In order to achieve greatness in any leadership position, it is necessary to achieve the goals or mission of your organization.  This applies to coaches in sports, officers and NCOs in the military, leaders in community organizations as well as leaders in the business world.  If your team doesn’t achieve its goals, how effective are you as their leader?  Lou Holtz, who earned nearly everyone’s respect as the head football coach at Notre Dame often told the press, “When we lose a football game, the first place I look is in the mirror.  I ask myself, ‘what could I have done differently’?   Then I ask my assistant coaches and players what they could have done differently.  But I start with myself first.”  Joe Paterno, the highly regarded and very successful football coach at Penn State has the same attitude.  And who can deny General Schwartzkoff’s military success in the first Gulf War or General Franks’ recent military achievement in Iraq?  In business, Lee Iacocca and Jack Welch, recently retired Chairman at GE, serve as good examples of business leaders who achieved great results. 

In your automobile dealership,  the goal of all leaders, whether the owner, GM, new or used car Sales Manager, Service Manager, Office Manager, Parts Manager, Body Shop Manager, Service Advisor Supervisor, or Supervisor in the shop, is to achieve three objectives:  Profitability, Customer Satisfaction and Employee Satisfaction. 

Edward Deming, considered the father of Total Quality Management (TQM) stressed that the on-going sustaining success of a businesses depends on achieving a balance between 1) productivity and making money; 2) superior and consistent customer satisfaction; and 3) a positive work environment for all employees.  This should be the objective for each department leader in your dealership.

As always, identifying your goals and objectives is often the easiest part.  However, the devil is in the details.  In this case the details take the form of a question:  How do I become an outstanding leader as the CEO, or Sales, Service, Parts or Office Manager?

The answer begins with identifying the primary job of every leader.  In addition to achieving the long term balance of taking care of your customers, taking care of your employees, and making money, the role of every leader, reduced to the simplest definition is:  Make the people who report to you successful.  If you make a department manager successful, the department will be successful, and when all departments are successful, the dealership will be successful.

Once again, that is easy to say and believe, but how do you do it?  Here’s how:

1.  Make certain your expectations for your direct reports are crystal clear. 

2.  Spend large amounts of time training and coaching them.

3.  Hold your direct reports accountable and give them an honest performance evaluation.

Now let’s look at each of these in more detail.

Have clear expectations

It is critical that you and those who report to you agree on their goals, priorities and timelines.  The goals should be mutually agreed on by you and your subordinates.  They should be specific, measurable and oriented toward making a profit, providing customer service (which translates into repeat and referral business) and making your dealership a great place to work.  A manager or employee should never be confused about his or her goals and priorities.  Leaders who involve the employees in the success of the dealership, value and appreciate their employees, and make sure they work in a clean and safe environment, experience high moral, strong teamwork and low turnover.  Not defining specific goals and targets is like putting a blindfold on the employees and then saying: “Go for it!”

Train and coach

Tom Peters, arguably one of the most respected and successful business consultants in recent years, (author of In Search of Excellence, Thriving on Chaos, and Passion for Customers, suggests that, “You can manage from behind your desk, but you can’t lead from behind it”.  If you are the Service Manager, spend time in the shop with your technicians and on the counter with your Service Advisors.  Remember, your job is to make them successful and you do this by training, coaching, helping, mentoring, asking questions, providing answers, and standing up for them when they need your support.  You need to make sure the technicians and Service Advisors have the tools and training they need to do their job.  Your specific coaching skills include: communicating, motivating, delegating, and disciplining.  You should make certain that Service Advisors and Estimators are proficient in personal relationship skills, computer skills and product knowledge. 

If you are the Sales Manager, your job is to spend time with your sales team showing them how to sell effectively, do complete and accurate paperwork, and follow through with each sale to ensure total customer satisfaction.  You must make sure they have current sales material, excellent telephone skills, and maintain a professional personal appearance.  In addition to training them yourself, you can enroll them in seminars, suggest books and tapes, and even have peer-to-peer training.

Not providing your employees with the training and resources they need to do their job is like putting them in handcuffs and then saying, “Do your best”!

Hold accountable and evaluate performance

Of the three skills you need in order to make your team members successful, this might be the most difficult.  Requiring accountability is often confused with “not being a nice person”.  If you perceive holding an employee accountable as confrontational, you will avoid dealing with a tough situation.  But there are few things worse than putting up with poor performance, condoning negative attitudes or enabling a pri-madonna.  Not requiring your direct reports to adhere to your performance standards, especially when those employees agreed to your expectations, and allowing them to demonstrate an attitude or behavior that undermines teamwork, is doing a disservice to your company and definitely weakens your leadership effectiveness.

