Episode 077: Live from RTA Connect

Welcome to the Fleet Success Show. 3, 2, 1. We are a podcast dedicated to talking about the fundamentals, standards, and best practices that empower today's fleets to achieve fleet success. Let's get into the show. All right. Welcome back for another episode of the Fleet Success Show. I'm your host, Josh Turley. My co-host, Jeff Jenkins.

Hey, Josh.

Welcome back.

Thank you.

A long several weeks.

Very, very long.

Yes, it was back and forth. We were at FleetCon together. You went to McLeod. We had—

I went to Atlanta for a sales conference.

Well, then what was before FleetCon? There was another one.

IANA.

There you go. So just back and forth, road warrior. Welcome back to the show. Yeah, I didn't burn it down without you, so that was good.

That is good.

So last week, uh, in the last couple weeks we've talked about the, the presentation we gave at FleetCon, uh, then last week we talked about intentional culture from a technician's perspective, which was a question that I had after that presentation. I had another question that came from a local city here, and you know, I have 2 managers from this city came up and asked me about one-on-ones. And during the presentation, as I talked about how do you improve technician retention, right? We're like, we don't have to go hire employees if we keep good employees around. The way— one of the ways to do that was to have really good quality one-on-ones, right? And I, you know, we recommend doing them weekly, at least biweekly if not weekly, but not to let it go longer than that because Otherwise, you know, like just too much time lapses. You're not having timely conversations. You're not— if you need to have a hard conversation, too much time can go on and you're not having that conversation. You don't get to know your people on a more personal level, right? And so they came up and they asked me, they're like, well, how do we, how do we have effective one-on-ones weekly when I have 13 people working for me and he has 18 people?

18.

18 directly working for him that directly report to him. And they're all technicians, right?

That's a big number.

It's huge.

13 is a big number.

13 is a big number. And so it got me going on like, well, what is the right number? And I've, you know, we've had conversations about this in the past here at the company, and I've talked to many of my mentors about this because one of our exercises we like to do is kind of design a future org chart. Like, what does this company need to look like in next year, in 3 years, in 10 years in order to, you know, in order to grow? What roles do we need? Who are they going to report to? Who's responsible for that function? And so, like, we're always kind of looking at that number and figuring out what is the ideal number, because you don't want it to be too heavy. You don't want to have it be too top-heavy where you have too much management, too much leadership, and not enough tactic, right? Where you're not getting enough of the work done. We see that plenty in school systems and university systems where they're very top-heavy.

Yes.

And you don't want that. You don't want it too much. But what I've kind of always gone back to is like the 6 to 8 seems to be about the golden ratio. You could have fewer than that, but like when you're running fewer than that, you have room and capacity to, to grow a team underneath you. and I want to say even the military uses about 6 to 8. In fact, I think their squads are 4.

Really?

Yeah.

Okay.

I think their platoon is 8 and their squads are 4, like it's made up of 2 squads. Now I could be totally wrong, people in the military are gonna be like, "Dude, you're an idiot." But if I remember from my fanatical following of Band of Brothers, I think their squads are made of 2 teams, 2 firing teams of 4. And the platoons are 2 squads.

But even 8 is, it's like at the top end of what you have.

So, but even then you've got a squad leader, right, that kind of reports to the platoon leader. And then you've got usually 2 to 3 platoons in a company. And then in a company, it's anywhere from 5 companies that, you know, are under a single battalion, right? So, and I might have gotten that whole structure wrong too, but I think that's about the gist of it. And each time you can kind of see that trend, which is it's, it's usually never more than 6 to 8, right? Um, Jeff Bezos had kind of a similar thing. He called it the two pizza rule, which is when you get to a point that you can't feed your team with two pizzas, it's too big. Now I think you have to kind of put that into, you know, like two like thick crust Chicago deep dish pizzas, maybe.

Not the, hey, Jeff can eat a whole pizza by himself because it's Little Caesars, right?

Thin crust, you know, like, oh, I could pound that whole thing. I got half a pizza myself. Yeah. Um, so I would go like, I might stretch it to 3 pizza rules, right? You know, for the big eaters, especially in fleet. We got some big eaters in fleet.

