Good Stewardship

Good stewardship is serving others while honoring the trust they placed in you. It is responsibly managing anything extended to your care, ensuring that your actions reflect protection and a commitment to using resources for the greater good.

Good stewards do the right thing, even when doing the right thing is not easy, and also when no one is looking.

This is especially important when people are in vulnerable or compromised positions, and they are turning to us to do what is best for them. I can’t think of a more serious or compromising position than in medicine. Consider the following, real-world example.

A late-middle-aged man goes in for eye surgery. During the procedure, his heart had some issues, and he was kept in the hospital to be checked out. His in-network heart doctors are not in this hospital; they are in a different one. So, an out-of-network heart doctor comes in to see the patient, reviews the chart, and says, “Oh, you need a pacemaker,” and then schedules the six-figure procedure for the next day.

His in-network heart provider says that what the patient needed was two or three days from the anesthesia and other medicine to wash out of his body before they could accurately evaluate what was required.

The out-of-network heart doctor gets paid per procedure. He is incentivized - and makes A LOT OF MONEY - by putting in a pacemaker.

Was this being a professional worth hiring? Was this doctor being a good steward? Can you do the right thing when the incentives aren’t necessarily in your best interest?

Is that physician a bad person? I don’t know! It will probably work out? What is pretty clear is that the physician saw an opportunity to make some extra money at the expense of the other medical provider. It didn’t really “hurt” the patient per se - but then again, who’s to say.

When things are going great, when your bank account is flush with cash, and when your pipeline is full, it’s probably easier to do the right thing. But...probably?

What about on the margin? What about when things are just going...okay? What happens when times are tough?

You are sitting in front of a client, and it’s in your best interest to make a sale? What then?

They say, “We were thinking of buying next year.” Inside, you’re thinking, “How do I convince them - how do I get them - to do something now?” That’s not good stewardship. That’s not putting your clients’ best interests first.

What gets in the way of putting your clients’ best interests first? Incentives. Incentives get in the way of good stewardship.

From Morgan Housel in Same As Ever, “Incentives are the most powerful force in the world and can get people to justify or defend almost anything.”

Moreover, he says, “One of the strongest pulls of incentives is the desire for people to hear only what they want to hear and see only what they want to see.”

If we pulled the heart surgeon aside to have a conversation about his thought process regarding the pacemaker patient, he would be 100% certain he was doing the right thing. Like, it would be as clear as day to him; in his mind, there would be absolutely nothing wrong with his actions. In fact, he is not the only physician who would have done what he did. It is almost “common practice.” But just because it’s common practice, does it make it right?

Where do you have situations in your business where the incentives are not in your clients’ best interests? If what you were doing was put on the cover of a newspaper, what would people outside your industry say of your actions? In other words, outside of your industry norms and traditions, what could others extract from your actions? Would it be clear that you were honoring the trust your clients placed in you?

Look, I am not saying that what you are doing is wrong or bad. Before the NAR settlement of 2024, and especially from 2009-2011, listing agents and their sellers sometimes offered incentives on their listings. When I was representing a buyer, was I required to disclose that? If I weren’t required to disclose, should I?

Being a professional worth hiring is honoring the trust the client puts in us. Even when it is not easy, convenient, or clear-cut.

Buckminster Fuller said, “You can rest assured that if you devote your time and attention to the highest advantage of others, the Universe will support you,” followed by: “always and only in the nick of time.”