Be a Teacher, Not a Preacher: The Key to Effective Service Manager Training | SDR #288
Chris Collins and Christian argue service managers should teach, not preach. They emphasize guided discovery, repetition of fundamentals, and system design where form forces the right behavior. Concrete tactics include demonstrations, reinforcing basics like phone handling and walkarounds, and building systems that make good habits automatic.
Chapters
Welcome, everybody, to the big show. This is exciting. Probably something you haven't thought about. And I do believe it's going to spark some ideas. Should you be a teacher or a preacher? There's a big difference, and we'll talk about it. Also, some fun, exciting stuff in the news. How to fire 400 people at once.
That's exciting.
We go deep into any changes in Christian's life since he's been engaged and much, much more. Coming up on this edition of Service Drive Revolution.
In case you didn't know, Christian recently got engaged.
Yes.
You did not follow my advice and videotape it.
I did not.
Probably because you did not want to play it on the show.
That my answer.
You didn't want evidence of you getting down on your knee and. But she would have liked that.
Yeah.
But my question is, now that you're engaged, it's been a. Been a little while. Has your love life changed? Like, has it picked up or has it slowed down?
No, it's pretty flat.
So it slowed down.
No, it's just the same.
There's no. There's no structural changes other than we're officially engaged, but we lived together before.
But emotionally there's a difference.
Oh, yeah. So. So for her, definitely.
She feels a stronger connection.
But for you, that isn't translating into your love life.
Maybe it should be.
Yeah, it's great.
This isn't a trick question. You would know.
Seems like it.
You would know if it had picked up or not.
It feels very.
If you know how to count, you would know if it picked up or not.
Oh, no. Okay. Yeah, it's. It's great.
It's the same.
It's the same.
So why. Why get engaged then?
Yeah, the commitment's important.
Feels very transactional.
No, I meant it from the heart.
But nothing's changed.
Not really.
Well, we will. We will keep you updated on this as well.
People are at the edge of their question.
Keep asking.
So you were just commenting before we went on about how my hair. I need a haircut, but it looks very full. Yeah, but you know what happened the other day? Have you ever heard that saying? Like, if you. If somebody offers you a breath mint, take it?
Yes.
And what does that mean? Like, why?
Just in case you have bad breath.
Because you can't smell your own breath.
That's right.
Okay, so I show up to the gym on.
Monday, a week ago from today, and my trainer that I work out with on Mondays, it looks like Incredible Hulk.
Has two gifts for me, pulls out of his bag, and both of Them are like, hair, like, going bald stuff. Like one is one. He explains to me that you can only do it once a week and it hurts. It like cuts your scalp. Like it's got little needles or something.
And it's supposed to like, massage the follicles, I'm assuming, or something like that. Or declog the follicles.
I don't know. And then the other one is like a cream you put on twice a day.
Sounds like a lot of work, but.
Am I going bald? Like, is it like the breath mint thing where, like, I'm going bald but I don't notice?
Like, I've always had this CIC up here.
Yeah.
But I mean, I don't think I'm. I don't think I'm dramatically losing my hair. Like, maybe it's thinning, but yeah, I think it's.
You got a lot of hair up there still.
When he told me that it cuts you or what, I was like, I don't want to do that.
That sounds awful. Yeah, yeah.
Like, I think if I start going bald, I'll just shave it.
Yeah, he's, he's, he's kind of. He's an expert at like the, the weird backhanded, like, passive aggressive. Like he does stuff like that. It's funny, but he cares.
Like, I think it comes from a place of love. Right.
No doubt about it. Yes.
Man, it bummed me out. Felt so old that day.
Every day.
It's funny. Like, when I'm hanging out with, like, my buddies, like, the stuff we talk about is like, how many times did you have to get up and pee in the middle of the night? Like, my prostate's the size of a grapefruit. Like, it just sucks getting old.
That heated conversation.
Like, I don't know, what did we used to talk about? Business or, I don't know, going to Vegas. Yeah.
Music.
Now it's like prostates and hair loss.
Right. Well, I definitely notice every time I get a haircut, it seems like there's a little less hair that needs to get cut.
So it's like, thank God I only had to pee three times.
Yeah.
I really got some sleep.
Like, two is a good night.