Yes, we do.

Right. But we're hungry. If you're over 3 pizzas, your team's too big. Yeah. So I think that's a fair assessment. Um, so we're looking at this and, you know, and as they asked me like, well, how do we do that? We've got 13 people, 18 people, you know, if the ideal team size is 6 to 8 you know, like, well, that's, that's just not doable. Um, and so for them, I think they've got a couple options, you know, and the first one is you could keep your team of 13, right? Nobody's telling you you can't do that. It's just very difficult, right? Uh, because you need to have effective one-on-ones, and if you decide not to do a one-on-one because you don't have time to do it, what you're really saying is retention is not a problem that you want to focus on.

And retention is a problem everyone should focus on.

You would think.

You would think.

Maybe it's not a problem for those guys, right? And so in that case, like, you could do nothing and just have the status quo carry forward. Another option they could do, and we've actually kind of gone around this route, is start looking for people that are ready for kind of a leadership or, you you know, to take on more responsibility.

Yep.

And you can have them take half your team and just put them as like a team lead over that team. They'll report to the team lead and the team lead reports to you. But we've done that with several of our, like, our next layer of management. You know, we're installing kind of a middle management layer and we're doing it slowly. Like, not every department has a layer of middle management. You know, we're doing it as the team grows. Uh, you know, like our engineering team, you know, we finally got to like 13 or 14 on that. And so we said, okay, who in here is ready or, you know, seems like they're most capable of leading a team? And it's not necessarily going to be your best tech either, you know. It's— you're going to look for somebody who's got some leadership potential, that has influence, that people enjoy being around, that kind of shows you those attributes that a good leader has.

Yeah, and I would caution just choosing someone because they're the best at the role, right? We did that in trucking. So the best dispatcher, we're going to make them an operations manager, and and it does not translate. Nope, at all.

The skills are different.

Yeah, they're totally different. And so people say, hey, they're the best one for— at their job currently, let's go ahead and bump them up to a manager. And they just may not be prepared, may not have the skill set, they don't know how to coach, right?

So you want to look for people that are already demonstrating leadership capabilities.

Yes.

And like, okay, I'm gonna tap you and see how it goes. Um, but then you could take like your, you know, if you want to split a team of 13, you could take 6 of those, your most junior ones, and have them report to the team lead. And then you take the most senior ones and they report to you. And the idea there is that you are focusing your time on the ones that are the highest quality that you're most afraid to lose, right? And then you let this team lead kind of get their, you know, their teeth sharpened by working with the junior techs and helping show them the ropes, you know, and they can command respect in that area too because they know more than the juniors, but they might not know more than the seniors. And so that's another reason we kind of split that up in our engineering team that way, was to give a leader a chance to grow and kind of be a mentor instead of working with somebody that they can't really mentor and manage.

Yeah, so I'm going to play devil advocate because I had an experience to where I was pushing one-on-ones at a previous job and the person had, oh, 7 direct reports. And when I was asking about one-on-ones, they shot back and said no, because 3 people— so, so, so-and-so, and so-and-so— they don't need one-on-ones. They're the best people I have. They don't need to have that because they're already where I want them to be.

Hmm. Well, and I think— do we talk about one-on-ones in an earlier podcast episode?

Well, we did.

Yeah.

We did, but what that person didn't see is, well, that person now doesn't have the opportunity to talk to you about what their issues are, what their growth plan is, or whatever else. So you're thinking, hey, they don't need it because they're great.

They're terrific, right?

But they need it more than anybody else because you're trying to help develop them and give them a career path. Yeah.

And, and usually, like, when I set up one-on-ones is I try to make it where it's not my agenda. Like, I want all the talking points to come from my people. That it's their meeting with me. Like, I carve out 30 minutes and it's their time, right? Like, this is my time. I'm just dedicating me to you and you have me for free for 30 minutes. What do you want to talk about? And I have questions like we talked about that, you know, where you get to know them personally and see how things are going. But it really is like it's a time for them to— what do I need to work on? And if you're not giving them that opportunity, well, you're perfect. You're, you're excellent. You're also robbing them of the opportunity to improve.

