Finding the Right Roles for Your People

Jan. 2, 2014
A big challenge to any business owner or anyone tasked with hiring and firing is keeping our stores fully staffed.

A big challenge to any business owner or anyone tasked with hiring and firing is keeping our stores fully staffed. Even worse is keeping our stores fully staffed with capable, competent people, who know what is expected and know the policies and procedures that are unique to our operation. Often the perfect candidate is right there under our nose working for us. We just forgot they were there.

I would be the first to acknowledge that there are some employees out there who will never measure up, and who will never live up to our expectations. We hired them based on their resume, but even with extensive training and clear direction, they just never have made it and likely never will. We all have seen and experienced these lost souls. These are not the employees I will be talking about. The employees I want to discuss are those who have shown potential, have even had moments of brilliance but somehow have never blossomed into the hard chargers we thought we were hiring.

Knowing how busy most of us are and the state of training in our industry, I want us to look much closer to home the next time we find ourselves needing to fill a position. I have seen it again and again where we hire a seemingly perfect employee, with all of the right experience and skills, and within weeks of our hiring them we find ourselves frustrated and angry because they just aren’t getting it done. They just don’t get it. We give up on them, don’t waste any additional time trying to train them and just let them drift through the day pretty much ignoring them. We want you to take a hard look at yourselves and how you went about training them and setting expectations for their performance. Too often I find these new employees under-trained and clueless as to what we expect of them and too often we, the shop owners and service managers, are to blame.

In many cases we find ourselves hiring out of desperation. We have lost a key employee and though we were given notice or at least had a suspicion that they were on their way out, true to our long-standing habits, we didn’t do anything toward placing an ad or otherwise responding to the need to hire somebody. Now we are down an employee and desperate to find somebody as soon as possible. We place an ad on Craigslist, by some miracle (given our inability to effectively interview) not only get a good response but actually interview and hire a “perfect” replacement. Life is good!

Unfortunately, we have no formal plan for training this new employee and a good portion of the time, we throw him on the counter or out in the shop. Despite our being armed with great intentions, by luck or by a miracle, some of these new staff members survive this baptism by fire for several hours or even a few days and we decide they’re brilliant, they’re our guy and seeing how motivated and capable they are, we cease any effort toward training them. They obviously get it. However, we have just short circuited their training by throwing them into the fray unprepared for what will be coming at them, unaware of what our expectations are, and setting them up very nicely to fail. They are untrained, don’t have the knowledge or skills specific to our operation, don’t know what management wants, and have no chance of being all that we would have them be.

In putting together a training regimen, I like to combine a 60-day calendar with a list of critical tasks that I would like for the employee to master before setting them loose on the world. I notate times and days that we would provide training in the indicated tasks and do everything humanly possible to live by this training calendar. During the training period, you can throw the employee where you will, hopefully attempting to train them along the way, but on the indicated days and times, they need to be getting the planned training and all else is secondary in the effort. This way we are assured that no matter what, our people are learning and exposed to the tasks that we have determined are most important.  This assures that they have formal instruction in each applicable area. This more formal approach will go a long way toward assuring that our people are capable of doing the things we expect from them and are set up for success.

As leaders and as managers, it is extraordinarily important that we provide training and a work environment that will give our employees the greatest opportunity to succeed; success being their ability to live up to our expectations. The second we short-circuit the training process, the second we make assumptions about their ability, we set our newly hired or newly promoted employee up for failure and set ourselves up for frustration. Assume they know nothing and give them every opportunity to learn and benefit from a well thought out training process then get out of their way. Armed with this knowledge and experience, they might shock you with their ability and astound you by being all that you had hoped for and more. Redemption, in the form of training and clear expectations, might save you the cost of that ad and perpetuating an unfortunate cycle of hiring and eventually firing the wrong guy. Realigning the roles and responsibilities of existing staff members is much easier and more cost effective than recruiting and is also very good for the team.

You might not need to hire new employees, but if you take the time to evaluate and rearrange your staff, your productivity and sales could skyrocket.

This scenario is very similar to what I see shop owners do with marketing. Though we are cash starved, just barely able to pay our bills, we dig around in our couch and underneath the seats in our cars and scrape together enough money to purchase the latest and greatest marketing tool because goodness knows we need more cars. In this case we decide we need a new service advisor or a new B tech and without a thought toward the people we already have on staff, we are all over Monster or Career Builder looking for staff members that as likely as not are already there on staff, right under our nose.

If you have a staffing need, by all means fill it and fill it quickly. But when you start out on that search, before you look anywhere else, look close to home.    

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