Yeah, two is. Two is taking you back to when you were in your 20s.
Yeah. So funny.
We, for all those of you that.
Are still listening, we lost half of the audience.
We have.
The unreasonable hospitality training coming up at our coach meeting. So that's an all day workshop that they do. Will is going to be a speaker at Top Dog. He's going to Come on the show here pretty soon. That's coming up, right?
Yes.
Incredible book. One of Christian's favorite books so far this year.
Over the last two years, I would say.
Two years. Nice. I. And it's in my queue, but I've been writing a book, so I try not to read other people's books when I'm doing that that much. When I get to the end, I've read the leadership book. Like.
It'S so funny, man. When you write a book someday, you end up hating the book by the end because you've read it so many times.
I can only imagine. I feel the same way.
Like, bleed.
When the. When the boys are in the production room filming or editing and stuff like that. Like, they watch the same stuff over and over and over again. I just feel like I have so much respect for them and what they can do. It reminds me a little bit of. Of my joke inventory. Right? Like, I've got. I don't know if you know this or not, but it's been four years since I started coming on this podcast.
Feels like. It feels like 20.
Yeah, it feels like 20 or 25 every week.
Every week.
But. But I've got this tremendous inventory of. Of.
Essentially dad jokes. Right. I'm like, I don't know. I don't even know what to do with them, but I figured out where to put them in a database.
Can you hear that laughing off in the distance?
Two people. Yeah, that's actually courtesy of Josh, who I had in our masterclass last week, and he threw me a lot of dad jokes, and I'm like, I don't want you to be offended, bro. I'm gonna write these down. They're pretty good.
That wasn't. That was fun. But. So new clients coming in come to a boot camp. You call it a master class? I do, but it's more like a boot camp.
And we had a good group this time. They were fun.
What was I gonna say, though? Oh, back to unreasonable hospitality.
Here's the thing that I want to tell everybody. And please listen. If you're in coaching and you haven't signed up, you better hurry up because this thing is almost full, and.
I.
Don'T want your feelings to be hurt, but we only have so much room in here.
That's right.
So the problem with. With, you know, doing this is.
We'Re.
We're capped on space here at the library, too. I don't know, 100?
We're on the verge of logistical concern. That's what I would say.
Yeah. So I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings. I, you know, I always feel weird when people are excluded. The reason why I don't do the, the giveaway my car thing is because the, it hurts me too much to see the people that don't win, they tried so hard. Breaks my heart. So.
Don'T hesitate. Hurry up and sign up. Rsvp.
Yeah, you don't want to miss this one.
Okay. What's in the news? Chris? Joan.
Okay, so this is, this is pretty funny. So I, I woke up to this piece of news in my email today. And who would have sent you that?
So it was in my email and out of Fortune magazine. Stellantis uses. It's just brilliant. Stellantis uses mandatory remote workday to cut 400 white collar jobs. It was a mass firing of everybody that was on that call.
So, so, and that headline is deceiving because they laid them off. They didn't fire him.
Yeah, there was a layoff for sure. But you know.
At any rate, but so essentially they told these 400 people, hey, we got a lot we have to go over on Friday. And to ensure everyone can effectively participate, we've decided to implement a mandatory remote workday for those 400 people. They are expected to work work from home unless otherwise instructed by your manager, which what do you think that manager told everybody that was coming into work?
Do you think that manager knew?
Oh, I guess I thought, I assumed that they did, but could you imagine having that conversation? Yeah, you need to come into the office. You can't work from home. No, it's a good thing, right? Like, but essentially what they did then is they got everybody on a zoom and dropped the hammer. So it's funny, like they did all.
400 people at once.
All of them. Sia, thank you so much for attending. We're going to be moving on.
But. But there's a little bit of speculation saying that they want to push these white collar jobs to low cost countries. I don't know if that makes sense or not completely, but there was. When I saw this thing on, like the Fortune Online thing, there was just tons and tons of comments and I don't know, I was kind of thinking about that in terms of like being laid off on zoom versus the walk of shame that you would have to do normally if you get laid off. I almost think this might be more humane.
It still feels sneaky. But.
You'Re already at home. You don't get to drive into work.
