Another satisfied car buyer drives away in their new Honda/Chevy/Ford/other make. They’ve just experienced the best car purchase in their life. They have the perfect vehicle with the right features. Their new car is within their budget. Best of all, they didn’t feel pressured nor did they get the feeling the salesperson was hiding anything. It was the ideal, transparent transaction, and their SSI survey reflects it.

Six months later, that same customer returns the lowest survey score ever from their first service visit. “There must be something wrong,” you think. “They love us! They would never trash our dealership on a survey.”

You’d be right. They didn’t trash your dealership.  The customer blasted your service department alone.

From years of auto retail experience, it happens more than you’d imagine (unless you’re in the service department – then you probably know it’s true). This type of two-faced feedback comes about when the sales and service departments aren’t operating on the same wavelength.

It’s About Culture

The service department in most dealerships is geared for an overriding purpose: generate income. With front-end sales gross dwindling, dealers lean on fixed operations to generate the bulk of the income for the store’s operations. The message service advisors and service managers get is to bring home the bacon.

The sales floor used to be the same. In recent years, with buzzwords like ‘transparency’ becoming more prevalent, the sales floor has undergone a reform. The focus on the sales floor isn’t to slam buyers into any car you can – it’s to help them find the right car for their needs, facilitate a no-nonsense test drive, and provide a no-pressure environment for the transaction. That’s the way it should be in today’s marketplace. It’s a culture change.

Discrepancies in Dealership Culture

But the culture hasn’t made its way into the service department in the same way. There’s no such thing as getting ‘just an oil change’. It’s an oil change and a wheel alignment. Or an oil change and a tire rotation. You can’t just fix the primary issue on the work order. You must fix that PLUS the three other add-ons the technician discovered.

The pressure is high in the service department, and it’s no wonder customers hate bringing their car in for service (that applies to dealerships and independents alike).

Culture Shift

Dealers need to align their culture across ALL departments. The customer bringing in a damaged car to the collision center should have the same experience as the one who just walked into the showroom. The new car buyer visiting the service department for the first time should get the same feelings as they did in the showroom.

To state it clearly, the culture must be a customer-centric one. There’s no room for pressure sales anymore; not with so many online avenues to vent and complain in today’s market. The customer-centric culture must be spread across all departments, and that’s to provide the highest level of care possible.

Shift the service culture away from high-pressure sales and towards transparent, manufacturer-aligned service recommendations. Give the customers a reason to trust you, not distrust you.

Look at your dealership today. What message are you conveying to your customers in each department? Is it the same across all of them? If it isn’t, you need to re-align your department cultures.

There is no shortage of bad online reviews, excruciating customer tales, and complaints to deal with about the service department. It’s easy to pass off one or two as keyboard warriors or ‘e-thugs’. But the fact is that front-line service staff aren’t perfect. They never will be.

It’s been drilled home about ‘Service Advisor 101’ – the basic tools service advisors need in their toolkit to do their job. Service Advisor 101 includes customer service skills, performing a vehicle walkaround (WITH) the customer, writing a repair order, selling an estimate, and cashing out the customer. These are the essential tools someone needs to do the job.

However, Service Advisor 101 only includes skills that keep your head above water. To swim powerfully in the automotive industry current, there’s another level of training required. It’s one that, sadly, many advisors never aspire to and are never pushed to pursue.

Service Advisor Training 102 Curriculum

In a nutshell, it’s the constant pursuit of improvement towards excellence. Service advisors should be coached to pursue more than just the status quo. It’s about doing better for yourself and, in turn, providing a higher level of service to the customers you deal with daily.

Ongoing Training

As I mentioned, it’s about doing more than keeping your head above water. The 2018 Olympics in Pyeongchang don’t have swimming as an event, but there is speedskating, skiing, and dozens of other sports. Each requires a daily commitment to training hard, honing skills, and developing a winning mindset.