If you don’t take the time to communicate with your team members and have them agree on what your expectations are for them in terms of measurable goals and timelines, and if you don’t take the time to train and coach and make sure they have the tools and resources they need to be successful, and if you don’t hold them accountable and give them an honest appraisal of their job performance, your default leadership style will be “Hope Management”.  You will know you are there when you catch yourself saying: “I hope they get to work on time, do their paperwork right, treat the customers right, put their tools away, treat their teammates right, answer the telephone properly, clean up their work area… and on and on.  You will hope yourself into failure as a leader.  Hoping doesn’t make employees successful.  Strong active leadership does.  Can you imagine putting blindfolds and handcuffs on your employees and then expecting peak performance?  That’s what you do if you don’t follow good leadership principles.

So far I have shared suggestions for making your individual managers and employees successful.  But realistically, great leaders don’t achieve success unless they get the managers and departments to work together as a team.  I want to share two important ways for you to do this. 

The most important team in your dealership.

First, the most important team in your dealership is made of those managers who report directly to the CEO.  That is the first level where you delegate responsibility and authority for running your company.  If there is chaos, lack of trust, lack of communication, hidden agendas, ulterior motives or negative attitudes between those team members, chances are very high that there will be chaos, lack of trust and lack of teamwork throughout the dealership.  For example, if your Service Manager and Sales Manager don’t get along or trust each other, the service and sales departments probably won’t work together as a team.  Successful leaders make sure their senior department managers support each other and help each other succeed. 

ACT right.

The second component of building a strong team is to make sure your internal vendors work for your internal customers.  Whoever provides information or material to another employee is the vendor, and the recipient is the customer. Within your dealership, it is the internal vendor’s job to take care of their internal customer.  For example, when a service advisor completes a work order, it is his or her job to make sure that work order is Accurate, Complete and Timely (ACT).  When the work order comes back to the service advisor (for repair approval) the technician is the vendor and the work order must be completed accurately, completely and on time.  When a technician requests a part from your parts department, the technician must provide accurate, complete and timely information to the parts person so that person can do his or her job. 

The daily operation of your dealership is a series of handoffs between you internal vendors and customers.  It is always the vendor’s job to take care of the customer.  It doesn’t matter how much money the vendor makes, what their job title is, how long they have worked in the dealership or in the industry, or how important they think they are.  When someone is a vendor, they have one job:  to ACT in a way that pleases and supports their internal customer teammate.  One of the most demeaning comments I hear in companies is when a vendor (sales, technician, parts, service advisor, office) says to an internal customer, “I don’t have time to do it right”.  They say this to the very person who is depending on accurate, complete and timely information in order to do their job properly.  Anytime you find a vendor, regardless of their job title or how much salary or commission they earn, telling an internal customer, “You’ll have to do it because I don’t have time”, you have a significant problem.  The message that vendor is sending is this:  “I’m too busy or I’m too important, so I’m willing to dump it on you to deal with it.  I know you depend on me to provide you with accurate, complete and timely information, but I’m choosing not to do it.  And you know what?  I’m doing this because I know I can get away with it.  No one is holding me accountable and so I don’t have to give you the information or material you need.”  How would you like those kinds of messages going between the departments in your dealership?

Being an effective leader in a busy and successful dealership is not easy.  The following is a sample of tough questions my business clients ask.  I can’t answer these questions in this article, but if you are interested I would be pleased to provide you with information and material.

Tough Questions

How do I get my direct reports to care as much as I do?

How do I get my department managers to add more value to their position?

How do I deal with a problem employee?

How do I stay in control without being a micro manager?

How do I motivate my employees?

How do I take corrective action without demotivating or losing an employee?

How do I get my internal vendors to work for their internal customers?

How do I build a strong, focused and motivated team?

How do I write effective performance reviews?

How do I hire the right people?

How do I make sure my company (department) is process driven and not personality driven?

 For more information on this topic contact Beau Hamilton at 425-821-1115 or at beau@hamilton consulting.com. Beau Hamilton founded his management training and consulting business in 1984, and consults within and outside of the automotive industry.  His Puget Sound non-automotive clients include Starbucks, Microsoft, T-Mobile, and Red Robin.  His automotive clients include ASA - Washington, Washington Autobody Association, Washington Auto Wholesalers Association, Northwest Tire Dealers Association, Washington Trucking Association, NACE, and SEMA, and many dealerships.