THE KUMBAYA MYTH: WHY YOUR SHOP DOESN’T NEED A COUNSELOR, IT NEEDS A LEADER

By David Rogers

David has a new blog post on Motor Age’s Search-AutoParts.com that is a must-read for every shop owner… 

Can you chalk morale problems and personality conflicts up to generational differences? It’s easy to see why we blame problems on this difference.

Millennials (or Generation Y or the Net Generation) are displacing Generation X, who displaced Baby Boomers before them. Each grew up in a vastly different world…each has their own ideas about work ethic and customer service and even management.

But here’s the ugly truth: no amount of inter-generational understanding is enough to fix shop morale issues.

It’s nice to think that we can overcome generational differences with some shop-run therapy sessions and by walking a mile in another man’s shoes. But nice thoughts don’t equate to results for two reasons.

First, employees seldom respond the way the trainer suggests in his classroom role-play. No amount of classroom workshopping can prepare you for how your employee will actually react.

But more importantly, the TRUTH is that shops don’t need a therapist, they need great LEADERSHIP.

Great leadership means clear policies and accountability for following those policies. Great leadership means understanding of the struggles we all face, yes, but even more than that, it means providing an example of care, consideration, and higher principles.

Effective leaders know that consistency and follow-through create great results.

• If crossing being an understanding leader with a strong leader who holds the team accountable seems impossible….
• If it seems like I’m saying you need to be a cross between Gandhi and Patton…
• If it seems like what I’m recommending is unreasonable when you’re slammed with everyone’s needs, complaints, comebacks, and mood swings…

Well, it seemed that way to me once, too.

For years, we struggled to strike the right balance in our shop. When I came to work for Keller Bros. in 1997, the team was divided far worse than any generational divide.

In our shop, it wasn’t different generations disagreeing about how the shop should be run, it was a disagreement between groups that wanted to follow the rules and those that didn’t. One group was determined to squeeze down the shop — they were only in it for themselves.

It’s what happens in any shop when the spats and differences are allowed to grow and fester into a stinking open wound.

Where do you Start?

The first instinct is to take command. If you can control every element of what goes on in your shop, you can control the outcome. And you’d be right. You can trade your happiness, health, and well-being for a shop that operates exactly as you want it to.

You can send your blood pressure through the roof and put yourself at risk for an early heart attack for a few years of increased profits.

But you still won’t have fixed the problems. You won’t be able to step away from the shop for an extended period — time away with the family, enjoying the fruits of your hard work are out — because the only reason things are working is that you’re forcing them to work.

So when I write that your shop doesn’t need a therapist, I’m not saying that the opposite is true. Your shop doesn’t need a dictator, either.

What’s more, if you act as a dictator, you limit how much your business can grow. Even with many years of experience and training, most shop owners still don’t have all the pieces they need.

No, one of the biggest lessons that I ever learned (taught to me by Terry Keller), was that the team has to want you to succeed.

If the team doesn’t want to follow policies and procedures, doesn’t want to help each other, doesn’t want to get along, doesn’t want the company to succeed….no amount of command and control OR therapy is going to help.

The truth is, leadership is about striking the balance.

In our training, we call it the two critical faces of leadership. One face — the concerned, caring side — is out when your team is doing what they need to do. In this role, your job is to make it absolutely clear that you’re happy with how they’re performing.

The other face — the drill instructor side — only comes out when things need fixing. In this role, your job is to make absolutely clear that you’re unhappy with how they’re performing and how they can fix it.

There’s no third face of leadership.

There’s no lukewarm setting, no gray area. But being that cross between Patton and Gandhi isn’t something that can be done overnight. You have to live it out in your life, every day.

That means you must:

• Set the example of becoming physically and mentally healthy
• Hold high ethical standards and be transparent
• Follow a set schedule and set rules for all employees
• Do what needs to be done when it needs to be done
• Set and expect high levels of accountability from team members
• Be willing to discipline and train, or replace team members as necessary
• Clearly understand production targets and business goals
• Communicate well and teach the team what is expected and why
• Have instant access to reliable daily production numbers displayed on a simple one-page report
• Exude enthusiasm and love for the customer and team members

There’s enough material in that bulleted list to write for years. It’s what I spend my life doing for shop owners, and why I’ve recorded hours and hours of classes. Many of these things are personal choices we have to make as owners….a switch we have to flip.

But there are just as many things that owners can start doing immediately, in the time it takes to read this column. Getting instant access to your daily production numbers is one of the bedrock principles here and isn’t remotely hard.

But without it — without knowing where your shop stands, where the holes are, where your employees need to be trained, and how to fix these problems and provide this training — you can’t be an effective leader.

Without reliable daily production numbers, you can’t even start to show your two critical faces of leadership.

Worried that being either of those two critical faces of leadership doesn’t mesh with who you are? Great leadership isn’t about changing who you are. It’s about filling in your personality.

In other words, if you’re the kind of leader who opts for more of the Gandhi-style leadership, you don’t have to fundamentally change to your core. All you have to do is realize that we all have roles to play and that unless you are willing to at least play the role of command-and-control, Patton-style leader when things are wrong, your team will never understand just how serious you are.

For leaders who naturally fall on the opposite end of the spectrum, the same is true: sometimes you have to play the role of the happy, content owner so that your team clearly understands that they are performing well.

(When I say “Gandhi,” I don’t mean “pacifist. I mean that command and control leadership doesn’t work unless they know you care about them and are doing the right thing as a leader.)

If you’ve seen the movie Patton, you know how true this is for leaders. After General Patton has done something outrageous to motivate his troops, one of his staff officers says to him, “You know General, sometimes the men don’t know when you’re acting.”

Patton responds: “It’s not important for them to know. It’s only important for me to know.”

In other words, adopting the two critical faces of leadership doesn’t mean changing who you are, it just requires convincing your team.

Is this everything you need to start to become a great leader? Of course not — I haven’t even begun to touch on other bedrock principles like chain of command, setting expectations, daily accountability meetings, appropriate targets, and team building.

But that’s my point: shop’s aren’t fixed by piecing together solutions. If the staff is in turmoil because of generational differences, the fix may include intra-shop therapy, but it begins with the kind of leadership that provides the kind of clear expectations that come from real shop measurement solutions.

It may not be easy to hear (or read) that we have to figure out how to be great leaders before our shops can be great teams — but it’s the truth. I have the battle scars to prove it.

The good news is, the

If you haven’t listened to The Two Critical Faces of Leadership, get your copy today!

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