What you’ll notice is that world-class athletes don’t always train within their sport. Hockey players spend hours in the gym, building muscle mass in all the right areas to optimize their on-ice performance. Ski jumpers spend much of their time working on reactionary skills and mental focus so they’ll stay composed on the hill.

The same goes for the best service advisors. They need time away from their desk on a regular basis – monthly, quarterly, or annually – so they can hone their skills from the beer league to major league.

Pursuing Advancement

There aren’t many employees who are content to spend the rest of their career in the same position. It’s hard to accept as a manager or employer, but you need to prepare your staff for the next thing in their journey. If you’re lucky, they want to move up in the chain of command and you have the responsibility to prepare them for it.

Service Advisor Training 102 involves training service advisors in aspects of the industry they don’t see on a normal basis. It’s management-type duties like reading and interpreting the daily DOC report, overseeing a small number of employees, or sitting in on management meetings. You’ll find service advisors involved in this type of atmosphere develop a sense for the business and are better prepared when the opportunity arises to take on a management role.

Addressing Changing Technology

A service advisor with 101 training can write a work order saying, “CHECK AND REPORT BLUETOOTH WILL NOT PAIR AS PER CUSTOMER”. That’s an acceptable way to write the concern on a work order, and it’s probably not going to bring the heat on the advisor.

Service Advisor Training 102 involves getting the team member involved in more technical knowledge. They complete all the OEM training programs online that are available for their position. Infotainment systems, maintenance requirements, mechanical understanding – it all gives an advisor next-level abilities to be the best advisor they can be.

So, instead of writing a work order about Bluetooth not pairing, the advisor says, ”Jane, let’s go to your car. You can show me what you mean… Oh, I see. Jane, that’s an easy mistake to make. If you do this instead, it should pair for you without a problem. Let’s try it…There, all done! By the way, did you know your Bluetooth connection can also stream music from your phone?”

When a service advisor learns the product extremely well, they can provide a higher level of customer service.

There’s no finish line for service advisor training. It’s an ongoing process and progressive training opportunities should not only be available but encouraged!

Branding is a hot button. It’s pushed as the best way to create an individual identity or your dealership. Whether it involves a slogan, a physical image, or a location, branding has benefits, of that there’s no doubt. But branding your dealership can be detrimental if it’s not done well. Here’s an example of what I mean:

A Poorly Positioned Brand

A dealership’s brand is ‘Your Big City Dealer with Small Town Pricing’. That’s not too bad, kind of catchy. It’s a message from a rural dealer just outside a major city. They position themselves as equals but with the capacity to undercut any sales deal you’ll get from the urban dealerships.

However, they’ve created their own metric; a way you can measure your experience at the dealership. And unfortunately, in the automotive industry that’s dominated by commission sales, it’s not a promise you can make to your customers. Shopping between dealers is commonplace, and the ‘Big City Dealer with Small Town Pricing’ has pigeon-holed their branding into a losing proposition.

Any customer that gets a better deal elsewhere has immediately associated your store with a fallacy. Your store hasn’t come through for them according to your brand’s promise. It’s not only poorly positioned – the brand is based on pricing alone – but it’s unrealistic to provide that experience to each customer that comes through the door.

Make Your Brand an Achievable Mission Statement

A mission statement isn’t a destination but rather the road on which you’re traveling. It’s a consistent path that you can always find your way back to. That’s what a brand should be as well, and it should be evergreen. That means that ten years from now, twenty years from now, or even longer, your brand should be as applicable as it is today.

If your branding is about an experience, it must be one you can promise for every single client or visitor that comes through your showroom doors, browses your website, or visits your service department. Here are a few things you CAN’T promise in your brand:

- You can’t promise to always have the best pricing. Someone is always going to try to undercut you and positioning yourself based on a best-price brand only takes gross profit out of your pocket.

- You can’t commit to being the most convenient. Current and potential customers have options, many of which may be more convenient in their personal situations.

-You can’t promise anything definitive like being the ‘ONLY’ anything. You just don’t know when something else comes along, and you’ll have to change your brand again.