That's a good point. I didn't think about it that way. But yeah, it's. Think about making somebody drive all the way in just to let them go. Yeah, there is that idea that you're doing it in person and all that. It's like. Do you break up with a girl over text?
No, not personally.
Well, you're married, you're engaged. Why would you.
Yeah, I wouldn't. I'm not worried about it. But let's see. And then it kind of talks about a couple other companies.
The Goldman Sachs eliminated 3,200.
Jobs by via email.
Elon Musk basically, just when he took over Twitter, he didn't tell them they were fired either. They just. They couldn't log into the system or get into the building anymore.
So, yeah, that, that feels a little dirtier. But at the end of the day I thought that it sucks any way you let. There's no way that you can lay off people and be like, oh, yeah, that was awesome. It is one of the. It's one of the tough parts of running a business, right, is if sometimes you do the wrong hiring or hire too much or things change. But also related to that is it ends up that making people not drive into work was really Stellantis main concern from a safety aspect because they also announced that they are recalling 318,000 vehicles because of faulty airbag parts.
Why can't we make airbags the right way?
Aren't all the airbags made in Japan.
For the longest time they were made by Takata.
Isn't that Japanese?
Yeah, yeah, but yeah, so we just. We don't make airbags that, that work. Right. 318,000.
What's that recall going to pay?
Three tenths, probably.
And you have to take the dash part. The good news is. Oh my gosh, I remember this. So, so this is 2018 through 2021. So newer cars. But I remember down in Florida when Stellantis had a recall on the Ram trucks. And imagine just being down in Florida for years and this was like. It'd be like. This was 2016. So it'd be like a 2006 Ram truck. And literally the dash, when you try to do the airbag recall, just turned to peanut brittle and it would just like disintegrate while the technician was trying to take the airbag out of the car. Oh, and by the way, they didn't pay for it if the dash broke.
Who paid for it?
The customer. Or in some, some cases we ate.
Was tough.
But you were working in a Dodge dealership in Florida, though. You were at a Volkswagen dealership.
I went to the Dodge dealership first. Same company.
What happened there?
Oh, the job ate me up alive. I was working from 7am to 2am.
That'S what you do now?
Not quite to 2am at least. I work from home for the last six hours of the day. But yeah, it's a little bit.
You know what my memories about a Dodge in Florida are?
No, tell me.
That time we were pounding down the whatever interstate there, the four intercontinental roadway or whatever they call it in Florida, and you're putting on your makeup and drinking your Starbucks and playing around with your texting somebody trying to switch the song.
I think I had my laptop.
Meanwhile, there was a.
Accident in a.
Construction zone during the rain. Yeah, all that stuff.
And you noticed very late.
Dynamited the brakes. Your anti ABS kicked on. Oh yeah.
They were so. They were so loud on that truck too. It's like.
Like that. I think I was trying to take a nap.
You had napped successfully up until that moment.
Yeah.
And I can't. I'm not way to wake up. I'm not sure if you woke up because of that or right before it, but it was. It was really, really close.
Nothing makes me nap quicker than a road trip.
Y. Oh my gosh. There's a. Chris doesn't have a lot of stress in his life, but one of those stresses is the.
No, a lot of them have something to do with your driving.
Yeah, Exactly. I'm probably three in the top.
The 10 minutes it took you to hit me with my jet ski. On my jet ski.
That was the only time I did it. The whole rest of the week it.
Was great because I stayed away from you.
That's true. Lake Chase. You need to keep going for further away.
I kept my angles.
I never put myself in that situation again.
The.
And then. What about jumping? What about jumping the.
The.
What do you call that? The roundel.
The roundabout.
Yeah, the roundabout. Cincinnati. Oh my God. You're a terrible driver.
That wasn't even my vehicle.
You're driving is legendary.
It's. It's getting that way.
No, that was. That was a situation where we'd had a lot to drink and you don't. You don't usually drink. And so he was like, hey, drive my truck back to the hotel.
Yeah.
And. Yeah. And so it might have been better to have somebody drive drunk, which I'm not condoning, like statistically hard thing to say, but. Yeah.
It was also only like three blocks.
And we'd only had a couple drinks.
Yeah. But I did not drink, so I.
Was the design right over the top of that. Dude.
