Dan Morrell: Willy Walker (MBA 1995) is the chairman and CEO of Walker and Dunlop, a commercial real estate finance firm founded in 1937 by his grandfather and his great uncle. Walker joined the business in 2003 when it had one office, 46 employees, and an estimated value of $25 million. Today, Walker & Dunlop is a publicly traded company with a market cap close to $5 billion.

While Walker has led massive growth at the company, he realized several years ago that the way he led was in serious need of re-evaluation. And that professional awakening about how he managed his company was part of a larger reflection about how he managed something more personal: his anger.

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Photo by Aaron Lucy     

DM: You’ve spoken about how you underwent anger management counseling and how it shaped both your life and your career. How and when did you recognize that this was a problem?

WW: I recognized that my anger was a problem the day that my wife turned to me and said that we were getting separated and that she wanted to get divorced.

Prior to that moment, I always thought that my intensity and somewhat unrelenting expectations of excellence were what made me and Walker & Dunlop special. That sense that everything had to go right and when everything didn’t go right I had the right to get upset that it didn’t go right was that extra edge of perfection that was what was creating such great returns in the company. And when Sheila said, “I want to get separated and I want to get divorced,” what I was confronted with was not only the reality that the most important thing in my life was moving away from me, which was my nuclear family, but that I had no control to stop it.

And so I think that one of the other issues there that was so perplexing to me was that prior to that moment, when a problem would arise, if I put my full intensity behind it, and that might include some anger, and really started to drive the process, that I could make things right, that I could get a business unit that wasn’t performing well back on track, that I could convince an employee that wasn’t performing to measure to get up to the level that we were expecting. And now, all of a sudden, I was confronted with my wife saying, “I want to get separated and divorced,” and all those tools that had always been able to sort of solve problems in the past, I couldn’t use.

DM: One morning, after a sleepless night in the guest room, Walker’s wife handed him a book and told him he should read it. The book was Taking Charge of Anger by Dr. Robert Nay; she’d actually given it to him several years prior, but he never opened it. That day, desperate for help, he devoured it.

There was a quiz at the very beginning of the book meant to help the reader identify what kind of anger they had. What would you do if another driver cuts you off, it asked. Do you flip them the bird? Do you roll down the window and yell at them? Or do you cut them off in some vindictive way? Walker wondered if there was an “all of the above” option.

After reading the book, Walker began meeting with its author, Dr. Nay, and began to understand that his anger was rooted in unmet expectations.

Take the driving example. Walker was expecting everyone to be the excellent, attentive driver he considered himself to be. The truth is, though, that the world is full of crappy drivers. And if Walker’s expectation was that he wasn’t going encounter any of them, well, he was going to be angry a lot.

This realization about the weight of his expectations—driven, he says, by a desire for greater control of outcomes—certainly played out in his home life, especially when it came to his kids. But he also saw it play out in the office.

DM: The story, as I remember you telling it, Willy, is that you had a group that was underperforming, and you really had them under your fist, you know, and you’d push them really hard. And then, in the process of this work, it changed the way you approached that group. So let’s take that example and talk about how that illustrates the value of the work that you were doing around anger management.

WW: That anecdote, Dan, is very telling as it relates to the way that I managed pre-anger-management and post-anger-management. And, as I talk about this, I have to be very straightforward: I am far from perfect, and I can still get angry and I can still lose my temper. But there are a couple major differences. A, I know it when I do it, B, I’m very willing, today, to apologize for bad behavior and, C, because I’ve been so open about it, I also know that a lot of people are kind of watching me and making sure that I’m not heading down that path.

As it relates to the office, there was a group that was underperforming. And, as I said previously, when things weren’t going well, my way of managing them was to get in people’s face, if you will. Get going, start driving them, remind them that they were underperforming and really drive performance.

And when you’re a small company, I think you can do that. Like if you’re a CEO and you’ve only got 46 employees like I had when I joined Walker & Dunlop, if someone isn’t doing that well, the CEO’s attention to an issue—just by putting attention to it, much less whether you’re being nice or mean or angry—you can make a difference on issues. But as you start to scale, that doesn’t work anymore.

But what I also realized was that the expectation that I had for the group to turn around their operations either the next week or the next month, or even in that quarter, were wildly unrealistic and unfair.

But by stepping back, I gave the team the space and also the explicit expectations that they needed to get to and the time to get there, that allowed them to spread their wings and really fly. And what was amazing to me was that team that had consistently been struggling, I stepped back, I told them what I was expecting, and six months later, they were definitely on track, and 12 months later, they not only had met the objective, they’d flown through the objective. And so it really taught me that some of this sort of hyper-aggressive management style, getting in people’s face, showing anger for under-performance was a lot of time and energy that was very misspent and probably not that productive.

