Eliminating Negative Advisor Attitudes | SDR #284

Welcome, everybody, to the big show. Christian, the question that everybody wants to. To know the answer to is what to do when you don't like your advisor's attitude.

Oh, the burning question.

We're going to talk about hospital food.

And there's some fun stuff in the news and much, much more coming up on this edition of Service Drive Revolution.

We spent the last four days in the. In a hospital. I want to talk about that. But before that, coming up on our April coaching meeting, which is going to be here in the library, will be limited to, I don't know, 110 people at the most.

I think we. 110 was a. Was a stretch.

Okay. You want to talk about hospitals?

I do. Yeah. So I always get nervous when you talk about hospitals.

Do you know that there's kind of like a. There's a. Definitely a customer service push in hospitals. Like, they're surveying you for everything. They. They definitely are trying to improve their communication.

Okay. I don't know that I haven't been. I haven't been in hospital in a long time.

But they also.

Get it wrong, too, in a sense. Like, it's just interesting. So my mother had a pretty, you know, major operation, and the doctor was incredible. His team was incredible. But you show up to the hospital the day of the surgery, and it's so funny how the people that you interact with give the person who's about to have surgery a context. So if you meet negativity and you're going into a major surgery, your context is going to be negativity. And my mom at one point, this is no joke. And you know my mom. You've met my mom. You understand what, what an Irish.

I love everything about her.

What an Irish. She does not have a filter. Right. And so we had to be there at five in the morning.

Oddly, it snowed. They got three inches of snow, which.

Is not normal for that part of the country to get that much snow at this point in time. Correct.

Things are changing.

Yeah.

The weather's changing. I don't know why, but all of a sudden we're.

We're a. We got rainforest here in Los Angeles.

Right. We're going to wash into the Pacific Ocean. They thought it'd be an earthquake. It ends up. It's just going to be a flood. By the way, we should get two of every animal and build us an ark.

Turn the library into an ark.

So she had to leave. I stayed at a hotel closer to the hospital because that's kind of where we were all gonna stay. But she Was home. And so she was an hour and a half away. 2 o' clock in the morning, she starts calling. They have three inches of snow.

She leaves.

Then there's trees down. The electricity's out. It's like, wow. And so she, she was originally going to meet me at 4:30 to go to the hospital. She's like, me early for everything.

Sure.

So she was supposed to be there at five. So you check in at five and then I think the surgeons like to do surgery early. I guess maybe they're more.

Oh, maybe they need more time in the day in case there's something that needs to happen. I don't know.

You can only be under anesthesia, I think for like six hours.

But I think if I was a surgeon, I'd go early too. So that makes sense.

Anyways, we were supposed to be there at 5. She from 2:30 or whatever. She left all the way until she got to us was like 4:30. So she'd been up, hadn't slept. There's like special stuff you got to do.

You know, special soap, like all this stuff that you have to do. So we get there and you go to check in and the lady who checks us in and there's a group of people. There are people that are showing up late and they're all stressed out because trees were down and you know, sure. But we're on time, we're early. We get to the lady super rude that checked us in, like just out of the gate to start insurance. Like, and it's odd to me, they don't know all that ahead of time.

They ask for it, but they ask again.

It's, it's very repetitive. Like it's an interesting.

Organized, not organized thing. It's weird. Like.

You could get rid of 25% of the people there. There's just a lot of redundancy. Yeah. But so then we go to the waiting room. Then you get, she gets checked in, goes to the room to, you know.

The prep room or whatever.

Yeah, prep room.

Okay.

And the nurse in there was a little battle ax. Like she was real bossy and negative or whatever. And my mom, like only my mom can do, looks right at the lady and she's like, I'm the one that's gonna have surgery and I need you to be nice.

Correct. Yeah.

And she stopped and she like thought about it for a second and then she was cordial. She wasn't nice. She was. I don't think it was in her. Like, the best you could get is cordial kind of Sometimes you don't want your best technicians talking to customers. You might not want your best nurse or doctor talking to customer. I don't know. But it definitely. Like, she was efficient, but she wasn't charismatic, like, whatsoever. And she was having a bad day. The. Then the doctor comes in, and he's actually very charismatic. And, you know, you have to treat older people a little different because you got to explain things a couple times and make sure they understand and all that. But I thought it was funny that my mom was worried about her context going in. Like, she wanted. She wanted to. She wanted to be in a good mood, and she wanted it to be positive. And she just told the lady, like, right up front, like, you're. You're ruining my vibe here, lady. Like, yeah, cut it out for her. Yeah.