Base Your Brand on Something Experiential

Let’s look at that sample again. They’re only one word away from a really good brand message: ‘Your Big City Dealer with Small Town Service’. Everyone understands the ‘small-town service’ image of being friendly and personal. Those are characteristics you can reasonably promise that a customer can experience at your store. However, it means that the small-town service experience has to be the one overriding motivator for everything in your dealership. Whether it’s the sales experience, the service drive experience, or the parts guy at the counter, everyone needs to understand and undertake the brand message as their own.

It comes down to being who you say you are, and if you can deliver it consistently, that’s a message you can hang your hat on.

Your dealership website is often the first point of contact for new customers. It provides high-level information for shoppers and current customers. You’re displaying your inventory, enticing the anonymous lurker to make their first contact with your store. It’s the first impression you make on the clientele you’re targeting.

If you’ve had someone spend hours taking high-quality pictures, you have a system that decodes the VIN for accurate details, and you keep the listings current, you’re on the right track.

You give detailed profiles on your sales, service, parts, and support staff, making a personal connection with the reader. It’s an extremely healthy item for your website.

The mobile experience mimics your website with intuitive, easy-to-navigate menus and simple-to-find information. It’s really coming together.

You have a website that functions well and looks great! But instead of the roar of the crowds in response, you have crickets. Why is it?

The Silent Killer Has Sturck

Did you notice the typo? And what did you think? As soon as your brain detected the spelling error, it was like jamming the gears. Your engagement went from a 10 to nil in a heartbeat. The silent killer STRUCK!

Spelling and grammar are two of the most important things to a reader, even though they may not identify it. It might be an errant keystroke or it could be the writer isn’t strong in the area. Whatever the root of the issue, one misspelled word can negate everything else you’ve built up.

Are you doubting how relevant it is? Think about it in real-world applications in your life:

• When you read Facebook posts, do you pass over the comments with improperly-used punctuation or those with none?
• On a LinkedIn profile, do you give credence to people who misspell words in their posts?
• Do you weight a tweet’s validity based on how well the writer conveys their 140-character message?

I’d be willing to bet that at least one of those items strikes a chord.

A Simple Message: Speling and Grammer Matter

I promise I’ll stop the intentional spelling errors. It hurts me too! But it drives home the point: your dealership website content needs to be spot-on with every detail you present to the reader. Spelling must be correct. Sentence structure and grammar must be accurate. In short, eliminate this basic issue as an obstacle for your customers.

How Do You Do It?

It sounds simple. Accurate spelling and grammar aren’t as easy as you’d like to think, however. If someone at your store writes content for your website, you need to give them the tools to be successful. Grammarly is a fantastic tool that addresses most grammar and sentence structure issues and is phenomenal with spelling. It even offers an alternative so corrections are often just a mouse click. If your content has frequent mistakes, though, perhaps you have the wrong person on the job.

Ideally, your content should be handled by a professional service. Online content creators have the skills necessary to provide a top-notch website experience for your readers…without all the errors. It’s going to seem expensive at first but if it results in a single new customer, it will pay itself off immediately.

Take a look at your website right now. Check every page for spelling and grammar issues. Are you missing an ‘S’ in ‘Accessories’? Is there an ‘A’ in ‘Definate’? Can you find a run-on sentence or a period where there should be a comma? Is the wrong ‘then’ or ‘than’ used?

If you find errors, your customers will also. Don’t let something as simple as spelling get in the way of selling cars!

You think you’re dangling an enticing lure in front of your customers’ eyes. You plan to set the hook and reel them in. But what you don’t know is that the lure you’re using is completely ineffective!

Yes, that’s a nebulous analogy but you’ll see where it’s going very soon. It includes a challenge for everyone reading this to take a look at what you’re presenting to your customers.

From My Experience…

I’ve just completed a major purchase, one that’s very similar to that of buying a car: a travel trailer. I spent hours browsing online, searching for just the right layout and configuration for my family’s needs. I visited probably 10 to 15 dealer sites – maybe more – looking for the elusive ‘white whale’ of travel trailers.