It’s not in any way saying that you don’t need to work hard and set high expectations and try and both either lead or perform to those expectations, but I do believe that my desire for control of everything, control of outcomes at Walker & Dunlop, control of outcomes at home, control of outcomes on where my kids went to school, was what drove a lot of these expectations and missed expectations, and, therefore, anger. And so as I kind of try and peel the onion on all this stuff, it is very, very difficult to pull back if you have trained yourself and lived your professional and personal life in a manner that says that nothing gets done unless I’m on top of it and pinning it down.

And so this process and this transformation, for me, has allowed me to stay very present. I still set really, really high goals for our team and our team consistently achieves them, but it’s not because I’m sitting there chasing up after them and nipping at their heels. It’s because we’ve done it in a collaborative way, and that the goals are clear and they’re transparent. And while they’re highly, highly ambitious, they’re also achievable. And that process and that shift of management is what took me, I think, from being a good leader and manager to being a really good leader and manager. And the results, as it relates to Walker & Dunlop and our growth and our performance as a publicly traded company, are very reflective of that transformation in me.

DM: Willy, as you got into this work, how soon did it take for you to start seeing results, both from a managerial perspective and at the firm level, but also on a personal level, and what did those results look like? What was the feedback that you were getting?

WW: The example I just gave, Dan, is a good one of a team that I gave the space and the opportunity to go excel and they did.

But the real change was at home. I think one of the biggest changes was during that period of time when Sheila and I were separated and I was doing this work, I would see various parts of my personality that were starting to change.

And one of the biggest ones was the expectations that I had for our three boys. And for a lot of different reasons, mostly personal, a sense that, you know, if our kids weren’t going to the right school, if they weren’t doing well at the best school and they weren’t the best students, that somehow that would reflect negatively or poorly on Sheila and me. And my wife, Sheila, never, ever, ever would even think of uttering those words, but that was me. So it wasn’t like Sheila was building into that, that was all me.

And as someone who is quite competitive, somebody who’s gone to great schools and who’s seen the benefit of what a school brand or image can bring to people, I had a lot caught up in that. And this process made me realize that I needed to be a father to my boys, for the boys that they were and not the boys that I wanted them to be. So as my expectations for the boys shifted to expectations of being good kids regardless of where they went to school, good kids regardless of how they did it in the classroom, or on the football field, the relationship with the boys transformed very quickly.

And as I have thought back on it, I think I worked really hard, Dan, to be a great dad. And I would go to all efforts in the world to show up, to be there for a sports game, for a concert recital, whatever the case might be. But I wasn’t really there mentally. I wasn’t engaged in being present for the boys, I was there to sort of carry the flag.

And this transition period, particularly given that Sheila and I were separating, was a wonderful opportunity for me to kind of redefine the relationship I had with my boys. And they were young enough at that time that having all this happen to them when they were in their, you know, 8- to 12-years-old period allowed for a complete reset that has made it so that my relationships with them transformed from being, I think, great relationships with care from Dad, but much, much more fully loving them for the boys that they are and rather than the boys that I, if you will, wanted them to be.

DM: It wasn’t just the relationship with his family that improved during this period. Walker’s openness about the separation showed a vulnerability that even some of his best friends had never seen—and which would eventually help him forge deeper emotional bonds.

WW: As I told people that Sheila and I were getting separated and going to get divorced, it was the hardest thing for me to tell people about. And in admitting that I had a very significant failure, what it did was it made me more human to both my colleagues and my friends. I sat down with four business school classmates—great, great friends of mine—and in the lunch to tell them that Sheila and I were getting separated and likely getting divorced, and admitting that I had screwed up—the moment that I showed that vulnerability, all of my friends shared something with me that they had not shared previously. And in one of the conversations, I said to this friend of mine, “You know, I wish you’d shared that with me previously.” And he said, “Dude, you’re like the Teflon man. You’re like the guy who like everything’s gone perfectly for. So there’s no space for anyone else to show you their vulnerabilities, because we all think that we’ve gotta live up to your expectations.” And that was such an epiphany. That was such a wonderful moment, where all of a sudden I realized that this big shell that I’d built up of being a great athlete and doing really well at HBS and then running everything I did in the business world as best as I possibly could and constantly benchmarking and trying to show everyone that I was faster and better and all that stuff, was all really just this farce. It was trying to be something that, quite honestly, I’m not, but I thought I had to be.