So then funny, though, that they don't understand customers. Like, they don't understand human interaction.

It's sad because I'm sure that they're.

Going through what we go through. Like, they can't find nurses. They can't find. You know, one of the. The things with Obamacare is it opened things up. More people are covered, but they didn't double the doctors.

Yeah.

There aren't more doctors.

They doubled the shifts, I think, for people like, the nurses.

Like, yeah, yeah, you have to wait longer for surgeries, everything. So they. There is an element in that.

Industry where I think you need them more than the other way around. Right.

Yeah. You don't have a choice of 10 other places you can go and get surgery done today.

And so trying to have a culture is harder, which I think it kind of. It mirrors our. Our subject today, which is what to do when you don't like your advisor's attitude. Right.

Yeah. It's so funny that I hear. Hear and read a lot on. I would say that there's a few hot topics in, like, kind of like that coaching and leadership arena that I kind of follow because I'm always trying to learn and do the things that we do better. And I would say that attitude is one of the most common topics that I see people. Either they're either doing podcasts on or they're doing little comments or LinkedIn articles and stuff like, that attitude is a very, very interesting thing to me.

Yeah. Okay. What's in the.

News?

Yeah.

So I've got a couple of things I wanted to talk about. The first is, I think it's interesting this is out of Fortune magazine and the way that the. The United States is trying to kind of block the. The Chinese electric Car. So they just not trying to.

We are.

Yeah, they're. They're blocking it. And they're also the ones that can come in. They're making it more difficult. Like they can't get tax credits if you have an electric car that has a battery that was built in China. But it, it's really clear that they're trying to block that Chinese car.

I don't know how I feel about it at the end of the day, but.

But it's interesting. It's definitely not free market, but I'd rather, I don't know, call me kooky. I'd rather have them buy people in the United States buy American cars.

When I was up there in Washington for my mom's surgery, I rented a Suburban.

What do you think of that?

It was a. What do they call it? A Z71.

Okay. So the kind of the. That's a little bit sporty, a little bit performance y. I thought it was great.

The, the only thing, the only downside. But the, the interior, the performance of it, the size, it's massive inside.

Yeah.

But you look like an Uber driver everywhere you go.

Yeah. That's hard part. Unless you do a special color. So like a wrap would kind of be a cool thing to do. But I think the Suburban's amazing. I love Suburbans. Tahoes. I think the Escalade killer comfortable. So easy to drive it. When someone that's not a good driver like me can drive those things, it's a sign that it's a pretty good vehicle. So usually when we go places together we'll. We'll rent a vehicle like that and it's just really, really comfortable. I noticed because when we do long drives, you go to sleep right away when, when we rent those. Cuz normally he's holding onto the dash just to let everybody know when he has to ride with me. But when we're in a Suburban, no, it goes right to sleep. So. So that is kind of an interesting thing. And then I thought this was kind of a fun deals. Nine cars you won't see in 2024. Some of these we've talked about before. That we kind of talked about being continued.

Yeah.

So. Well, at the very least they're not being done for 2024. So no more Dodge Challenger for 2024.

Yeah.

Why.

Why do you think that is?

I believe that they need to completely retool it. There's a new one coming out. But I would say that both number one and number two. Number one's the Challenger. Number two is the 300 which is on the same platform. The Chrysler 300. It is like a huge failure in some manufacturers is that they've barely redesigned those cars in 20 years. Yeah, it looks the same and it's just so crazy. There's a few other models.

They did the Varvatos edition.

No. Oh, that's pretty cool.

So those two are going by the wayside. Audi, I don't think this is a huge deal because they don't sell a lot of these but Audi TT and the Audi R8. The R8 kind of got claim to fame with the Iron man movies cuz Tony Stark was driving those. So those are both going away. Yeah, Chevy Bolt is going away. This is a big shocker to you is the Fiat 500 which it's only.

Going away here, right?