And then I did. I found the right floor plan and the right equipment. But what was extremely tough to find was a list price. What I wanted to know is approximately what I should expect to spend for my desired trailer. And time after time, I was frustrated by the lack of pricing available. What was on more than 90 percent of the VLPs was a statement that makes my innards burn: “CALL FOR PRICE”.

You Haven’t Earned a Call Yet

Think of it as it applies to your online shopping and research experiences. When you come across a listing that demands you “CALL FOR PRICE”, how do you respond? I can tell you, my initial response is to find another dealer who will give me a price online. When you require your potential customer to ‘take the bait’ on a bare hook, you aren’t going to land many fish.

It’s because you haven’t earned a response yet. The goal for vehicle listing should be to create warm leads; to generate true potential sales. If someone is contacting you to find out a price, they’re already irked that you haven’t given them information they want and, for all intents and purposes, should already have from you.

You Don’t Want Their Call

And if you’re a salesperson who gets that phone call, you’re already behind. The conversation is no longer about the product or the experience – it’s all about price. No matter how much better your dealership performs, there’s very little chance you’ll sway the customer on any other metric than the price. Can you say “Mini”?

Take a look at your website today. Are there vehicle listings, parts specials, or service menu items that tell the customer to ‘CALL FOR PRICE”? If there are, think about how you’d respond if you were in the customers’ shoes. Then consider why your listing is like that. Is it because you don’t have a price available for the unit yet? Or, are you fishing for price-based leads that whittle your gross profit down to a nub?

If you’re fishing, you need a worm on your hook to get a bite. If you want customers to respond to your vehicle listings, give them a full, juicy, tantalizing description complete with a price.

Take a minute right now to browse your website’s home page. Just open a new browser window on your phone or your computer, check it out, then come back. It’s okay, I’ll wait.

What did you see? Did anything catch your attention? There’s probably a slider at the top, scrolling through your current offers. You have a sharp-looking logo up in the corner, maybe a bunch of your top-of-the-line inventory flashing across the screen.

If this sounds what you just saw on your website, you’re missing the mark completely. The Car Buyer of the Future study by Autotrader gives you a glimpse into what customers value most in their dealership of choice. If they’ve come to your website, that says you at least have a shot at being their car dealer, but you’ll have to get their attention.

What Customers DON’T Want

What a customer doesn’t want on your website is to be ‘sold’ on something. The typical sales advertising tactics are old hat and have no place on your site. We’re talking about the “$77 per week” ad or the “9,999 plus $3,000 down, PDI, Freight, dealer fees, and sales tax” banner. That’s not helping anyone!

Actually, your website is hardly about the vehicles at all, except for your in-stock inventory. Better, more accurate and complete information is on the manufacturer’s site. Unless you’re doing something special with the vehicle listing on your website, it shouldn’t be the focus.

It’s not the time to close the customer, and unless you’re selling cars online, the vehicles aren’t the most important part of your site.

What Customers Want in an Online Experience

What your customers respond to most when they visit your website is a unique experience. This can’t be stated strongly enough:

Anyone with the same franchise as you can get the same vehicles as you, if they don’t already have them. Your customer experience is what you should give your customers a taste of online, not just the cars and trucks you sell.

Please don’t get the message mixed up – the vehicles are important to have listed, just not as important as your team members and the environment.

How You Can Tweak Your Website

What you see when you first view a website, before you scroll down at all, is known as ‘above the fold’. It’s a term from physical ads where there is a literal fold in the paper. It should always contain the most important message you want to convey; a briefing of what your store is all about.