Yeah, it's, it's funny because you say that, oh, you're perfect, I don't need to spend time with you, and then it comes time for an annual review or whatever, right? And they've got no feedback. Yeah, they don't know how they're doing. You say you're doing great, they don't know the score. Yeah, they don't know whatsoever. And then they're going to get upset because something goes wrong in their annual review or whatever else, and they're like, wait a second, where's— you didn't tell me I wasn't doing a good job, right?

Or worse yet, there is nothing wrong with the job they're doing, so I should be expecting a nice little pay raise, right?

Yeah, a big bump.

And there's nothing there.

And then they get like 2.5%, 3%, which is standard, just set in the budget, and you're like, wait a second. Yeah, I thought I was doing great.

So when you don't have those conversations frequently, like, things like that can fester. They can go on for long periods of time without being addressed. You can think, you know, like, oh man, I keep having this conversation in my head, but I'm never having it out loud. And then you get to that year mark and all of a sudden this stuff all comes out. You could have avoided all that with a one-on-one. So there, that's their first option, right? Split the team, have a team lead that's ready for leadership, take the juniors, and then they focus their time on the seniors.

Yep.

Just by doing that, you know, it's a team of 13. If somebody took 6 and that's, you know, the 7th becomes a team lead, that means you've got how many left? 5 left plus the, the team lead. So now you're back to 6. It's a good ratio.

Very good.

Now if you're 18, you might have to split that into 2. You might have to have 2 teams of 6, uh, with your 3 to 4 seniors plus your 2 team leads. Um, but you're at a point though, is like once you get to 6, and you can stretch this, like we've, you know, I've stretched this to about 8. When I'm at 9, that's when I really start feeling it. And this is the, the second option you could do, right, is you could choose— you could move them to biweekly and then do half on one week and half on the other week. Biweekly can work if you're working with some really talented technical people and they know what they need to do and it works, right? Like most of my one-on-ones I do biweekly, but I'm also meeting with my entire team every week.

Yes.

And so there's not really a week that goes by where I haven't talked to my team at least once or twice. Um, so they could do that, switch it to biweekly, and then that means that they would be doing 6 one week and 7 the other. Um, the other option is they could just not do one-on-ones with the juniors. You know, like, this is something else that somebody mentioned to me is like, well, they could just focus on the top talent, right? And a lot of managers, I think, would make the mistake of spending all of their time with the junior technicians Right? And what I've learned is that often we spend, you know, use the 80/20 rule and we spend 80% of our time on the bottom 20%. Right? Like we deal with the bottom 20% behavioral issues or anything like that, whereas we should be spending our time on the top 20%. You know, how do we nurture them and grow them? Because who's going to hurt more when they quit? It's not going to be your junior. It's going to be your top performer. Right? Like that's what's going to hurt is, you know, when you lose a top performer, And so you want to focus your energy and investment, water the trees that are going to bear the best fruit. And in this case, you know, that's going to be your top techs. So as a fleet manager, as a shop foreman, shop supervisor, spending your time with your top employees really is where the priority should be. And if you want to spend time with the juniors, do it more in a group setting where you can coach them all together or assign them a mentor that you can delegate and say, hey, you know, pair them up. So that 13 now becomes 6 just through, you know, each one of you has a direct mentor that, that is working with you.

Yeah, and I don't advocate to skipping your bottom talent. If you choose to do that, you should at least line them up with a mentor, with a senior person who's going to help them, or otherwise they're never going to get better.

And then they're going to look for— because what do they want? Well, they want growth and they want attention, and, and they deserve that in a career. And this comes, I think, the overall bottom line, this whole thing, right? If you choose not to do it, if you choose to only do it with for a few of them, if you, you know, like whatever it comes down to, if you keep the status quo, right? The whole saying that we always go back to was, you don't have a time problem, you have a priority problem. And that's really what you're saying is if you choose not to do this, your people are not a priority.

And it's no wonder you have a retention issue because your people should be your number one.