Yeah, I'm sure they're doing it. Why? You know worldwide there's still probably a Fiat 500 you Kia Stinger which took the place of like their regular four four door sedan. So Kia is doing away with the Stinger and then Mazda's RX MX 30 like a little utility vehicle looking thing.

But it's dead in the United States. Are going to continue worldwide production. And then the saddest thing to me because I've had, I've owned four of these cars. The Nissan Maxima. They're not making one for 2024. So I think they're kind of again kind of going back to the drawing board. I don't think that they've done a drastic enough change on that in the last 10 years either. So maybe they're going to come up with something super cool.

Honda and Toyota kind of own that part on the market.

Yeah. And Nissan, the Maxima has just been shrinking. Ultima's always kind of just Honda's.

Well the Hyundai's look great too. I think the Hondas and the Hyundai's look great.

Hyundai I think has their design. Oh I mean Kia I think has some really good looking stuff.

Very similar. It's not.

I like the refresh they did on the Tacoma for 2024. The. So I think they'll sell a few of those.

But.

But yeah, I think that there's some, some manufacturers are winning in the design world and some are not. But that's a list of some that are. Are going by the wayside. I was going to tell you a little story. I had a friend of mine went to a job interview. He sat down and the guy doing the interview slides a glass of water or a glass and then a pitcher of water where he's like, hey, would you like any water? And my buddy's like, yeah, thank you. So he picks up the pitcher and he pours and pours and pours. And then it starts overflowing at the end. And then he puts the pitcher down. And the guy doing the interview is like, are you a little bit nervous? And the guy. And my friend's like, nope, I always give 110%.

That's pretty good.

Thanks.

Christian, what do you do when you don't like your advisor's attitude?

Well, the first thing that I would say is.

It's, yeah, it's your responsibility. They're your people, Mr. Rogers. Okay.

Do you know Mr. Rogers?

Fred. Fred Rogers, Old Navy guy.

Attitudes are caught, not taught.

Attitudes are caught, not taught.

I love it.

Attitudes are caught, not taught.

So it would bring me to my next question.

If you don't like your advisor's attitude and attitudes are caught, not taught, who's in charge?

That would tell me they caught it.

From you or you're allowing it. One of the two, Right.

Or you didn't fix it.

You want to, you want, you want me to tell you a commonality between a service department where the advisors don't have good attitudes and something else? Can you guess what that something else is?

Like?

There's a commonality if the advisors don't have good attitudes.

Like things like this travel impacts. Right. They're not isolated. It's not. So my thought, everything else is working great, but we just have random bad attitudes. Right. There's other things that are broken around this. What would the biggest one of those things be? If you, if you find yourself saying, hey, I don't like my service, my service advisors attitudes, what would be something else? That would be a major problem that's going on that you can, you know, you're not psychic, but you just know.

Okay. I would say that the techs probably have bad attitudes.

Oh, that's a good one. I didn't think about that.

I would also say that the communication's really poor, both internally and externally. Would be. My guess is that we, we take it out on the customers.

Neither of those are what I was thinking, but they're all very good.

I would also say that.

The service manager might also have a little bit of a negative or glass half empty attitude.

And have you ever played craps?

Yeah.

What is craps?

Determined by.

Whether you hit a 7 or 11, which is what you're either you're rolling dice.

Okay. Yeah. And so when you roll dice, is it left to chance. The reason why it's gambling is because it's left to chance, right? Yeah. I mean, yeah.

Without loaded dice, you can't control how it ends up.

Right. So it's a. It's left to chance. So if you find yourself not liking your advisor's attitude, then what we're saying is that the advisors can decide.

What sort of customer experience we want to have.

That's right.

So depending on their mood, they can decide if they want to do walkarounds. Depending on their mood, they can decide if they want to have a good attitude. But the customer is going to get a random experience because the experience is left up to randomness. You're a gambler, you're leaving it to chance. So if you find yourself not not liking your advisor's attitude, imagine how the customers feel about everything else. It's all left to chance because you don't have a system for it. It's a, it isn't a culture. It's allowed.

Yeah. I almost would rather have it be consistently bad than random. I know that sounds crazy.

I get why you say that though. Yeah, I understand that. I don't think that that's what we have to settle for.

