As the holidays ramped up in early December 2019, Woman of Influence Charlotte Catalfo had her eye not on decorating and gift-wrapping, but on a small but worrisome health crisis escalating halfway across the globe.
From the suburban Virginia headquarters of mortgage securitizer Freddie Mac, Catalfo kept tabs on a new virus that the Chinese government was having trouble containing to the city of Wuhan. When the now-infamous COVID-19 virus hopscotched to Italy, she knew that it was time to put Freddie Mac’s emergency continuity plan into gear. As senior vice president for enterprise operations and a member of Freddie Mac’s senior operating committee, it was her responsibility to figure out how to ensure uninterrupted work with investors, lenders, multifamily property owners and homeowners if business as usual was thrown off track.
Leading the Freddie Mac’s business continuity initiative, which manages $2.2 trillion in assets, Catalfo cleared the way for ongoing collaboration with regulators and business partners to firm up policies to keep Americans safely housed. Her team worked with lenders to lay out policies for mortgage forbearance, if it was needed. She oversaw dress rehearsals in which Freddie Mac departments practiced remote work to find and fix technical and logistical glitches.
“People, process and technology,” Catalfo says of the remote-work stress tests. “We found that some people were locked out [of the Freddie Mac computer systems] and we could help them before there actually was a crisis. We figured out how to support employees in their critical roles. We finished our last division just as we declared that everyone had to work from home except for essential personnel. That plan executed nicely.”
In March, while most American companies were hastily patching together backup plans for keeping their doors virtually open, Freddie Mac was a step ahead. Having learned from the 2008 housing crisis that consumers needed clear, consistent guidance about what to do if they couldn’t pay their mortgages, Freddie Mac made itself the go-to source for how homeowners could claim forbearance to ensure they had a home in which to shelter in place.
As the pandemic swept across America in the spring of 2020, Freddie Mac managers took their cues from senior leadership: support line employees as they figured out their own personal continuity plans. Communicate more, and more often, than you normally would. Assume the best. Lead with empathy.
It worked: the company’s thousands of employees managed a record volume of inquiries, offering beleaguered Americans at least one reliable point of reference when nearly all aspects of daily life were upended. Over 2 million Americans sought information about their mortgages from the company’s website.
From pandemic to protests to politics, 2020 has been an obstacle course for housing industry companies. Though core business momentum is strong, employers are fighting a thicket of complications to keep staff engaged, business partners in synch and customers in the loop.
Data and forecasting only go so far when events cascade to a torrent of unexpected, unpredictable situations. When companies have to navigate one week or even one day at a time, communication and collaboration are the most critical leadership skills. And women are, as a group, renowned for those skills, along with a measured risk management; empathy; and a people-first approach to operations. This year, as the going got tough, women who kept things going drew on both traditional and operational strengths. If this year continues its current trajectory, the housing industry might permanently change as a result.
“It’s nurturing that women tend to be better at,” says Kara Taylor, ATTOM Data Solutions vice president of marketing. “And that’s what this situation calls for.”
A health care crisis on such a huge scale is intrinsically threatening at an elemental level. That means that employee communication is really about reassurance; frightened people can’t concentrate, Taylor pointed out. In such situations, she says, women intuitively gravitate toward communication, lots of it, in lots of different ways, on lots of different levels.
“I’m always asking my team, how’s your comfort level, what are you worried about? And then I can take that to the executive team and share that there’s anxiety out there,” Taylor said. Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, she realized that employees and business partners alike had no tolerance for generic messages. “They wanted to hear directly from the person in charge. It helps every time our CEO sends out an email that says, ‘here’s what we’re doing, and why.”
“What we’re seeing now is drawing on some important skills that don’t always get prioritized,” said Gayle Weiswasser, senior vice president of communications and business development for Homesnap, a mobile productivity platform for agents and a home search platform for consumers.
“Serving in a communications role in this pandemic has drawn on traditionally female traits, such as empathy and connection, and reaching out,” Weiswasser said. “It has been a bit less about traditional marketing messaging and analytics, and the more transactional side of relationship building. We’ve seen that since the middle of March. What’s working with establishing connection with audiences is providing information and recognizing the challenges that people, especially agents and multiple listing service staff, are going through. We’re trying to anticipate the kind of content that will make their lives easier and explaining what those features are and how to use them.”
Catalyst, a New York-based nonprofit think tank that explores and advocates for women’s leadership, released a report in June illustrating how aptitudes often characterized by women are precisely what’s needed to guide organizations through this year’s wrenching events. Transparency, equity and communication are essential factors for fueling resilience and flexibility, Catalyst reported.
Housing industry employers need all that and more to steer through the confusion that the COVID-19 pandemic inflicted on nearly every segment of the economy.
“The pandemic has put more urgency on utilizing our soft skills for crisis management, without a doubt,” said Lisa Fenske, senior vice president of marketing and communications for Waterstone Mortgage, which employs 600. “We had to have creative problem-solving strategies while also considering health and safety protocols. We put even more of an emphasis on communication, not just with employees and customers but also with business partners. And that didn’t just mean pushing out emails and videoconferences, but considering the personal and emotional perspective.”