• Make your staff a feature. If you have a slider across the top of your screen, include brief profiles of your sales and service staff. These are the people who make your dealership the success that it is.
• Give your customers a glimpse into your store. Photos of your showroom and your service drive make it less foreign, helping a customer decide to walk through your door physically.
• Be transparent with pricing. Forget about the ‘sticker price PLUS’ and instead, show all-inclusive pricing. At minimum, show a pricing breakdown with the total price displayed somewhere.
• For your vehicle listing pages (VLPs), be current! Don’t keep old listings up online and put new arrivals online immediately. Anyone shopping for a car doesn’t want to hear that the vehicle they’re inquiring about has already sold – that’s a turnoff.

Want to Make Your Website Truly Individual?

If you’re serious about being different in your website presentation than everyone else, get personal. Add a brief video of the president or GM explaining why their store benefits the shopper. Add video clips of friendly interactions such as a salesperson greeting a customer at the door with a handshake. Include a 360-degree showroom view and service drive view.

Give customers a reason to feel that they know you. It’s the personal connection that’s going to set you apart from the other dealers around you who all focus on price, not personality, as their selling point.

Parts departments, the service drive, the sales floor – everyone has a sales target every month of every year. There’s a clear expectation from upper management, which is a good thing. But that pressure to perform can cause good staff to run off the rails.

It isn’t always realistic to hit monthly goals, and some years it’s simply impossible. The economy affects how customers shop for cars and how tight they are with their parts and service dollars. And after a fantastic year or two of growth, the bubble is almost guaranteed to burst. It seems like a slump, but it’s just a correction, much like what happens in the stock market or the recent Bitcoin correction.

As a general manager, dealer principal, or department manager, you know this to be true in your head. But since everyone’s paycheck depends on sales, there’s a push to hit those elusive targets. When the pressure is on, now far will you go to make the sale?

Maintain Integrity…

It’s what everyone would like to believe they would do. When a customer shouldn’t be bought in the F&I office, the salesperson knows it’s not the right fit for the customer, or the fuel injector service isn’t really due but shows up on the recommended services, you’d like to think you’d have the integrity to take the high road.

Sometimes, it’s in everyone’s best interest to let a deal go. Despite the pressure to roll a unit or make a service upsell, the best way to serve some customers is to let the sale pass by and keep a loyal client.

For example, I have a rough older truck. It needed new tires, and the shop I chose to buy tires from knew it. I explained it was only a workhorse, yet the advisor had the option to try to upsell me services that weren’t of benefit. Had he pushed for fluid flushes, a transmission service, and brake services, I might’ve bought the tires but certainly would’ve gone elsewhere afterward. Instead, he knew my interests and made recommendations in passing, because he is a man of integrity.

…Or Get Greasy

The other option is to make the sale, no matter what the cost. It’s about the here and now – hitting this month’s target with no forethought of the damage it will do down the road. A few examples:

• Slamming a subprime customer into a car with payments you know they can’t afford at an obscene interest rate.
• Selling a trusting customer a brake job when a cleaning or adjustment would do instead.
• Playing a customer’s emotions, making them feel guilty, or causing undue worry about their current vehicle.
• Selling a part above retail list simply because you want to make up gross profit.

Especially at the end of the month when the pressure is on to hit the target, there’s a tendency to get greasy with sales. Instead of bowing to the pressure, maintain your integrity and only make the sales you know are honest. Your customers will love you for it.

As this new year starts, get back to the basics with your team. Make sure everyone is doing what they should be with every customer interaction. Ensure your team maintains their integrity with your customers and does right by them, and the sales growth will follow.

Overall, 2017 has been a success in the sales and fixed operations departments. We’ve seen a broader recognition of the service department’s importance, solid sales, and a surge in EV sales and developments. The new year, 2018, promises to offer incredible opportunities for success going forward.

Professionally, you might find yourself at a high point in your career. Things could be going really well – your staffing situation is perfect, you have customers flowing into your store, and you love what you do. Or, it could feel like it’s all unraveling. In-fighting or high turnover can be beyond stressful, you aren’t getting the leads or traffic you expected, and it’s a grind going to work every day.

