The sixth step toward becoming a highly effective lube manager might just be the most important step yet.
Synergize. What does this mean? It means that you need to put your aces in your places to achieve your goals. It means that you combine the strengths of your people, through positive teamwork, to complete tasks that cannot be completed, normally, by one person. It will make you a true teambuilder.
To put this into a college football reference, think of yourself as the Nick Saban of your shop. Saban, a college football coach whose teams won seven national championships, is famous for a ton of team sayings. The one that we want to use is as follows: “Focus on the process of what it takes to be successful.”
Isn’t that what we have been doing in the past six months? Preparing to do things is a new way to achieve greater success. Part of this process is to know your people and put them in the greatest opportunity to be successful. There is an exercise that you can help you not only know these strengths but also shore up weaknesses. GWC. Get it. Want it. Capacity to do it.
Take a pad and a pen. Write out your crews and G, W, and C at the top. Think about each employee. Do they get their job? Do they want their job? Do they have the capacity to do the job that you want them to do? Let’s say you are evaluating your assistant manager. He can do the job. He has the knowledge to do the job. He does not really want to do the job. This gives you a starting point to find out what they need to be successful and if they are not the right fit, it allows you to start looking for the right person to do that job.
Once you know that you have all the right people, you can start to build a well-oiled machine. Start with a smaller goal or task. Let’s say that you do additives as a potential add-on to your service. Set a reachable goal to add on a certain number that day, like 10. Get everyone working as a team to achieve this goal—from the proper greeting procedures and the proper checks to the follow-up to make sure that the customer is educated on that product. Once you achieve that goal, raise it slightly and keep improving until you get to a good median. Then, it is as simple as staying on top of this to make sure that it continues.
You have built a habit in the team to ask. All of these are ways to build positive habits in the team. Hence why the GWC exercise is important. It only takes one person to not know or not care to slow down the machine.
There are loads of procedures and goals that you can implement into your team using this method of synergy. I gave you a sales goal, but there are timing goals, administrative goals and more that you can do to get a result. If you know that you do not have a person that is good at talking to people, then they may not be the best to be an advisor or the person collecting email addresses, for example.
Synergy is not an accident; it is a habit. There is a process we can follow to get there. For that process to work, we must live all the other habits. If we are reactive, directionless, unfocused, if we fail to consider what others need, and if we do not listen to each other, we will never collaborate successfully. We will also never get to constructive collaboration if we do not value others’ ideas.
It is truly valuing differences, instead of just tolerating them, that drives synergy. The ideas and perspectives of others are what allow us to get outside our normal way of thinking to see the world, and the problems we are trying to solve together, in a new way.