And the moment that I could bring down that shell, the moment I could be real and honest and open with people about my humanity, about my failures, it was like a flower opening up, and the relationships with my friends became so much more dynamic and real, because I was willing to share that I knew that I was human and I had my failures. And so that whole process was wonderfully transformative. And when I gave a speech on this at the Walker & Dunlop Summer Conference in, I think, 2017, and Sheila and I were back together. And the fun part about the talk was, A, I got to tell it, and then, B, I had a really great punchline, because Sheila was in the audience and we were back together.

But getting up there and admitting in front of, I think there were probably about 600 people in the room—colleagues and our biggest and best clients—that I had this problem, that I struggled with anger management, that there was a side to Willy Walker that a lot of them had never seen that I wasn’t proud of but it was clearly part of who I was, allowed all of them to be much sort of, I guess, closer to me. To be more real, to appreciate me for the whole and very, very flawed person that I am, rather than this image of perfection that was a complete farce.

DM: I can’t let you go without telling the full story of the reconciliation. So tell me about what it looked like, how you mended your marriage.

WW: So I didn’t mend our marriage, [laughs] Sheila mended our marriage.

For the first six months, Dan, when Sheila and I got separated I was still holding out hope that we’d get back together and, in the process of holding out hope that we’d get back together, I was still holding on to a lot of things very tightly, if you will. And it’s hard to actually put words to what it was I was holding on to tightly, but it wasn’t until I fully let go that I came to peace with the fact that our relationship was ending, and started to create a new life, a separate life, but that I fully embraced that I needed to move on and that Sheila was going to move on, that I was able to start living a new, normal life.

And in living the new normal life, Sheila could see and she and I started to communicate in ways that we hadn’t in the past. And I think she started to see me act with the boys in a new way, act with her in a new way, deal with challenges in a new way and, most importantly, which is one of the [laughs] very unique things about this story, negotiate our divorce agreement in a different way. Rather than being angry and upset about various things that my lawyer would bring to me, looking at them and saying, “Okay, what’s a reasonable way to look at this?” It’s hugely painful, but not act with anger or disappointment, just it’s what we’ve got to get through.

So in November of that year, I was headed off on a trip with some friends to go to a friend’s bachelor party and Sheila came over to my house. And I was getting packed and she sat on the floor in the closet and as I was getting packed, we just started talking. And she said, “I can tell that you’ve changed.” And I said, “I’m really happy you have seen that, and I feel great. And I feel like this work has been transformational and I’m very happy and thankful to you for giving me the book and for introducing me to Dr. Nay.”

And she said, “I miss us.” It caught me completely by surprise and I didn’t really know how the conversation [laughs] was gonna go from there. But we decided, at that time, to give it a try, but we didn’t want the boys to know that we were giving it a try to put it back together.

And so for the next three to four months, Sheila and I started dating each other. And we dated each other in a very clandestine way. Nobody knew it. Nobody. The two of us, you know, we’d sneak around and see each other. And it was great. Fast forward, we told the boys almost a year to the day that we told them that we were getting separated, which was the worst moment of my entire life. We put them all back at the same table, in the same seats, and you could see this fear on the boys’ face that there was another shoe to drop, that we were coming back with more bad news.

And to be able to sit there and say to them, “Mom and I are coming back together and Dad’s moving back into the house.” It was a moment that I, obviously, will never, ever forget, and it was one of the most joyful moments of our lives. And I guess the final piece to it, Dan, is that then that summer we decided that we would get the minister who married us back in 2000 to come back and get married again. We redid our vows and we had a little ceremony just with the boys and the minister who married us, 17 years earlier, and it was a really joyful moment.

DM: Willy, you’ve had such a dramatic experience with the separation with your wife, getting back together, and these painful moments. For the people who are listening to this and maybe see some of themselves in your story, what do you want them to learn?

WW: So, in YPO, Young Presidents Organization, you can’t give fellow YPOers advice, you can only share experiences. And so when you’re in forum in YPO and someone has an issue, you can’t sit there and say to them, “Dan, what you need to do is go do XYZ.” But I hope that by sharing my story, our story, that there are pieces of it that people can sit there and listen to and say, “That’s really insightful. Maybe I oughta think about doing this, or maybe there’s something else I could do along that.”

Whatever someone takes from this that can help them work through a difficult situation or, in their own mind, be a better person, that’s a huge gift, from my standpoint.

Skydeck is produced by the External Relations department at Harvard Business School and edited by Craig McDonald. It is available at iTunes and wherever you get your favorite podcasts. For more information or to find archived episodes, visit alumni.hbs.edu/skydeck.

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