I am doing my presentation on a company I worked for in 2005. The fictitious name of the company is Sunrise mortgage.
A little back ground the company structure. Sunrise Mortgage is a large, nationwide lender, Headquartered in West Covina, California.
The company is structured as a net branch organization. This means each individual mortgage brokerage is able to operate under the federal licenses of the main office. This gives the ability to do FHa and other government guaranteed loans.
This has allowed the company to expand all over the country in a short period of time.
Each office is basically an autonomous entity controlled by a manager. This essentially makes it like running your own business. You set your own hours, hire a staff, and handle all administrative duties. The main office provides some basic yearly training and that’s about it.
Each individual office is required to give the headquarters a small percent of its gross income in exchange for using the Sunrise name and logo.
The only qualifications needed to become a manager is to have a state issued mortgage broker’s license, good credit, and two years of experience working in the banking, lending, or related fields.
These standards ensure a certain level of financial and ethical fitness. However, none of these requirements measure an individual’s leadership abilities.
Here is how i became involved with the company:
In Cincinnati, Ohio, the Sunrise branch is managed by an African-American man named Lee Patterson. I met the manager through a mutual friend a year earlier. Lee is college educated and well spoken. He had been working in the industry for a total of 6 years and has had his own branch for 1 year at the time i came to work for him.
He offered me a job in the early summer of 2005. He told me he wanted to expand his company and need more loan officers to facillite this expansion.
I felt like this was a good opportunity since i was not happy with the place i was working for at the time.

Now i will summarize the main problem in this company, which i feel was a lack personal and corporate ethics related to managerial communication
I began working there in august of 2005. From the beginning there were problems. As soon as i started working there, i noticed Lee had a very condescending tone when he spoke to his employees.
This is covered in chapter 8 of our textbook and it gives examples of how to avoid this.
He knew that i had several years of experience, yet he talked to me as if i was clueless.
A second thing that was evident from the beginning was his inability to keep his personal life away from the office. He constantly brought friends and family members around and would try to impress them by belittling his employees in front of them.
Many of his friends looked like drug addicts or drug dealers which didnt enhance the professional image of the company.
He created a hostile, non-productive environment and would blame the employees for not producing results up to his standards.
While i was working there, Lee was obviously making a decent amount of money. He had three cars, a nice house and many new suits. However, he was very egotistical and would throw the fact he had more money than us in our faces.
I thought when we moved to the new office things would get better. Obviously, i was wrong.
He still had the unsavory characters loitering around the office and he still was very condescending toward the employees. Not only was he especially abrasive toward me, he also aimed his verbal abuse toward a loan officer who had started at the company at the same time i did.
By october of 2005, i had heard enough. One evening, I overheard a conversation between Lee and some of the loan officers who had been working there for a long time. He said that he didnt need us anymore and was going to fire us.
I immediately started looking for another place to work and quit before he could fire me.
Using principles i have learned in this class, i would make the following suggestions:
1st, the sunrise corporate headquarters needs to provide loan officers a way to complain about manager abuses without fear of reprisal. We never had any contact with anyone at the main office which made us feel helpless.
2nd, for Lee Patterson, I have two suggestions, 1. Do some self-reflection. He needs to find out why he feels the need to put people down in order to make himself feel better.
2. I would suggest sensitivity training. I actually found a company that could help people in situations like this.

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