As a leader, they should be the absolute number one priority. The job comes secondary. The people are the job. So one of my favorite lines, if you guys ever watch The Crown, right, the King turns to the Prince of Wales— or not the Prince of Wales, whatever, uh, Princess Elizabeth's husband at the time, uh, Prince Philip— and it says, she is the job, right? Like, because he was getting a little bit distracted He's like, well, you know, it's all the pomp and circumstance and like, I'm going to be king and, you know, crown prince or whatever they call that, king consort. And, uh, and he lost sight of like what was most important was making sure that the queen was supported, right? And sometimes we lose that as managers. We get trapped in the glory of being a leader and like, or the, we're the number one person in our department and we forget what the purpose of the job is. And I'll tell you, as a leader, The people are the job and they get your job done, right?

Right.

So I was trying to think if there was another, uh, another option for these guys, but I like to, to get success and to develop your people.

There is no other option. I mean, honestly, you have to have your one-on-ones, and if you have too many people to where you can't do that, you're never going to get ahead of the game.

Well, so how many— what's the biggest number of direct reports you've had?

Well, that's a— so it's a two-part answer. Okay, so one was '62, but that was as a dispatcher, uh, when I first started out in trucking. Right, right. But that was a singular role, there was a singular focus, and I didn't have one-on-ones. I talked to every driver every single day, but it was more about, you know, showing up on time. What do you want your next load to be? When do you have to go home? Um, if they had like their miles per gallon was too low or their idle time was too high or they weren't getting the revenue or the miles on the trucks, you would talk to them about that. But there wasn't a designated time.

Were these company-owned trucks?

Uh, yeah. Okay. Yep.

So these are employees, company employees, correct? Okay.

Yep, absolutely. Um, if you take away dispatching, 13 is the largest number I've ever had in a leadership role.

Yeah, I think I've gotten up to 11, and 11, like, I start feeling stress.

Yeah, 13 was a lot.

You know, 9, it's like I start feeling it. By 11, I was like, I can't— like, I was not effective as a leader anymore. Yeah. Um, And it was at that point where it was like, where, where's my focus? And I think you mentioned, you know, that with the drivers it was one single role. And I think strategically that's, that's another thing as a manager that we have to learn is that if you have one role you're responsible for, it's easier to kind of replicate and say like, this is the plan for drivers, this is our strategic plan, this is how I'm going to make a difference and shape and work on my role instead of in my role. Yep. But a lot of times what happens is, you know, that 13 or 14 might be 5 or 6 different roles. And now you've got to figure out like, how is this person going to be effective in their job? And how is this person effective in their job? And now like you're playing chess, but you're doing it with two hands, you know, like you can only move one piece at a time. And what ends up happening is you lose focus or you can't focus on the right things at the right time and you've got too much to worry about. And so you never make enough progress. On any one thing. And so that's usually what burns people out, is that they're like spread too thin. Yeah.

And do you know what's funny? When I had those 13, I bet you I canceled more than I kept. Yeah. Because I felt so overwhelmed. And if there was one thing to skip, it was always going to be the one-on-one.

Right, right.

Which was odd because that's what was the most important thing. And I was like, oh, I'll just talk to him later, right? I'll just pull him aside and talk to him. But that never happens.

Yeah. So that's one option, right, is, you know, if you've got only like one role that you're responsible for, they're all technicians, because then you can do a little bit more group training. They still need one-on-one conversations, so maybe you do a shorter one-on-one.

Well, that's what I was going to say, it doesn't have to be an hour, it doesn't have to be an hour and a half, it can be a 30-minute conversation.

Yeah, mine are all 30 minutes, right?

If you can actually, you know, get in there, stay focused, and get to what you need to talk about, 30 minutes is plenty of time. Yeah, like I set mine for an hour But if it's a half hour, great. Yeah, if it needs to go longer, then it goes a little bit longer. But, you know, 30 minutes is probably the sweet spot.

Yeah. So another thing I'll do is I will ask during the interview process, when I'm interviewing somebody for a leadership position, I'll ask them the question, how many direct reports have you had?

And, and they will go ahead and give you a false number, right?