No, it's not the only option.

But I understand why you're saying the.

Customer knows what they're getting when they come in.

Yeah. You would rather have consistently bad than the randomness.

Yeah. It really messes you up when it's. It's six bads and one good.

So randomness, leaving things a chance that when they show up, they show up whenever they feel like showing up, they have the, a good attitude. Whenever they feel like they're going to have a good attitude, they're going to do walk arounds whenever they feel like they're going to call customers whenever they feel like. Like you said, communication. There's a lot of things now left to chance, which is an indicator that you got a manager that isn't a manager, their friend or their, their you know, talking head. But they don't really have any sort of grasp or hold on the business and what's going on. In a situation where I would contend that it's pretty easy because this is a closed loop system. Right. There's no randomness to a service drive. It's the same thing. People are coming in to get maintenance or repair. Like it's exactly the same every day. Like one day we might write a hundred and the next day we might write 90. But we're doing the same process with everyone and we're struggling to have consistency in a Groundhog's Day type scenario where it's the same thing every day. So I would say that if you don't like your advisor's attitude, it's. You're allowing it, you're allowing inconsistency and there's a bigger problem there than just that. Yep. You're a gambler, you're leaving it to chance.

Yes.

And then what happens to people who leave things to chance? Do they have an external or an internal locus of concern?

Control? External. Very.

And so then what? It's the market's fault? Hey, we can't find good people. These young kids, they don't want to work any. What it, what are all the external excuses that we're going to blame it on?

Because it's the building. The building, it's the generation.

The water. Yeah. Could it be the water causing the M Energy?

Biden's fault.

Yeah. Biden or Trump? I don't.

Both. It's both their fault.

In a two party system, it's somebody's fault.

Yeah. So it's, you know, attitudes are caught, not taught. Like if you're allowing it, you're, you're allowing other things too, that it's not a singular thing. The other thing is you hire for attitude.

Oh, so that was gonna be my little thing I was gonna ask you about. Right. So, so there's two types of situations here. There is the attitude that you inherit or there's the attitude that you hire. Right. So how do you approach the attitude that you inherit? So let's say that you're a brand new service manager going into a situation. There's three service advisors on the drive. How do you start to control or get control of the attitude?

Well, some, you know, sometimes you can sit people down and talk to them about it and say, you know, this is an issue and maybe you're aware of it, maybe you're not, but it isn't working. And most of the time that attitude comes with customer complaints and other things. Right. Miscommunication. The, the thing that happens is when you have a poor attitude, people don't hear what you're saying. So the communication is bad. Like you said, you said that at the top. Like it, it creates other problems. And so you sit the person down and you say like, here's an observation that I've had and maybe you're aware of it, maybe you're not.

But it stops now. Like, and every time I see, like I'm gonna progressively get, you know, in tighter and Tighter and tighter until you either break or you decide this isn't for you. One of the two. But it's not, it's not allowed. Like I dramatically overreact and I stand around and watch and remind and like I'm actively engaged in that. Like when we're struggling with something here. And this hasn't happened in a long time, but it did at the old building in our old office. We met at 8:30 every morning and talked about it every day. Every day until it was fixed. Right.

That's funny.

So we were all very active in the, in the resolution. If I have somebody with a bad attitude, I'm very active in that until it breaks. Like in by breaks is it gets better or it goes away? One of the two. But there's no in between. Like you can't negotiate. There's no negotiating.

Positive welcoming attitude. Right. Because it's an energy. Like customers can feel. That energy you can feel when somebody doesn't want to help you.

And have you found the same as I do is that I actually think the prison yard mentality works out the best.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What?

Yeah.

Prison yard.

The prison yard mentality. Right.

So things in prison. Yeah. But you go in non gang thing.

Or it's a non gang thing. So you walk into a new place, you've got some, you got some rough attitudes and the person I believe that you tackle first is the one that is the biggest barker. And the. You're basically going against the biggest guy in the yard or girl. Where I'm going to fix the person with the worst attitude that has been there the longest, that has the best numbers or whatever it is. And, and I know that if I get that person to fall in line, everybody else falls in line. So you don't have to keep doing it over and over and over again. Usually what happens, there's some people that are like a fulcrum type affect on the rest of the team where I can have. I want to use them to my advantage not to do Groundhogs Day. And you're like, you're having the same conversations over and over again. So I pick my battles in that situation.

