Chris Hunsicker teaches dealership managers how to build lasting habits through trigger, action, reward, and reminder instead of relying on motivation. He walks through concrete examples like laminated needs-analysis cards and team shout-outs for bookings, then challenges you to design one habit, deploy it, and iterate.
Chapters
Foreign, You don't need more motivation, you need a better default. Every great leader I know has done this. You have a killer meeting, you absolutely nail the standard, the whole team nods in agreement and three days later, they're all back to doing it their way, the old way. You don't have a motivation problem. You have a habit architecture problem. And we're going to dive in and address that today. I'm Chris Hunsicker and this is the dealership war room. Leadership fire. Built daily, fueled intentionally and delivered relentlessly. And today I'm on location at Hansel Honda in Sonoma County, California, just north of San Francisco. And basically the war room is going to be on location for the next three weeks. So come along for the ride. And for today, let's dive into what can we do to create habit hacking skills for you and your team in your store? If you want real behavioral change, you have got to stop relying on memory, energy or emotions and start engineering the environment. Because your team runs on habits. Habits don't care about how fired up your team was in the last meeting. They care about cues, friction, and follow through. So here's the key. Don't coach the outcome. Build the environment. Architect the environment where the right choice becomes the default. So let's dive into the four forces of team habit change. Literally, how do you hack habits? You can't use brute force to change habits, but you can engineer it using these four cues. Number one, trigger. Number two, the action you want to take. Number three, rewarding for the effort. And number four, reminder. Let's break each of these four down. Number one is the trigger. Make it obvious and then tie it to an existing event. Like for example, if you want someone to floss, then as soon as they brush their teeth, the next thing they should do is floss. Right? If you stack a habit on top of an existing event, then the trigger becomes something you're already doing and you don't have to remind yourself of it. So for example, right after you greet the customer and you go through the meet and greet and the warmup, immediately take them to the walk around before you sit them down at the desk. Then they're always going to get the walk around done. The more you can make the trigger something that is already happening consistently, the faster you can build a new habit. Number two is action. What is the specific next step that you want them to take? Make it small, specific and finishable. For example, write the RO and concern on the clip for before you pick up the phone to call the technician. Absolutely so once we got the trigger, the action, the next step we need them to take. Number three is reward. How does the team feel a win, having done the action, having taken the action. And now this is where things are idiosyncratic and it's different to each team. And you got to know the vibe of your team. Is this personal recognition? Is it personal growth, Is it competition, is it public praise? What specifically rewards that behavior, reinforces it and is going to give you more of it? For example, create a shout out to the first person to book an appointment that morning. If your team was going to call from 9 to 10 every morning, first person to book an appointment, shout it out and praise it. Number four is reminders. And this gets skipped so often, but you can't just shout out what you want. That yes you need a trigger and yes you need a specific action and yes you need that reward for going on, but you need reminders so that the habit stays continual and keeps going on over and over and over again. Think visual prompts, checklists, scoreboards, rituals. For example, a sticky note on every monitor that said speed sells, follow up wins. So there's this constant reminder of what it is that we're trying to do, the habit we're trying to hack. You don't need a tougher speech. You, you need a tighter system. Let's take Sean, who was begging his sales team to do a more consistent and proper needs analysis. They kept skipping it until he created a laminated card with three questions that he put on everybody's desk. Then he ran a contest. Most needs analysis gets $50. Spiff. Then he built in a ritual where at 5:30 every day he would sit down and have a one minute win recap. So what happened? Consistency, confidence and buy in. Because he didn't just coach the habit, he hacked it using these four steps. So today's war room challenge. It's simple. Pick one habit, one behavior you wish your team had automatically and then run it through the four forces. What's the trigger, what's the exact behavior, what's the reward and then what's the reminder? Design it, deploy it, and then reinforce it. Let's wrap up with this thought. Motivation is always temporary. It's transitory, it's ephemeral. It disappears into the air where systems are sticky and habits are the absolute hero of every high performance team. So look, what can you do today? Start taking your frustrations and turn them into systems. Make a list of the daily habits that you wish your team had that they did automatically and then attack them one by one and day by day, week by week. And let's take one habit at a time and build that. Let's hack the habit by using all four forces. And then once you lock that habit in, let's move on to the next habit and the next one. What you're going to find is in 90 days, you got a high performance team with high performance habits. Instead of every 90 days complaining about the same habits that your people don't have, if your team doesn't have the habit, it's not a lack of motivation and it's not their problem. It's you haven't designed an engineered an environment where, where you can hack the habits and build them so that you can create the momentum that you want. So take this, design it, figure out what habits do you want to have, how are you going to have it, how are you going to hack it, and then what behaviors, first, second, third, fourth, sequence them. So there's this constant build of habits as you go through. And with that, I will see you tomorrow in the dealership war room.
