We recently started a project at Oilstop to create a manager development program. As we grow, our single largest bottleneck is developing great leaders to be ready to step into a new service center and lead a team. Developing strong leaders in your service center is critical and impactful, whether you are a large multi-site franchise operator or if you operate a single independent quick lube. When you develop strong leaders in your service center, you can trust those leaders to drive performance, set the tone with your team, and care for your guests. Whether you need to step away for a day off or vacation, or are trusting that leader with the care of a service center in a remote location, strong store leadership is vital to helping grow your business. So, where do you start in developing talent?
In “Good to Great,” author Jim Collins correctly suggests that, "The right people are your most important asset.” Who you hire matters most. The most commonly expressed challenge of the quick lube operators I speak with is finding and hiring good talent. The labor market, and perhaps even our culture, has shifted, and finding good, reliable talent is challenging. So, if this is the case, how do you develop leaders in your service center?
A simple hack we’ve learned is not to hire for experience or technical ability. We hire for culture fit and leadership potential. While most companies are interested in what a new hire has done in the past, we are interested in what they want to do in the future. If you bring great potential leaders onto your team, you can teach them how to change oil. You can teach them about your process and how to service vehicles and serve guests. But they will have an intangible asset—a desire to learn, grow, and lead. They will help build a culture that aligns with yours, instead of resisting your process and culture.
Once you’ve hired a green and inexperienced but high-potential future leader, the next ingredient is time. At Oilstop, we like to say, “You can’t microwave leadership.” You can’t speed up the time it takes for a new hire to learn your process, develop mastery of it, and begin to seek to grow and yearn for more opportunity. Investing time with those team members to work alongside them, mentor them, and help them understand the why behind how things are done is a critical element in helping develop them into a future leader. This helps them understand what “good” looks like, but also helps them understand how to lead and teach other team members.
Jesse Cole is the founder and creator of the Savannah Bananas baseball entertainment concept, which has taken off like a rocket over the past few years. Cole explains how to approach teaching your new hires: “We do not believe in training. We believe in coaching, teaching, mentoring, and educating, and not the typical language of training. Dogs are trained, people are coached and are educated on the company and the culture.” Training instills how to rinse and repeat a process to perfection. Coaching is about developing the whole person. Spend time developing your future leaders in softer skills. Communication style, professionalism, organization, and financial planning are equally as important as your service process when it comes to developing future leaders.
At Oilstop, we will focus more time in our leadership development program on our mission, culture, leadership skills, and people skills than we will on the tactics of running an oil change service center. Learning how to open and close, order inventory, or process a fleet sales order are all very important. But they can be taught and trained, and smart team members will pick them up after a few times practicing. How to lead the team, how to inspire them to perform, and how to treat your guests is something that requires much more cultivation. Focus your leadership development on these more important tenants, and not just training how to do the job.
Investing in developing leaders in your service center gives you options. You’ll have the option to take a day off, open a new service center, or grow your existing sales. As an operator, the most important investment you can make is to develop future leaders in your service center. If you want to connect to talk more about how you are developing leaders in your bays or have a question, reach out at [email protected].