Moving Forward Isn’t Always Easy

Whether you’re coming from a high point or you’re struggling with what to do next in your career, it’s important to keep taking strides. Staying still is the best way to grenade your career. You know how it works:

• If you’re doing well and are happy with the way both you and your department are doing, it won’t last. Your higher-ups expect growth – personal growth and sales increases. Without a growth strategy going forward, you’ll be at risk of being replaced with someone more driven than you.
• If you’re struggling and want to give up, don’t. Whether you get through the rough waters and into smooth sailing or you seek a change in your career, demonstrating a ‘never-say-die’ attitude will help you in the future.

With both trains of thought, there’s a sure-fire way to ignite your passion for what you do and to discover new or better ways of doing things.

Get Out from Behind Your Desk

If there is one thing you should do in the new year, it’s to get out from behind your desk. Your office is holding you back. It makes you inaccessible and unapproachable. It blocks you from seeing what’s going on around you in your department. It turns your eyes downward to the reports you’re reading or the screen you’re scrolling.

If You’re a Sales Manager…

You need to be present with your sales team. There are slow times when you can get your reports completed, and you’ll need to set time aside to watch the auctions and replenish stock. But your greatest impact is when you’re walking the showroom floor.

Customers appreciate when the sales manager is approachable. It feels like they care about the customer, not just about making the numbers work and closing a deal. Your salespeople will learn more from you and feel like they can trust you better when you talk with them in their space, not yours. Spend as little time as you can at the podium or in your office chair.

If You’re a Service Manager…

I’d encourage you to abandon your office. Use it only when you need a closed-door meeting with a customer or staff member, or for a short time each day when you complete the required documents. Instead, spend as much time as you can in the service drive and the shop.

You’ll see an immediate improvement in your staff morale – you’re showing that you care about what they’re doing. You’re helping when you can, you spend face time with the customers, and you’re seeing the problems and bottlenecks in real time, which means you can get them addressed sooner. A service manager out of their office can be much more effective.

If You’re a Dealer Principal or GSM…

The business side of a dealership gets in the way. Get back to what you love – the customer satisfaction business. When you spend less time at your desk, you’ll develop stronger relationships with your managers and employees, which improves staff loyalty and morale. Customers who see the owners, DPs, and GSMs enjoying time with customers and staff in their store feel like it’s a place they want to do business. And being outside of the office will certainly help top management to understand necessary changes and discover what their customers want.

Less time at your desk will absolutely have a positive impact on you, your department, and your store as a whole. If there’s just one change you can make for the new year, this should be it.

You might’ve had cause to be a skeptic at the beginning of 2017, but no longer. 2017 is the year Volkswagen committed to building an electric option in all 300 of their worldwide models by 2030. Volvo says every new model launched from 2019 onward will have an electric motor in some capacity. The Chevrolet Bolt is the 2017 North American Car of the Year, and the Tesla Model 3 finally (and slowly) began production.

Electric car technology is here to stay, and it’s going to change the way dealerships do business. That incudes the service department from tip to tail.

How Your Service Department Needs to Handle EVs

On average, your electric car customers will be much the same clientele; perhaps a little more environmentally conscious. How your staff relate to EV customers should remain constant with your other patrons. But how you deal with their vehicles will affect your service department structure.

You need a charging platform.

What you need will depend on the products your store sells, as well as the volume of EV sales. Have a minimum of one fast charging station outside your dealership to add a quick charge to depleted customer cars and inventory. Inside your store, have one Level 2 charging system per 4 to 6 service bays.

If this sounds like more of an investment than you’re ready to make, think about the repercussions. If a gas-powered car runs out of fuel in the shop, it only takes a moment to put gas in from a jerry can. If an electric car depletes its charge, how do you plan to ‘jump start’ it to move it? Besides, with electric car model releases ramping up, it’s better to be prepared ahead of time.

You’ll need EV techs.

The immense amount of electrical discharge from an EV can kill someone. It’s fundamental that the people working on electric cars know how to do so safely. All of your staff – from lot attendants and detailers to master technicians – should know how to be safe around an electric car.

