Berkadia

Formed as a joint venture between Berkshire Hathaway and Leucadia National Corporation, Berkadia is a leader in the commercial real estate industry. Using innovative, technology-driven data collection and analytics, Berkadia provides investment sales, mortgage banking, and loan servicing, offering customers crucial insights from over 250 market metrics, debt information from 300,000+ properties, and over 9,000 demographic data points.

Organizational PTSD from Past Trauma

When Justin Wheeler joined as CEO, Berkadia was an organization he characterized as having "PTSD." It had been through a bankruptcy and multiple CEOs. "A lot of people wandered around kind of thinking that today's the day where I'm gonna get the pink slip or today's the day the rug's gonna be jerked out from under me," Justin explained.

"There were a lot of people that had had a lot of colleagues that had been let go. A lot of baggage around the organization and trust," Randy Jensen, President and CFO, recalled.

This history created deep skepticism about any change initiatives. People had learned to protect themselves rather than collaborate.

"Eat What You Kill" Sales Culture

As a fast-growing company with 1,800 employees spread across the United States and India, Berkadia needed robust teamwork. But this was especially challenging in what President and CFO Randy Jensen describes as a "very transactional" industry with a tendency to evaluate people based on "cold, hard facts and numbers" rather than a more holistic view.

Hilary Provinse, Executive Vice President and Head of Mortgage Banking, described the tension: "I'm extremely competitive and I like that motivation for winning business and getting business and with that as the backdrop, having this idea of how do we build this culture of outward mindset and collaboration and how does that fit within a eat what you kill competitive sales organization and I honestly was a little skeptical of could we really do it?"

Silos in Competitive Environment

Berkadia's core value is that "people matter"—reflecting the belief that authentic relationships with both external customers and internal colleagues are paramount. CEO Justin Wheeler put it succinctly: "Our company is 100% people. Our company has no assets other than people."

Yet maintaining this focus proved difficult in a highly competitive sales environment where divisions protected their turf and client relationships.

Longstanding Departmental Conflicts

Years of friction existed between mortgage banking and finance. To finalize loan approvals and maintain business momentum, mortgage banking employees required confirmation from finance that customer payments were received and processed.

As a customer-facing unit, the mortgage banking team felt pressure to move quickly and experienced frustration at what appeared to be unconcerned, painfully slow responses.

On the other end, the finance team had responsibility for accurately tracking billions of dollars of transactions, with important safeguards to prevent costly mistakes.

For years, both parties felt mutual exasperation. Collaboration in transactional industries can be incredibly difficult.

The Change Challenge

Justin knew the challenge: "It's all about how do we prepare our people, their hearts and their minds for change to not just not resist change and not just to accept change, but to actually embrace change and ultimately drive change."

Berkadia enlisted Arbinger to help craft and implement the cultural framework and collaboration tools essential for continued success.

Leadership Walking the Walk

Arbinger consultants first met with Berkadia's senior leadership team. Randy described the initial step: "We got up the courage to invite an Arbinger facilitator to our management committee retreat."

For widespread cultural transformation to take root, those with most influence needed to be truly invested. Berkadia leadership recognized they could only expect the responsiveness from the company that they were willing to invest in themselves.

The leadership team made a bold decision: they would become trained as facilitators themselves rather than delegating that responsibility.

Randy described his initial hesitation: "While I believed in the material, I felt like the gap between where my aspirations were and where I really was were just different."

Because maintaining an outward mindset is an ongoing practice rather than an event, it requires bravery to let others in your organization witness the authentic struggle to continually see others as people instead of obstacles.

Creating "The Berkadia Way"

Justin explained their approach: "How can we implement this across 1800 employees?"

Arbinger helped Berkadia adapt the principles and framework into a culture-building initiative called "The Berkadia Way," which included leader-specific tools. The initiative provided structure for spreading an outward mindset approach throughout the company—an approach that could be usefully adapted regardless of the specific type of work.

Randy described what they wanted to create: "If we can create a work environment that has less politics, less drama, is more authentic—they’re in a better plac."

The reception exceeded expectations. "So incredibly exciting to see people connect with the material, the things that it started to open up," Randy observed.

Common Language for Collaboration

Hilary explained the practical impact: "It gives us a language that we can use when conflicts arise on really being direct about that, having a way to have conversations and a willingness to do it and to approach each other in a constructive way to really get to outcomes on situations so that we can move faster on transactions."

Justin summarized the transformation needed: "The difference between an inward and outward mindset was so powerful to me to want to implement it in a business sense, yes, but also in kind of a broader human sense."

Berkadia successfully created a cultural infrastructure that unlocks collaboration and reinforces best business practices in a transactional industry.

Breaking Down Silos in Sales Environment

Hilary Provinse described the transformation: "The framework provided by Arbinger really encouraged collaboration across regions, across divisions within Berkadia, and the breaking down of silos even in our highly competitive sales environment."

She observed that deepened relationships between colleagues translated into greater willingness to entrust peers with valued client relationships—a dramatic shift in an "eat what you kill" culture.

"We're working together effectively and seeing each other as people and as one team," Corinna noted.

Resolving Department Conflicts

The longstanding mortgage banking vs. finance conflict transformed. With an outward mindset lens, the teams were able to account for their impact and uncover ways to offer support.

Instead of mutual exasperation, they developed understanding of each other's pressures and constraints. Finance understood mortgage banking's need for speed; mortgage banking understood finance's responsibility for tracking billions accurately.

Increased Role Clarity and Accountability

Working with Arbinger increased role clarity and self-accountability as employees considered the impact of their efforts on coworkers' and clients' objectives, needs, and obstacles.

These changes enabled an environment that is simultaneously competitive, high-performing, and collaborative—proving that "eat what you kill" and teamwork aren't mutually exclusive.

Business Impact and Future Vision

Hilary connected the culture work directly to business results: "Okay, our ultimate goal here is to make more money for the organization, to make the pie bigger, to get more market share from our clients, to really grow Berkadia's presence in the market and leveraging these tools to do that."

Leadership saw how the culture work accelerated business results. "Incredibly exciting to see people connect with the material," Randy reflected.

Hilary's vision for the future: "Ultimately, what do I think Berkadia could become? I think it could dominate the commercial real estate finance industry in the United States over the next 10 or 20 years and I think that industry is going to transform with technology, with consolidation, leveraging the culture, with our technology, with our people, with our tools. We will absolutely be able to dominate that market."

Justin summarized the broader impact: "What I invite us now to do is to take that from our minds and allow that to get into our hearts for us to be able to show it through our actions."

Berkadia proved that collaboration isn't impossible in transactional, competitive industries—but it requires addressing organizational trauma and shifting from "eat what you kill" mentality to genuine teamwork. When 1,800 employees recovering from bankruptcy PTSD, departmental silos, and years-long conflicts between divisions received common language and frameworks for collaboration, they transformed from mutual exasperation to mutual support. The result: broken silos in competitive sales environment, resolved longstanding mortgage banking vs. finance friction, and greater willingness to share valued client relationships. The lesson: you can maintain competitive drive while building collaborative culture, but only if leadership walks the walk first and creates environment where admitting mistakes and seeing people as people becomes the norm, not the exception.