Managing Teams Through Economic Uncertainty

What actually helps a lending team keep performing through a rate-uncertainty period isn’t reassurance — it’s giving them something concrete to do with anxious clients, and being straight with the team about what you do and don’t know. I’ve coached teams through enough rate cycles now — rises, pauses, the “will they, won’t they” stretches that are almost worse than an actual move — to know which parts of the standard leadership advice hold up in a lending team specifically, and which parts are generic filler that doesn’t survive contact with an actual anxious client on the phone.

The anxiety is specific, not general

General “economic uncertainty” advice treats every team the same way — vague worry about the future, morale dips, motivate people. A lending team’s version of this is much more specific and much more solvable: your lenders are fielding calls from clients who are genuinely worried about their own repayments, and if your lender doesn’t have a confident, concrete answer, that anxiety transfers straight to them. I’ve watched good lenders go quiet on calls during a rate-decision week — not because they don’t know their job, but because they don’t have a script for “I don’t know what the RBA will do” that doesn’t sound like they’re dodging the question.

The fix isn’t telling your team to “stay positive.” It’s giving them the actual answer to give: nobody knows what the RBA will do, but here’s what we do know about this client’s serviceability buffer, and here’s what changes for them at the next likely scenario. That’s a conversation a lender can have with confidence, because it’s grounded in the client’s own numbers rather than a prediction about the cash rate.

A fifteen-minute huddle beats a pep talk

The day or two before a live RBA decision, I run a short team huddle — fifteen minutes, not a formal meeting — and we walk through exactly what each of us will say if a client calls anxious. Not a script to read off, but a shared shape to the conversation: acknowledge the concern is reasonable, pull up their actual numbers, talk through what a 0.25% move either way does to their repayment, and remind them what buffer they’ve already got built in from serviceability assessment. Lenders who’ve done this once stop dreading decision-day calls, because they’re not making it up on the spot anymore.

I also tell the team plainly what I don’t know. If I speculate about the RBA to sound confident, and I’m wrong, I’ve spent credibility I need for the next six months of this cycle. “I don’t know which way it goes, here’s how we handle either outcome” is a more useful thing for a manager to say than a guess dressed up as insight.

Deal flow gets harder — plan for it, don’t just push through it

The practical problem with a rate-uncertainty stretch isn’t just anxious clients, it’s that some genuinely good prospects go quiet and sit on the fence waiting to see what happens. That’s real, and pretending your team can sales-talk their way past it just breeds frustration when the numbers dip through no fault of their own. What actually helps: shift some of the team’s energy toward the conversations that don’t depend on the decision going a particular way — reviewing existing clients’ loans for anything that needs adjusting regardless of the outcome, following up settled files for referral opportunities, reconnecting with applications that stalled a few months back for reasons unrelated to rates. None of that needs the RBA to do anything in particular, and it keeps pipeline moving while the fence-sitters make up their minds.

Recognise the calls that go well

During a stretch like this, I make a point of calling out — specifically, not generically — when someone handles a hard client conversation well. Not “great work this week” to the whole team, but telling the individual lender exactly what I heard them do in that specific call and why it mattered to the client’s decision to stay with us. That kind of feedback costs nothing and does more for morale during an uncertain week than any generic “we’re all in this together” message, because it tells people the thing they’re actually good at, rather than a blanket reassurance they’ll forget by lunchtime.

What this means for any manager

Your team doesn’t need you to predict the RBA. They need you to have already thought through what to say to a worried client before the decision lands, to be honest about what you don’t know, and to keep pointing them toward the parts of the pipeline that don’t depend on the next decision. That’s the whole job during a rate cycle — not motivation, just preparation.

Related Reading

• What an RBA Rate Move Does to Your Repayments — what the decision itself means for clients and the team
• Navigating Choppy Waters: Strategies to Find Sales in a Slowing Market — keeping pipeline moving while clients sit on the fence

Written by Michael Wignall, who’s spent 30+ years in banking and home lending, including leading a team of home lenders across three regions of NSW.

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Written by Michael Wignall, Lending Area Manager with 30+ years in banking and home lending across the ACT, Illawarra, and Riverina. Got a question or an idea for a post? Get in touch.