Chris Collins explains how managers should handle bad attitudes by confronting employees one-on-one and enforcing expectations until the attitude breaks. Target influential negative employees first, and when hiring, prioritize attitude over technical skills since skills can be taught quickly.
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 going to be my little thing I was going to 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, 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, 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, and 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.
A 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.
Yeah.
Prison yard.
The prison yard mentality. Right.
So aren't there gangs in prison?
Yeah, yeah. But you go in.
Is it a non gang thing or a gang?
It's a non gang thing. So you walk into a new place, you got some rough attitudes, and the person I believe that you tackle first is the one that is the biggest barker. And you're basically going against the biggest guy in the yard or girl, where I'm gonna fix the person with the worst attitude that has been there the longest, that has the best numbers or whatever it is. 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 Groundhog 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 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 the changes of 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.
Thanks so much for watching this clip of Service Driver 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.chriscollinsinc.com now it's Offers. Do Chris collinsinc.com I'm Chris Collins, and I'll see you in the next video.