“And then I started seeing a bit of a shift,” Fenske continued. “When we had conversations, and we kept bringing up employees’ situations as we made decisions, other leaders started talking about that, too. The months of March through May presented many extraordinary circumstances for us, as they did for all businesses. We relocated about 90% of our workforce to their homes, and remained sensitive to the unique emotional challenges that many of our employees and customers were facing. While we focused on making the transition seamless and flexible for our team members, we were also able to successfully help a record-breaking number of customers with their home purchase and refinance needs.”
As in many industries, many women in senior housing leadership occupy marketing, communication and human resources roles, precisely the roles designed to rise to the occasion.
“I held myself and the team accountable to ensure that we had virtual face time with each of our direct reports,” said Victoria Gillespie, chief marketing and communication officer for the National Association of Realtors. “We initiated best practices around virtual and consistent communication.”
The same approach framed Gillespie’s external communication: if she was a resource for her team and for NAR, then member agents could take their cues accordingly and be resources for their local communities. “We called this a resiliency plan, not a ‘COVID plan,’” said Gillespie.
The nature and intensity of 2020’s events could signal a permanent shift in how the housing industry values women’s traditional strengths, according to business school academics who study gender roles in the workplace.
“I’d be surprised if we went back to business as usual,” said Laurens Bujold Steed, an assistant professor of management at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. “Employers have to be more thoughtful about sick leave, taking leave, caregiving and working from home, and there are a lot of psychological impacts that employers will likely have to consider as well. Organizations may find that many of the policies they enacted benefit the organization and they may keep them.”
Crisis-induced change can be good, said Elizabeth McClean, an assistant professor of management within the University of Arizona’s Eller College of Management, who studies gender dynamics in leadership.
Given the glacial pace of advancement for women in most industries, including housing, a radical shake-up can break inertia and propel change that has been long in coming.
“There is a chance that this pandemic might have some positive outcomes. We might be better managers because of this. It will require having more women at the top but also having more men at the top explicitly recognizing the benefits of these behaviors.”
-Elizabeth McClean
Karen Starns, chief marketing officer of OJO Labs, a technology company that has developed a personal artificial intelligence advisor, is acclimatized to male-dominated teams, she said. But the abrupt shift to all-remote, all the time challenged even her tech-immersed comfort zone.
“When you’re a successful woman leader, the tactics that work for you around a conference table may not directly translate to virtual work,” Starns said, who added that she is asserting herself more to ensure that all participants in virtual meetings are heard, including herself. “There are lots of tactics you can use in a room, like putting your hand on the table, and when you’re on Zoom you can’t use your presence in the same way.”
“One thing I learned earlier in my career is not ceding the floor,” Starns said. “I find that it is valuable to not say, ‘oh, you go ahead.’ If two people start talking, I’m going to say my piece and not always defer. I’m going to get my comment in.”
In normal times, task-oriented leadership behaviors tend to be more valued, even though leadership effectiveness requires the ability to get things done and to have strong relationships.
“Since women are already expected to display compassion and communality, we are at a pivotal moment where we can explicitly shift the value we place on relationship-driven leader behaviors for both men and women, without anyone risking a backlash for doing so,” McClean said.
“People think of evolution as linear, but it’s not,” said Vipula Gandhi, a managing partner with Gallup, which constantly monitors American perspectives about leadership and workplace culture. “Unexpected high impact events create change at a very high pace. Women’s strong connection with the purpose of the organization, and their innate strengths provide them an edge in the current circumstances.”
“There will be a greater appreciation for women because men are seeing how well women are handling so many factors,” said Erica Bigley, Ellie Mae vice president of corporate communications.
The pandemic forced Ellie Mae to transfer its annual user conference to the virtual realm. The silver lining to that cloud quickly shone: 6,000 customers, partners, prospective customers and employees signed up to attend from their desks, compared to 2,500 who’d registered for the on-site event. Meanwhile, working largely from home, Ellie Mae’s staff of 2,000 continued to help lenders manage a record volume of mortgage refinances.
“I think we’ll look back in 10 years and realize this period was worse than we thought,” said Courtney Graham, Princeton Mortgage senior vice president of marketing and people. Executive teams are discovering previously hidden fault lines and have a chance, as the dust settles, to realign their dynamics accordingly, she said.
The true moment of change will come when male leaders realize the power of women’s strengths and deliberately decide to incorporate an understanding of some of those skills into their own leadership style, said Gandhi.
“If we incorporated women’s empathetic and inclusive approach into the traditionally male style of data-driven and strategic decision-making, an entire leadership team will be better positioned for success. It’s not about one gender’s skill or aptitude versus the other. It’s a blend of both that brings out our best.”
– Vipula Gandhi
To read the full August issue of HousingWire Magazine, click here.
