A Journey of Learning and Growth

Managers or leaders do not force people to follow them. Instead quality leaders invite employees on a journey of learning and growth. Quality managers and leaders set the standards that make others wish they were on their team!

Effective leadership as a service manager for the benefit of your service employees means: Taking the employees you’ve been entrusted to lead and make them more valuable tomorrow than they are today through training, coaching and counseling. If your dealership is under-performing at this very moment, you would be wise to stop just sitting in your office trying to figure out a way to turn your numbers around. You need to review your numbers but you also need to get onto the floor and turn your people around.

Only through proper training, coaching and counseling will you and your employees be able to turn the numbers around! If you are unwilling or unable to execute this critical leadership responsibility, I urge you to find another form of employment, that’s how critical your job as a service manager is to your dealership! As a service manager, you are paid to lead employees and map out the direction of the service department.

As a service manager you need to impact your employees in such a way that you teach them, and help them to accelerate their growth. If you are the type of service manager that blindly asks people, “how are you”, “how is your week going”, or what have you, and you’re not actually taking an interest in training or teaching them, you may retain long term employees but you’re not growing your department or stretching your employees to perform at a higher level.

If you are spending too much time dealing with trivialities and you’re not spending the time with your employees, you have very little chance of impacting, stimulating or training them to be better than they currently are. This is a recipe for poor performance and average customer service.

The bottom line here is this; if your employees are not growing, your department isn’t growing. Whether or not your employees grow is the measurable aspect of your leadership. Being a great service manager means you need to get up close and personal with your employees to impact them. This means you set crystal clear expectations for them as a team, or individually.

You need to coach and train them, giving honest feedback, holding all employees accountable for results. Increase employee’s abilities by empowerment, and spend time personally showing them what great performance and exceptional customer service skills look like.

Train your staff to stop looking at customers as an interruption to their day, maybe more customers will want to come back and your dealership reputation will improve, along with your bottom line.

David