Your Employees Aren't Failing. Your Coaching Is

Training vs. coaching 0:00

Dave Rogers: The hair jokes.

Steve Shaw: Welcome, Dave Rogers. Hair jokes, there we go. Good morning. What's happening? How are you today?

Dave Rogers: I'm doing fantastic. I'm on the road today, hanging out in lovely Atlanta, Georgia. I'm going to see one of the World Cup games later today. Should be fun. It was actually in the sixties this morning, and everybody on television was making a big deal about sixty-two degrees, so I guess it gets pretty damn hot down here. Everything's good, just doing the normal travel thing. You're used to it. I don't travel that much. How you doing, man? I haven't talked to you.

Steve Shaw: Well, all of you keep making fun of me because I'm pasty white, so I'm down here in the Keys trying to get some sun and be ready for our Friday live podcast with some color. I might even do something with my hair for Friday. But what's on your mind for real today?

Dave Rogers: I've seen a couple of stories online and heard a few things, and one of the notes I wrote down was mentoring, and I wrote down coaching: how some people are good at it and some aren't, and why we need more of it. You're the trainer, and we talk coaching a lot, so tell me a story from your recent events.

Steve Shaw: What's funny is I have a group of trainers on the road, so I'm not in the store as much as I used to be. My guys are out there doing it. But I spend a lot of time on the phone or on Zoom with my clients, and everything we're talking about right now is exactly that: coaching, mentoring, training. It's not about checking a box. It's about learning and growing. And you're right, some people are really good at coaching, and for others it's just a word. It doesn't mean anything to them.

Training is one thing, and coaching is another: having the ability to bring somebody in, in a positive fashion, and guide them in the direction you want them to go. Training is me disseminating information. I'm giving you information and sharing tools. We always talk about tell, show, do, review from a training perspective. Coaching is the review part. I'm reviewing with you and showing you the things you're doing well and the things that need improvement, and the whole goal is to do it in a positive way. But so many people want to check a box and just get it done. Others say, "Well, I told them," and let it go. It can be going off the rails, and somebody will say, "I told them to do it," but they're not keeping them within the rails. That's where I'm at right now with a lot of my clients.

Checking the box: Mickey and the metric 3:27

Dave Rogers: The university, obviously. You and I talked a couple of weeks ago, and I said, "Give me a list of everyone enrolled in the stores," because when we first started, people could put in their own store or select more than one. I was trying to clean it up a bit, since some people have left, moved on or changed stores. And it was funny, because I took the list, and we had some specific stores I believe could really use training. Their sales are down, or they're not growing the way they were. And there was no one in the store registered. Or everyone who had been registered had left, and none of the new employees were enrolled, including managers.

I don't like calling people out on it, and I'm trying not to insult anybody. You try to do this in a positive, motivational way, like you said. But at what point do you just get frustrated, because people aren't even using the tools provided for them to get better? What are you busy doing during the day that you can't spend a couple of meaningful minutes training, teaching or coaching? You touched on checking the box. That's the term I used when I was with the public company: Mickey and the metric. Some initiative would come from somebody in Detroit. They had this new thing; they reinvented the past. What is it, nothing's new but what's been forgotten? It was never anything new, because there's never a lot of new stuff in the car business. It wasn't going to make us more money or give us more customers. So what do you end up doing? You get tired of the emails and the pounding and the BS, and you click the box. You Mickey the metric to get them off your back. That'd be the first thing you did in the morning: make sure all my internet leads are responded to so I don't have to listen to anybody in Detroit. Now let's go sell cars.

I see the same thing with training, and it's frustrating, because I didn't have those tools a lot of the time growing up. But I did have good coaches and good mentors. So there's a trade-off. I agree with you a hundred percent: it's silly to watch people just checking the box. What's the point?

Steve Shaw: We had a dealer group that just took ten classes over three days. I sent a nice email back: "Congrats, I'm excited for you. I applaud your enthusiasm." But at the same time, they sent me a bunch of questions about what I'd just answered in the class. So it was, "Let's run through this and answer the five questions." Maybe they watched the video, maybe they didn't, but they checked the box, and whatever time they spent didn't produce any results. Mickey and the metric. That's a good title for this episode. We checked the box and didn't get anything out of it.

