Chris Collins hosts a short Service Drive Revolution Drive By episode about leadership. He argues that effective leaders provoke strong feelings — they are loved or hated but never met with indifference — because indifference signals lack of leverage and low performance expectations. Collins emphasizes being fair and ethical (otherwise polarity is harmful), pushing both top performers and underperformers, and creating a performance-focused culture. The transcript also contains brief audience questions/banter, a teaser for the next episode, and a standard closing with social links and CTAs.
Chapters
Foreign.
And welcome to this week's service Drive Revolution. The drive by. I want to talk about something today that has to do with leadership. And what kind of a leader are you? In my career, I've worked with well over 10,000 leaders, at least, and it might even be more. And I've seen good leaders and I've seen bad leaders. And most leaders truthfully, aren't very good. Most of them aren't very good. Most leaders are in their position because they stayed around and they were trustworthy, and I call them Charlie Browns. You can trust them with the keys to the building, they'll open up on time. But they're really not going to create alchemy. They really prefer their comfort zone over performance. They prefer safety over putting it out there and maybe making a mistake every once in a while. Most managers are right in the. In the middle. And I want to tell you, tell you this about leadership, is if you're a leader that isn't hated and loved, you're probably not a very good leader. If you're a leader where your people are indifferent and there aren't a couple people on your team that hate you, you're not pushing hard enough, you're letting that bottom part of performance in your department just sit there, they're indifferent, you're indifferent. It's okay. Hey, it's, you know, murders, murders allowed here in our department. People can perform, not perform. If there aren't some people that aren't performing that don't hate you, you're probably not a very good leader. So the best leaders are loved and they're hated, but never indifferent. If people are indifferent about you, you're a terrible leader and you have no leverage whatsoever. You have nothing to work with. You need that emotion. There has to be passion about your leadership. It's either love or it's hate. But if they're indifferent, you're dead in the water. Now, the last thing I would say about this is.
No matter what, you lose all credibility. If you're not a fair leader and you're not ethical. So everything that I just said gets diminished. If people hate you because you're unethical and you don't tell the truth, you're not fair, you don't listen, you don't really care, then what I'm talking about is a completely different conversation. But I'm assuming you're fair and you're ethical and you care about people, then people need to love and people need to hate you, and you need to be okay with people hating you. To be a good leader. So think about that. Absorb it, process it. But it's magic if you really take it to heart. Get aggressive. Get aggressive at the top and get aggressive at the bottom so the underperformers don't feel comfortable. They should not like you if they're underperforming because your culture should be a culture of performance. So thank you. I hope you have a great weekend. And now stay tuned for a preview from next week's Service Drive Revolution.
Next week on Service Drive Revolution, let's talk about the five reasons technicians aren't efficient.
Get everybody committed to delivering that five star experience every time now and in 90 days you'll have a completely different reputation than what was in the past.
Now, what is value to a customer? What makes a good deal?
You mentioned the book Wooden. He has several books. Which one would you recommend to start with for our group?
Is the autonomous driving system on a Tesla safer than humans driving?
Double your labor rate right away. That will kick out the people that can't afford it, that don't want to afford it and just attract the right customers to you.
That's. Let's fix Ford right now. So everybody watching this. Everybody forward. What we're about to say to the CEO of Ford.
I heard you've been traveling a lot.
You're just saying that to mess with. But we're drinking tequila.
Yeah.
My parole officer would never approve.
Yeah. So it's a. It's a disaster. People from Illinois can't drive.
Correct.
It threatened to come to their house and break their knees.
You could do that.
It's Miami.
That's right. Just get a silencer for your Glock.
Thanks for watching this episode of Service Drive Revolutions Drive By. I hope it gives you something to think about over the weekend and inspire fires some new ideas and hopefully some new results. If you have any questions for the big show, go ahead and post them below in the comments. We'll be looking out for them and we'll answer them on the show. Make sure you subscribe and hit the bell icon so you're notified when we post new episodes. I'm Chris Collins and you can find me on Facebook and Instagram at Chris Bulldog Collins. And I'll see you again on the next episode.
