely to keep speaking up. When concerns go unacknowledged, they may decide that speaking up is not worth it.
Good leadership, in Arsta’s view, is not about having all the answers. It is about staying curious, open and available to the people who have a perspective that deserves to be heard.
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