Baseball, development and the student of the game 6:35

Steve Shaw: You always say, are you working in the business or on the business? I was talking to a group in Kansas yesterday, and I'm a St. Louis Cardinals fan, so we were joking about the Cardinals-Royals series that just happened. But we talked about the coaching aspect. I'm more fascinated by strategy and coaching, and by watching players develop, than by who wins or loses. I know the Cardinals aren't going to win the World Series. But it's fun to watch people develop and grow. Some of these pitchers are having a terrible time, but incrementally, throughout the season, they're getting a little better. They're lasting a little longer in the game. Certain pitches are getting better. That's what I think is super cool: they have a staff of people who are just there to coach, mentor and help people develop.

We don't have that in our business. I understand it's financial, and I understand our managers aren't that person either. They have enough on their plates. But somewhere, as an organization or as an industry, we've got to figure out this coaching thing, or our people are going to stay the same. We have tremendous success stories. Some of your people are in that category: they've taken the training and run with it. But they're the one percent, the rookies of the year and the all-stars. Most people are in the mass category, and they need someone to guide them. I can give you the tools, but somebody's got to teach you how to use them and share them with you appropriately.

I talk to people all the time, and I try to be very forthright: if you're just going to check the box, don't pay the money, because it's not worth it. You're wasting everybody's time. It's very important to have a champion, and the champion has to be the coach. We can have a champion responsible for the metrics, but we've got to have somebody responsible for coaching, making sure people are applying those new skills.

Dave Rogers: A lot of points in there. I was talking to somebody at dinner last night about what makes people take it to the next level. How do you grow in this business? There's luck and different stuff, but I've always felt it's being a student of the game, and my buddy Joe Camarada is going to laugh at this. That's what you get in baseball, because they're professionals. They get paid a lot of money to play a kid's game. They have the financial resources for a batting coach, a throwing coach, a catcher's coach. A coach for a coach for a coach, and a coach in case somebody calls out sick. Not that we couldn't afford it in the car business, because most dealerships make money, though not all make a good profit, but a lot of times we just don't.

But the thirst for knowledge, getting better at your craft, comes from inside of you. I don't know if you can teach that. I know some people aren't students of the game. They're there for the paycheck, and they're never going to be that rising superstar. Then there are other people who maybe can learn to be a student of the game. I don't know.

Fill the gaps in your managers 10:31

Dave Rogers: The other thing is coaching. Some of the best GMs I've ever seen in the business have worked in the group I'm with now, and I'll shout them out as they come up. One in particular: when you talked to him, you never got the warm fuzzy. He was very mellow. You never got enthusiasm from him. But the one thing he did that I always thought was great, and a bunch of them do it, is fill the gaps between what his managers were good at and what they weren't. He had a service manager who was very dispatcher-ish, very techie, not good up front, not good with the advisors. That service manager did not want to be in the customer-facing area. So this GM, Randy, would spend his time out there with the customers and the advisors to fill that gap.

The same thing goes for coaching, training and teaching. A lot of GMs are high I's, influential people. They talk, and they could coach people up if they'd spend a couple of minutes coaching instead of... I saw a clip the other day of us talking about GMs who don't know service and just go back there and cut people off at the knees. They're not positive. So one thing we as an industry could do better is fill the gap. If my service manager is a technical guy who dispatches work, knows production and knows how to get the trouble cars through the shop, then support him with someone who's a front-end person, someone who can coach the advisors. We need to do a better job of that instead of saying, "Here's the mold, fill it. Steve, you've got to cover the whole base: front of the business, back of the business, coaching, training, warranty." I don't think that's always possible nowadays.

Steve Shaw: It's definitely a specialty skill, and some people have it. In the old days, as we were talking about the other day, we expected our GMs to be well-rounded in all of these areas. I grew up with a couple of GMs who were brilliant, with a very well-rounded understanding of the business, and they were very good coaches. But I also wanted to learn from them. I'd spend as much time as I could watching them. I remember going into my boss's office, growing in the fixed ops arena, thinking, "I can't make a mistake. I want to be better. I want to impress. I want to dot my I's and cross my T's." Then my people would see me as willing to grow, and they'd want to invest in me. I don't think those well-rounded people are there as much.

