Don’t hope your staff gets better — make them better

If you’re hiring a technician, advisor or counter person in the hopes they will get better at the job, you may be in for a world of hurt, a shop coach warned.

It’s tough to find talent, yes, but when you bring someone on and it’s clear that it’s not working out, the onus falls on you to challenge them and get the best of their abilities to shine through, urged coach Rick White, president of 180Biz.

It’s not about what you hope for them to do, it’s about whether they want to get better at the job and you push them to reach their goals, he explained.

“One of the mistakes we make is we hire people and wait for them to get better. You have to be the catalyst to making them better — your expectations, your belief and confidence in them,” White said during the presentation Business Boss Leader: From Creeper to Leader at the Mid-West Auto Care Alliance’s Vision and Hi-Tech Training Expo in Kansas City.

Think about this this way: Be the person in their life who, when they look back 50 years from now, point you out and say you’re one of the five people who made them what they are today.

“How many of you have people in your life that have done that? That ‘I see something in you that nobody else saw’ and they demanded it from you?” White asked the audience. “It’s your turn to be that person. See things for others.”

You can help staff accelerate their growth by giving them higher targets. If you aim higher, you’ll hit them harder. He gave the example of a boxer. They are trained to not aim directly for their oppoent’s face when they punch — they aim for six inches behind their target. They end up hitting their actual target harder.

Think of that when setting goals for your staff. Put them a little higher — if they hit, great. If they miss, they still hit a pretty high goal. So you can set a goal of 10 per cent growth and hit eight per cent or go for 20 per cent growth and hit 15 per cent.

“So go big or go home,” White urged. “Dream big as if you could not fail. Because again, failure is not an option here.”

Image credit: Depositphotos.com