Shortest distance between two spots is a straight line.
Interesting when, when you go from concrete to grass in a truck.
Yeah.
From asphalt to grass.
Yeah. There's a couple of stories like that out there.
Yeah.
Which we talk about today. Teacher not a preacher.
Nobody likes the preacher.
Teacher not a preacher. Well, I think there's a lot of guys out there that are preachers.
But not me. I'm a teacher. I'm not a preacher. I'm not the motivational.
10X go get it. I'm not that guy. I'm more of a.
Think about it psychology of it.
You know, I think that one of my favorite things when I watch you teaching people is you really give people the opportunity to come up at their own solutions. You're not giving up discoveries. Yes.
Guided discovery. I know, but would you say most.
Most managers out there are teachers, preachers or bystanders?
Bystanders.
Why do you say that?
Because they're, I think a lot of times the people that I come in contact with when it comes to training their people, they're waiting for it to happen. Like it's a thing that they don't have to actively participate in.
So I was watching a video from this professor that was in on and had studied the nine dot exercise. Are you familiar with the nine dot exercise? Very, very familiar with it. Explain it to the audience.
So you, so you have the piece of paper that's put in front of you. It's got nine doc dots.
It's laid three rows of three.
It looks like tic tac toe is what it always reminds me of. But yeah, so three rows of three and the.
The objective.
The objective or the rules of this thing are that you've got to have your pen where you can't lift it off the paper and you have to make four. Use four lines without taking your pen off the paper and connect all the dots so you can do like four turns if you will.
Right now it's hard to do extremely. In the, in the, the professor was talking about when they were studying people doing it. The secret to it is to think outside of the box. So what happens is those dots and look it up. If you're not familiar with it, but just type into Google the nine dot exercise and it'll come up. Those look like a box. So it looks like a big box with boxes inside of it. Right. Because like you said, tic tac toe. The idea or the thing that corporate America took away from that exercise is in order to do that exercise. You have to think outside the box because you come through the middle. Right. And then you almost are drawing like a. Like an arrow in a way, but it's not intuitive whatsoever. And what he was saying is when they were doing the experiment with the nine dot, getting people to do it, they started telling them, you have to think outside the box. Because usually what happens is they. They started, and then they go around the outside and they realize they didn't get the middle.
Yeah, they miss it.
There's a bunch of things that people normally do, but it's rare somebody can figure it out on. On their own. And so he said when they would tell people to think outside the box, it did not help them anymore. In fact, that just confused them more. It made it worse for them. And so he said the only way for them to learn it is to show them.
Yeah.
And it made me think about how often we overlook that in our industry in the sense that we don't think of ourselves as teachers. But you, you're a teacher. Like, most of what you're doing should be constantly teaching, teaching, asking for feedback and comprehension, and then teaching and then comprehension, and then teaching and comprehension. Right, right. Over and over and over again. And.
You know, I've said this before, but one of my mentors, Don Crevier, when I became a general manager, I never held a sales meeting before. And I'm a service guy, right. So I'm from Fixed Ops. So he said to me, he said that that sales meeting that we just had on Friday is the same sales meeting I had 20 years ago at Something Something Ford. It's the same one that happened a year. Like, it's the same thing. It's about how we greet customers, the steps to the sale, the. You know, it's just about the process over and over and over and over again. The system, in a sense. Right. And that always kind of stuck with me is it's like, you're not even today, we think, like tablets and video inspections and all that, but all of those type of things are still an outcome of being able to do a good inspection. It doesn't matter if you're doing a video inspection if you're not doing a good inspection.
That's right.
Right. And so it's the same thing with walkarounds. It doesn't matter if you're doing a walk around. If you're not connecting and making friends with the customer and building trust, it doesn't matter. Right. And so the going through the motions and checking a box is what happens if somebody's left to their own devices? Right, yeah, they'll do a walk around, but a teacher is the one that gets them to do a walk around with the outcome that we want. It's getting them to do an inspection that, you know, really does cover everything and is consistent and complete every time, taking the customer into consideration, you know.
Yeah. I think the teacher adds inspiration and understanding to why we do the little things that we do. So it's not just a box check. It's actually, oh, there's an end purpose to this.