But I don't know anybody better than most general managers or general sales managers from a sales perspective. I don't care if you use Steve Shaw's approach. If the GMs and GSMs in our stores shared their knowledge of sales, a fixed ops guy could apply it: "I see what he's saying. Let me apply that to a repair order, to a service customer." That's so powerful, and it's out there. We have people in our stores who can do it. But do they want to? Will they? That's the big question.

Dave Rogers: I think sometimes general managers don't realize how similar sales and service really are. They come from sales and think service is this mystical thing, the man behind the curtain. You don't want to go back to service. It's nasty, it's dirty, they deal with upset customers. But there are similarities. That's what we try to do with the GM tip of the day from a fixed ops point of view: bring that to light for general managers. There really isn't much difference. As far as coaching, training, teaching and mentoring go, the same principles apply.

You mentioned your willingness to learn, hanging out with someone to learn. That's what I did. I didn't goof off all day, but I spent as much time as I could with people who could teach me something. When I went to the accounting office, I used that time wisely: "Teach me something. Show me something. Why did you send that nasty email? What did I do wrong? What's a journal entry?" I remember sitting down with somebody looking at schedules and asking, "What is this source thing? How does that work?" My mentor, EJ, taught me a lot of that, how to read schedules. He threw me in the fire a lot too. He's one of the biggest impacts on my life and in the business.

He's famous for this. He calls me up one day: "Hey, bring Gary, the warranty administrator, over." It was a complex, so I walk him down the street, open the door, Gary goes in and sits down, and before I even sit down, I hear EJ say, "Gary, you're fired. Dave, help him get his shit out of his office." I barely sat down. I stood right up, opened the door, and we walked back out. It was that fast. After I got Gary out of the building, I walked back and asked, "What happened?" He said, "The guy's a thief. He was slimy, he was stealing." This was my first job as a manager. I had no idea. So I said, "Well, now what are you going to do?" He said, "You, my friend, are going to learn how to do warranty." What does that mean? It was tough love, but I got into it. I learned it, ran the schedules and came up with a system, and I did my own warranty as a manager at that Hyundai Dodge dealer for two years, until I left. Whether that's great teaching or not, it taught me a lot, and it still helps me today.

Did we hire for fire, or fill a seat? 17:22

Steve Shaw: Listening to you, it's hard to teach whether somebody has that fire. But if we go back one step further: did we hire the right person, the one with that fire or ability? Or did we, as managers, just check the box and bring somebody in to fill a role? Craig's traveling for me right now, and we talk every day, and some of what he's telling me would be mind-blowing if it weren't so normal. "We're down a technician today, so we stopped doing alignments. We should have four advisors, and we only have three." So instead of shutting off appointments, which I don't agree with anyway, they're going to write twenty-five tickets a day per advisor.

Well, how about hiring somebody? They've gone weeks and weeks without, and they don't hire. Then, "I guess we have to hire somebody, so let's fill the box and throw somebody out there." You said it the other day: we have to staff a third more people just because of attrition. We put ourselves in positions where we just put a body in place and say we'll deal with it later, and we never deal with it. I've been privileged to work with some auto groups that are absolutely amazing at this. And there are other groups and stores where it's the same churn and burn over and over, and we never get to a place where we can actually coach and train. It's management by chaos, by fire.

Dave Rogers: In all fairness to the people in the stores trying to make things happen, the talent pool has been weak. There are a lot of people out there who don't want to work or put in effort. But a lot of times it is our fault. We don't put time and effort into coaching, training, teaching, mentoring, whatever you want to call it. In hindsight, we should have done a much better job all these years of growing our own.

Show people the path from porter to GM 19:41

Dave Rogers: We've talked about why the car business isn't a career choice. I wrote that down as an episode one day: how most of us got into this business. Most of us just got into it. It was a summer job or a mistake. But it's a lucrative business. You can make a lot of money. There's no reason it shouldn't be a career, whether you're a career advisor, service manager, general manager, finance manager, sales manager or parts counterperson. There are a lot of career opportunities, and I don't think we sell it well.