Technicians, though, will need more thorough training. Begin the process of certifying your techs to work on not just your brand’s EVs but others that come through for service or used car reconditioning. Have at least two certified in short order; then add other techs consistently as time allows.

You’ll need dealer certification.

Get ahead of the dealers around you. Be the first to get EV certified in your area. Manufacturers will only sell their EV products through their certified dealers – the Chevrolet Bolt is one example and the Ford Focus Electric is another.

There may be geographical restrictions they impose as well, like just one EV dealer within 100 miles. If you aren’t the first, you may be waiting years before you can get your foot in the door. You need to find out your manufacturer’s requirements and implement them as soon as you physically can.

These three things should be at the top of your 2018 checklist. 2018 promises to be another big year for mainstream electric cars with the Honda Clarity Electric coming out, the new Nissan LEAF recently released, and other models kicking up production. Be prepared for the wave of EVs you’ll soon see on the streets.

You expect a certain amount of respect, and along with that, you expect to be listened to. Yet, every manager finds themselves in a place at some point where their words have no effect. It’s like speaking into the void of space: absolutely nothing is getting through, no matter how vocal you are.

It can seem like your team isn’t paying any attention, and that feels like a direct blow to you as their leader. It rings of disrespect for your authority, doesn’t it? It stings, and the lasting effect is that you begin to doubt your ability to manage.

Look for Proof

Before you get too crazy about it, do a bit of recon. It’s important to know whether your team has actually heard your previous directions, and that’s best done by observing. Take stock of their actions – are the directions you’ve given been put into action? Is there a direct contradiction to what you’ve said?

In my view, there are three possibilities:

• Your staff are following your instructions – you just didn’t hear a verbal confirmation that you were heard.
• Your words have fallen on deaf ears. There has been no proof that your input has been put into action.
• There’s direct contradiction to your instructions. This is the worst – someone thinks they know better.

How You Respond

Just because you’re a manager doesn’t mean it’s easy to respond, but it’s a must. If you don’t, you’re not just allowing out-of-line behavior – you’re approving of it.

If you feel like you weren’t heard but your instructions ultimately were followed, it tells you that your communication needs some fine-tuning. This is easy. All that’s you need to do is ask for your instruction to be paraphrased or repeated back to you.

If you’re the manager whose instructions don’t meet resistance but aren’t put into action, you have a challenge on your hands. What’s happened is that, over time, your team has gotten into a rut. They run on autopilot, and that makes diverting from the routine difficult. Hands-on coaching may be necessary for implementation. More likely, it requires less managing and more leading. Simply telling your team which way to go is less effective than showing them the way. And remember that changing a routine takes consistent effort for at least 3 weeks before it becomes the new routine.

If you have someone on staff that goes completely against your instructions, there’s an obvious issue. It’s a case of someone thinking you don’t know what you are doing and undermining you, or it’s a person who really doesn’t like their job or where they work. But before you put the issue squarely on the employee, you need to evaluate the environment. Is your request unfounded? Are you micromanaging? Is the workplace becoming toxic? Or is there something personal standing between you two? Try to resolve issues that may be affecting performance before coming to the decision to terminate, even though that might need to be the end result.

Evaluate Your Instruction

You’ve already said it, so you have to ensure its compliance. But if you’re noticing that you are ‘losing the crowd’, it might be a professional development issue within yourself.

The tendency as a manager is to want control of every facet of operations. You know what that means in your own store. You may be getting tuned out by some if you start micromanaging every process instead of letting service happen organically and personally. If that’s the case, you should find someone in your team – your ‘number two’, for example – that you can trust to bounce ideas off before implementation. You want someone who is willing to tell you that an idea is dumb, redundant, or unsustainable.

Often, you’ll just find that people are being people. Change is difficult. Making something new routine takes a long time. There’s other stuff going on in each person’s life. You should strive to be sensitive and gracious to these things. Knowing someone is understanding can build strength as a team, and you’ll find you’re being heard more often.