And the one thing that I think happens in every industry, not just us, this happens in professional football, this happens in restaurants. It happens on people trading in the stock market. It happens in politics. It happens in every single sort of career that is performance based. Is. Once we get to an elevated level, the first thing that we start to neglect is, is the fundamentals in football. It's the tackling. Yeah, right. Last year the Seattle Seahawks were terrible. We couldn't tackle. We're like third in the NFL. And run defense, also penalties, too.
Right, Those basic things.
Freelancing penalties. We're all too, you know, we're all getting paid a bunch of money and we think we're, you know, but we forget that it's about tackling. It's about, you think about the wide receiver that starts to run before they catch the ball. Yeah, right, like. Or the wide receiver that anticipates the hit before they catch the ball. They don't end up catching the ball, they drop it. And so it's the same thing with us is the thing that we need to be teaching more than anything else is the fundamentals. And what do we overlook? We overlook how we answer the phone. We overlook how we describe a problem on an ro. How we put information into a repair order, how the technicians put their stories into a repair order. We overlook how we do a walk around. We overlook how we do an inspection because we start to think, oh, well, those are. Those are things that you should know. But the truth is that the magic and the gold is in how we answer the phone. It's in how we do an inspection. It's in how we catch the ball and how we tackle. And so teaching is about back to the fundamentals over and over and over again. And one of the things like that you, you notice, like, say, in the shop, you take a veteran old Wiley technician and you give them a mentee to train. The first thing that you will notice in that old Wiley veteran is that their fundamentals get better again because they have to teach the fundamentals. So their inspections get better, they'll start flagging more time because they have to be an example. And that forces them to revisit fundamentals, things that they took for granted. Right. Little things like, oh, I order. I go get. I order the part before I go pull in the car. Like, they start to take shortcuts.
And they forget about the fundamentals.
The other thing I think about being a good teacher is it's not just about being the teacher. It's also about the systems that you put in place. Form equals function. Do you have any idea what that.
Means about form equals function? Essentially just that. That if you're designing a service drive and the way that you greet a customer, the way that you walk out is kind of all built for the intention at the end of the day for the. To have a good experience.
Let me give you an example. If you're a school bus driver and you have 32 kids to pick up, and you do that with your Kia Santa Fe, how's that going to work out.
Without some rope? Not good.
Rope. What are you going to do with rope?
It's for a different episode.
What are you doing with rope?
I'm just saying you got to get them all secure.
And they stack well.
Oh, you're gonna stack kids on top of a Santa Fe?
That's where the refracts.
Okay, well, that's not safe, and we don't want to do that.
All right.
So it would probably be better to have a school bus.
Way better.
Okay. So that's. Form equals function is the system.
The.
The environment that we're in, the culture that we're in will dictate the function of things. Right. So take, for example, our process in the drive with service drive, judo. It's kind of impossible for people not to do their job because of the form of that system. Yeah.
It forces it.
It forces the advisor to go out to the car. It forces a certain rhythm. There's timing, there's accountability, all of that. So form equals function. To be a good teacher, you also need to be good at creating systems that people can function inside of. It's not just about the teaching. It's about the. The environment and the system that's in place that encourages that.
Yeah. And the system's built to make people, even the most average people, way more effective at the end of the day. Oh, by the way, is that sound like one of your worst nightmares? Like, let's say that you're about. You have a You have a boy, A five year old.
So I have a kid.
You have a five year old kid.
Now, did I have the kid or did my chick have the kid?
She did, but you helped.
It started with, do I take maternity leave?
You can if you want. I don't know, it's kind of the thing these days. But you, you know your boy's first day of school and you're walking, you're sitting out at the bus stop, and then all of a sudden the big yellow school bus pulls up and I'm the driver. What would you do?
Carpool?
Yeah.
Like, would you just stay?
Would you just say, go on? You'd move.
You'd wave the bus on, not flyer the neighborhood. Like, rogue bus, school bus driver, not safe. I love this number. I'd start tying kids to the top of my Hyundai Santa Fe.
Which is safer, statistically. That's good.
That'd be so funny if you were texting and drinking coffee and putting on your makeup.
There's so many things you can get done while you're driving.
MP3 or you're trying to figure out your playlist.