I'll be honest: I've been in situations where you're hiring out of desperation. "Can you find your way back tomorrow? Can you fog a mirror?" Those were the only two questions, before drug testing and background checks. If you could find your way back tomorrow, you were in like Flynn. I'd hire you on the spot. But the business has become more professional. There are a lot more regulations and a lot more at stake. So we have to find ways to make this a legitimate career, and that's where the big guys and the publics have the advantage. When I was with Penske, we had a local trainer in Turnersville, Ed, who did a great job for me. He went out to the campuses, UTI. He had training classes for management and leadership skills. They had the money to do that. I guess we have to find better ways, or find somebody on staff who can do it as a side gig. That's probably what I would recommend.

Steve Shaw: Why don't people choose us? The publics have the financial resources. But I believe every one of us has a way that doesn't cost money to say, "If you come to work for me today as a porter, I can show you a path to GM." It may take you twenty-five years. Do we have a career path? Some of the publics have it, some don't, and some independents and groups have it. But by and large, that's the promotion we're missing. If I want to go from valet to CEO, how do I get there? I don't think we do a good enough job of promoting that.

I never did what you did. I didn't get to become a GM, and that's the reason I ended up going out on my own. I thought I was never going to get to take that step. Or maybe I didn't want to put in the time to go sell cars. So my next path was to work for myself, and that worked out very well for me. You and some of the other gentlemen we've talked to put in the effort to go to the next step. But nobody said to me, "Steve, if you go sell cars, we'll make sure we consider you for our next GM or sales manager role." It was just, "If you don't go sell cars, you're never going to get a chance." How do you take a step back as a fixed ops director who's doing well, stop, go sell cars for a while, lose all your income and go broke? I just don't see a career path for people to go from valet to manager, or manager to the next step. That's frustrating. We can't paint that picture for ourselves, so it's, "I'm going to make as much money as I can here, and when the next better thing comes along, I'll go there." If we did a better job of painting that picture for our associates, maybe that would help get them to buy in to the fire.

Invest in yourself first 24:05

Dave Rogers: It's funny you say that, because it isn't easy. I saw a LinkedIn post a couple of days ago I was going to respond to and didn't get the chance. A technician of twenty-five years was asking all the service managers and fixed ops managers, "How did you get noticed? How did you get to the next level?" Everybody has a different story. But a lot of times you have to go backward to go forward. You have to take that step back, unfortunately. I know technicians who make $150,000 a year, and you're not going to step into an advisor job and make $150,000 a year unless you're very fortunate. I had a salesman, Mike, who sold sixty cars a month out of my Nissan store. He was probably making closer to $225,000 at the time. He wanted to be a manager, and that job paid $175,000. That's just what it paid. And as a service manager, I had technicians making more money than me all day long. That's the way the business works. It's not easy, and you have to be in a situation where you can do it, whether your spouse makes a living or whatever.

But here's a novel concept: you could stay late at work and learn. You could sell cars at night, which is what I did. I sold cars after work and on Saturdays to learn how to do it. You could come in on your day off and go hang out with somebody and learn something, God forbid. That's being a student of the game. I've used this expression a hundred times, and anybody who's known me a long time is going to go, "Geez, not again." I used to tell the people who worked for me: Steve Shaw, you start a company, Steve Shaw LLC or Steve Shaw Incorporated, and you want me to buy stock. My first question is, how much of it do you own yourself? If you don't own any of your own stock, why would I invest in you? If you won't use your day off to come back to the dealership and spend time with the F&I manager or a salesman, on your own time, why am I investing in you? It goes back to the thirst for knowledge.

