Operational Excellence

There are key steps to achieve operational excellence.  The challenge i see is many leaders want to skip steps and blame others when results are less than acceptable.

A common step I have seen being skipped is giving quality training to new and existing people through a proper mentor-ship program. The days of Sink or Swim are long past us. On The Job Training is a quick way to get a new person up to speed on some basic skills but also can be away to breed bad habits throughout a team or an entire organization. When choosing a person to mentor new team members select wisely. Dont make your most experienced person your mentor based on their years of service.

How do you improve our mentoring team? You should first look at a potential mentors strengths and opportunities. Create a personal developmental action plan for your mentor to reduce their weaknesses and polish their strengths. Give them the tools to be the best they can be and then give them the game plan to help develop others. Highly trained mentors can increase productivity and efficiency quickly in any organization.

Financial Analysis

Just spent 2 days with one of the sharpest minds in the Equipment Industry. It was a great approach and style of teaching numbers to dealership personal. You have to understand how you calculate the key indicators before you can plan on how to effect them. 

The dealers, store managers and aftermarket managers walked away with a wealth of knowledge and many tools to take back to their dealership. 

The conversations were lively and fun. Its fun job when you get to help others grow.

What’s the Strategy?

 What’s the Strategy?

Does your team get to pop the cork and celebrate every year? As a leader your focus is on beating all your goals and objectives. How do you and your team know they are taking the correct actions every week to accomplish this task? That would take properly executing a Strategic Plan.

Do you have a Strategic Plan in place to motivate your team to the results you are looking for? Most Dealership’s don’t and if they do does the team clearly know what it is? The first step is for the key decision players to review their current position; I would recommend a SWAT Analysis. Now they have to set the milestones they want to hit in the future. From here they should pick three key objectives that they want to achieve this coming year. For Example increase market share by 5%, or cut used inventory by 50%.

With the Objectives set you must educate your team about them. They need to know what you want to accomplish this year and what the Long Term Goal is. You have to put the expectation in place for them to understand what they need to focus on. And give them the tools and knowledge of how to get there. Successful dealerships invest in their staff’s education to achieve great results.

Then a tracking system needs to be put in place and kept up to date. Superstars can’t win if they don’t know the score. Records cant be broken if no one records the results. So often dealerships keep results to themselves and lose the opportunity to motivate their staff to victory. 

A wise friend always told me the following. If you always do what you have always done; you will always get what you have always got. What’s the Strategy; Its time to get one in place before it’s too late.

5 Keys to Implementing Strategic Plan

1.    Gain Knowledge

2.    Set Expectations

3.    Observe and Track Results

4.    Follow Up On Performance

5.    Have FUN

All men can see these tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved.
Sun Tzu

Change is not a destination, just as hope is not a strategy.
Rudy Giuliani

Passion: Why do we kill it?

I watched a webinar on Passion and how people suck the life out of others.

Look in the mirror and think about who's Passion you are sucking the life out of.

Are they preforming at the level you want them to? Are they happy when the come to work? Are the happy when they leave?

So what are you going to do about returning the Passion to your team?

As a Manager don't allow your team to function with out the Passion it takes to be a Winner.

Born Leaders

Anyone Have One They Can Spare?

Through out my life I have heard many times, “he was a born leader”; that’s a load of you know what. I bought into that for many years early in my career. I found out the hard way when I gained the task of hiring or promoting managers.

Being a young hardheaded manager it took me some time to learn that Leaders are created not born. Before I learned that pearl of wisdom, I often found myself promoting or hiring some of the best workers I knew. I filled open leadership positions with these A+ workers only to have that position become open again when I got frustrated that the A+ workers didn’t become A+ leaders.  What a friend called “Promote and Destroy” trapped me for the longest time in a cycle of burning through great workers. I was replacing ineffective leaders with talented workers only to destroy them by not preparing them to lead others. It wasn’t until after I grew completely frustrated that my mentor let me in on his secret to success. This secret wasn’t something he learned at an Ivy League school; no, his mentor taught it to him.

Oh by the way if you don’t have a great mentor to help you along; find one quick. Life is a lot easier to travel if you have someone to help guide the way.

So back to the pearl of wisdom my mentor shared with me. Leaders are created they have never been born. We worked together on creating Developmental Action Plans for all my leaders and key personal. He taught me how to assess my team’s talent compared to the skills of effective leaders. These developmental plans were built to increase the skills sets that they were lacking. I can attribute all my previous management success to evaluating my team’s skill sets and creating Action Plans to give them the tools they needed to be effective leaders.

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Skill Sets of an Effective Leader

Positive attitude
Can Accept and utilize feedback
Gives constructive feedback to others
Effective communicator
Team motivator
Resilient through adversity
Self confident
Personal accountability
Holds others accountable