Yeah, because those kids are gonna listen to grunge. A lot of grunge. Grunge and country.
So great. Yeah, that's really good. What do you think of those? Well, maybe I'm just gonna say what I think of it, but way too often I'll come up with service managers that say, say I'm not good at training. Like it's a foregone conclusion that they couldn't possibly get better at it.
I think it's never too late to start to figure that thing out. And you are. There's a couple of things. Like if you're a service manager, if you want to be kind of, you know, like, just to borrow from the book, irreplaceable. I think if you can train really well or teach really well and recruit really well.
You have. You have a really good lock on employment for a long time to come. Like, those are two of the main things, don't you think?
Well, I would say candidly, if you would verbalize that you're not good at teaching, you probably should go back to whatever it was you were doing before, because one of two things. One is you could get good at it if you wanted to. So that tells me you don't have the want because it's probably one of the most important parts of whatever. Whatever it is that we're doing. And second is you just give up easy. Then if that, if that's Your obstacle, if that's your hang up.
Yeah, you probably aren't meant for the job.
Yeah, I think learning to teach is. I think it's got a lot of, you know, built up hype around it. But at the end of the day, you're pretty safe if you just try to teach people the way that you learn. Like, if you can put yourself in the shoes of someone that would be learning something. Like, it's. It's not as much of a Rubik's cube as people think it is. At the end of the day, you just have to make it about the people you're teaching, not about you.
Well, even that. Like, why would you even verbalize that? Like, why would you even have that thought? Like, the way that my mind works, if there's a thing that I've decided to do, and if I've decided to do it, then it means I want to be good at it. So if I've decided to do it, I want to be good at it. Why would I verbalize the things that I need to get. Get better at? I would just be working on it. Unless I'm asking for help. But I would say, like, hey, I feel like I'm not connecting with people when I'm teaching. What would be some insights you could give me? Way over. I'm not good at it. That's like giving up.
It's like, yeah, I'm not good at. It's giving up. But if I'm trying to get better at it's way.
Oh, I would ask. I would be like, what insights do you have? How do you know? What have you learned that you know, that's a, that's a mindset that's trying to get better. Not a mindset that's a step away from giving up. Right. Like, if it's that easy to get you to give up, give up now.
Yeah, good. Any other tips or tools on the teaching thing?
I think it's an identity thing. I think you have as a, as a manager. You have to think of yourself as a teacher, and you can't get bored with it. It's the same that, that Donnie story about. It's the same thing over and over and over and over. And you try to find new ways to gamify it or a new story or, you know, having somebody else do it. Like have somebody who's good at it. So say you got an advisor that's really good at walkarounds. Having them talk about their, you know, their version of walkarounds. But beyond that, it's like, it's the same. It's the same thing. Right? That's the, that's one of the, the pitfalls of what we do is we're in a closed loop system. So it's the same thing every day. Right. Customers are going to make an appointment or come in, we're going to write them up, we're going to have a tech look. It's the same. There's nothing new and unpredictable about that.
No matter how many times it's possible.
But it's super easy. But one of the outcomes of being in a closed loop system is we avoid change and.
We avoid thinking of ourselves as a teacher. And we kind of think that, we think that everybody knows what we know, but that's just not the case.
One of the things, one of the things I remember about being a client was this. I don't know, I'm sure it was you that came up with, but I saw it as like a tagline on like my first tracking sheet. It was like at the top of the tracking sheet and said, training isn't something we did, it's something we do. Do you remember that?
Yep.
And that is probably the main thing is, is that when it comes to training and teaching is that your job is never done. Like, they've never, they've never graduated.
And in way too often we think because we told somebody something one time that we assume that they're going to be great forever. I know there's times I still need to be reminded of things.
Thanks. Thanks, you guys for hanging out with us. I will keep updating you on whether Christian's love life is improved, decreased, wonderful.
But so far it's flat. Yes, exactly the same. We'll see you next time on Service Drive Revolution. Thanks so much for watching this episode of Service Job Revolution. We're uploading new stuff every day, so make sure you subscribe and click the bell icon so you don't miss out. If you have a question you'd like us to answer on the show, call 8333 Ask SDR and we'll answer your question on the show. That's 8333 Ask SDR. For special deals on our books and training, head over to.