For the first twenty years I was in the business, I never once thought of giving my lunch, toll or gas receipts to my boss after going to a training class. It never occurred to me. Maybe I'm stupid. I got paid for the day, and they paid for the training, whether I was a technician, a service advisor or a service manager. Nowadays, my God, they want their mileage and their tolls, and even though the school provided lunch, they stopped for a snack on the way, and they want that money back. I get it, but I don't. You're not even willing to invest a dollar in your own training. I'm still that way. When I go away for business, I use my own personal credit card for room charges. I'd never charge my boss for that. I feel like they were nice enough to send me and pay for the plane and the hotel, whether it's NADA or training. Maybe that's old school or naive. But the unwillingness to participate in your own career advancement is what burns a hole in me. People won't spend a minute after work to learn something new. Do you have that inside of you? Like I said, I don't know if you can teach that.

It starts at the top 28:20

Steve Shaw: The more I think about it as we talk, it goes back to hiring. And who taught us how to hire? Was there ever a class? I couldn't even teach a class on hiring; I could pretend I know what I'm doing. I was very fortunate, and people make fun of me for it, to be given lots of tools by Saturn Corporation in the late nineties, '97, '98, '99. It was very pie in the sky and very different back then. They taught us hiring and coaching skills. They actually taught us how to do an interview, hire the right people, grade the interview and take ourselves out of it: look at it as a grade versus a feeling, and ask every candidate the same questions. I couldn't tell you I did that every single time, but our owners wanted us to, and we turned those sheets in to our owners and GMs before we made a hiring decision. Our owners and GMs were much more involved back then, at least for me.

I always look at my GM as the man I work for. If you guide me, I'm going to follow your path. Right now, one dealer I'm working with is so involved, and I love it. Then I've got another dealer group that can't make the meetings, and I can't want it more than you as your outside service. So I always tell the GMs and executives that it's got to come from the top. Whatever happens below is because of how you look at it. As professionally as I can, I put all the responsibility back on them: "If you want it, we'll get it done for you, but it's got to come from you." I'm not going to say the word culture, but the environment, the way the place is run, starts at the top and works its way down. Their name is on the sign, just like my name is on the sign of my company, and whatever happens is because of me. So we have to ask our executives: how do you want us to make your business better? I hate to hang that on everybody at the end of the episode, but it really comes from the top. How is this place going to look and run? That's my rant.

Dave Rogers: What you said reminds me of the biggest heartbreak I've had in the car business over the thirty-some years since I became a manager: seeing somebody with possibilities and talent, wanting to take them under your wing, teach them and train them, and then they don't want it as badly as you do, and it doesn't work out. It's heartbreaking. "I saw so much potential in that person." I've forgotten some of them now because they've moved on or I've moved on, but at the time it really bothered me. "I must have done something wrong here. This was the right person."

I've always felt you pay it forward. I had some mentors, intentional or not. EJ was intentional; others were mentors because of situations and things that happened. And I'm glad I didn't break his heart. We had a conversation not long ago, on Father's Day, and he told me he thinks I've done great things in the business and he's proud of me like a son, which is so cool to hear, because I look at him like my dad. But when you get people who don't fulfill the promise you see, and now you get it from a GM or dealer principal, it's lip service. It goes right back to Mickey and the metric. They're Mickeying it. They don't want it as badly as you do, Steve, and that's the heartbreak. "Let's sign up for this program," but they just want to check the box and say they did it. I see it in every aspect of this business, over and over.

GM tip: don't Mickey the metric with your people 33:05

Steve Shaw: That is very crazy. Well, you'd better give us a GM tip of the day before we run everybody off at thirty-three minutes.

Dave Rogers: GM tip of the day, from a fixed ops guy who was a GM and then got out of that role: when you step back, you see things you don't see in the trenches. You don't see that you're checking a box sometimes, giving lip service. People are going to see it. Like Steve said a minute ago, they sign up for training and then don't want to attend the meetings. You have to be the leader, the person out front. That's the biggest role of a GM. It's your vision, your culture, your personality that drives the business, and you have to walk the walk. You can't just Mickey the metric. You want to Mickey the metric to your bosses? Great. Do it all day long. I wholly endorse that. But don't Mickey the metric when it comes to your people below you.

Steve Shaw: Awesome. That conversation went in a lot of different directions, which I love. We'd better get out of here. Everybody, we'll see you Friday, streaming live at 4 p.m. Fixed Ops Focus, streaming live at four o'clock on Friday. See you soon.

Dave Rogers: See you then.