Well, they'll give me a big number, right? Like, well, I've managed a department you know, of 200 people. Yeah, right. And I'm thinking, why are you applying for this job, right? Like, I've got 45 people at the company. I don't need a 200 manager. But what I like to do is I'll ask him, oh, well, can you tell me the names of the— your, your team members? Like, what their spouse's names were and their kids' names were, right? Or like, how well did you know each of your people? Because if you're truly a leader, like, you would know the names of your, your spouses and your kids for your people, and at least in my opinion, uh, you know, because it tells me how well you knew them and if you're friends with them or if, you know, like you were doing one-on-ones. And a lot of them immediately back up. They're like, well, you know, I didn't have that many reporting to me. I had like 2 that directly reported to me, and then I had a team of 10 underneath them, right? And all of a sudden they'll back up, and then I'll let them like, you know, recover a little bit, but then I'll turn it right back around and say, okay, so the 2 people Could you tell me the names of their spouses?

Right.

And most people can usually tell me, oh yeah, well, you know, Bob was married to Sharon and Julie had a husband named Tim. And it was like, okay. But then every once in a while I'll get them like, oh, well, I actually didn't ever know that. Okay, well, did you ever do like one-on-one conversations with them? Or, you know, oh no, well, we never really did that in my company. Okay, you know, and then I'll use that and But it's one of the things that tells me is how, you know, how compassionate or empathetic are you as a leader that you're focused on your people and, you know, you care about what matters most in their lives. You know, to these gentlemen, you know, you've got 13, 18 people working for you. We talk about the 3 signs of job misery. And, you know, the number 1 is anonymity because they're anonymous. They're a ghost in the machine. And if you can't tell me the names of, you know, their spouses, maybe they're not married, you know, the names of their pets or their parents, right? You can't tell me what— who's most important to them. They're not important to you. And that's the message you're sending to them. So if you want to improve employee retention, do your one-on-ones, get to know your people. If you have too many people, start restructuring the team so you can have effective one-on-ones.

What's funny is you said that where they— little— they like expand that number, right? I've actually done that in the past. Someone's asked me, how many people have you had reporting to you before? I'm like, oh, 1,400. Right, because I was over all of customer service and operations for a trucking, and we had 1,300 drivers. Yeah, right. And then you have all these other people that report up under it as well, and it's just such a BS answer, right?

Yeah. And you're asking because you really want to know. It was like, well, how big is the biggest team you've ever led? You know, and, and some people, like, it helps you see how strategic they can get versus tactical. But at the same time, I just usually want to know you know, what's the biggest number of direct reports you've ever had to, you know, interact with on a daily basis?

Yeah, and I've got some work to do because I'm in my head thinking about the spouses' names of my people, direct reports, right now, and I can't think of one.

You can't think of one?

Of one person's? Yeah, I know everybody else's. One I can't think of right now.

Are they fairly new?

Yes.

Okay, like, because he— like, you got time, right? Like, you got to build that up. Yeah, well, I actually had it this morning. Somebody asked me, well, what, what was his wife's name? And I'm like crap. I know all of his kids' names. I can't remember his wife's name for the life of me. So it happens.

I'll just put it on age.

Right. Okay. Well, I don't have that excuse.

Neither do I really. All right.

Well, that's going to wrap it up for this episode. As always, if you want to hear more tips like this, you can go check out the Fleet Success Playbook at fleetsuccessplaybook.com. Uh, and then we have Summit 2.0 coming up, fleetsuccesssummit.com. That's March 21st and 22nd in Luxor, Las Vegas.

And we're about to announce another speaker.

That's right. Let's get really close.

Yeah, we're going to. I think we'll nail that one down this week. So hopefully next week we'll be able to.

All right. So keep checking on the website. We'll have new speakers up there. We're, we're doing awesome. Like, that's— I'm super excited about that. And until next time.

Thanks, guys.

Thanks for joining us on this episode of the Fleet Success Show. If you like the show, we'd appreciate your 5-star review. Be sure to subscribe anywhere you listen to podcasts and come hang out with us on social media @FleetSuccess. See you next time.