Yeah. And I do it one on one.

Yeah. You're not doing it as a group. But you, but the, the rest of the team recognizes an immediate change in that person that they always thought, oh, they'll never change.

Yeah.

And then it kind of opens up that change is a possibility and all that other stuff. And then the backup to that, I'm gonna guess you kind of have written down this. Is that like you can hire in culture. I've heard you say that to me a couple of times. Is that like, I think so many times the reason that, that attitudes get terrible when you're hiring and then somebody comes in with a bad attitude and please, please stop saying this is that you're hiring because somebody has CDK experience.

You're not hiring for the right reasons. So you have got to 100% understand that you're, you know, you're going into battle with these people and it's, you got to have somebody that's going to lift everybody up.

Yeah, but you got to put in the work up front.

But whether or not they remember opcodes from CDK or how they get to certain screens has nothing to do with their attitude.

Teach that in a week. You can't teach attitude in a week.

I agree with you.

Okay, the other, the other part of this that I would say is form equals function. Do you know what I mean by that?

Okay, so how you have your, the structure of your department organized has, has everything to do. So you set up efficiencies within the design of the department.

Yeah, but if I'm having a shift meeting 15 minutes before and I'm focusing on the positive things and what we're doing, I'm making it fun. The environment is fun. Right. It's that attitudes are caught, not taught. I'm. If I'm playing games and I'm doing stuff that breeds fun, sooner or later that the bad attitudes stick out. It's, you know, they're contagious. So if you are creating an environment that doesn't allow that, that has a strong effect also. Like there just isn't room for that because we're having too much fun. We're in this together. Like, you either have the hospitality bug or you don't.

You either have it or you don't and you can't train it. In my opinion. I think that there are people that.

Have, like when we go into stores, even though we don't work there, when people aren't getting help, we're agitated. Like we want to help people.

Physically hurts me.

I don't know cdk, but I want to write up customers.

I'll talk to somebody for 10 minutes until you have it or you don't.

It just, it hurts to watch when people are here. Like if there's a line or, you know, like you just have the hospitality. Bugger. You don't.

Yeah.

And if you don't, it's hard to teach. Like you care about people, and you. You are in tune with how people feel. Or you're not. You got to have a little of that empathy, that empathy thing where you're worried about other people more than yourself.

Yeah. But you can create an environment where that's cool.

Yeah. And you attract people like that.

That's right.

But you hire for that more than anything else. And then kind of just to bring it all full circle, I think Walt Disney kind of had this, in a sense. And in. In my new book on leadership, there's a whole section on dramaturgy in this. But you. You think of it as casting for a play. Like, if you're. If there's a. Because he. He called people that worked at Disneyland cast members. They're not cast members or janitors. They're the ticket person or whatever. But no, everybody's performing, and it's the happiest place on earth. So everybody. You can't go to the happiest place on earth. And every time you interact with an employee, they're bummed out.

Right.

It doesn't work. And so everybody has to be happy. Everybody's playing a part in a play. And so you need to think about your department as you're casting for an outcome. You're casting for a play. You're writing a story. You're not leaving it to chance. And so if you're writing a story of a service department that customers want to come back to and that are engaged, if you're writing a story about your people, like Christian was saying, like caring and having that. That, like, hospitality bug, then that's the. That's the story that you're going to be telling in there. You would never cast somebody with a bad attitude. They wouldn't last because they can't remember their lines. They. When they're on stage, they fall apart. And so I think Disney had it right in a sense. Like, you got to think about it as casting a play or writing a story in a movie, then, you know, is something positive, not. You're not writing a sad drama.

Yeah, exactly. It's great.

So thanks for hanging out with us. That's. That's our thoughts on advisor attitude. And just, you know, if you don't like your advisor's attitude, look in the mirror. That's what I would say. You're allowing it. And attitudes are caught, not taught by Mr. Rogers. Thanks, everybody. We'll see you next time on Service Driver 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 offers do Chris Collins inc.com now that's offers.chris collins inc.com I'm Chris Collins, and I'll see you in the next video.