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High Performance Culture

High-Performance Culture

How do you build a great Culture?  What type of Culture do you have?  I’ve been in the Car Industry going on 17 years and I’ve seen my fair share of the following types of cultures:

Dog eat Dog – I’ve worked at the Dog eat Dog environment and although I excelled, I wasn’t a fan of the environment.  It was never a good feeling going into work making sure no one was trying to steal from you.  Being in a commission only environment it’s easy for people to essentially take advantage of a situation to cut you out of a deal.   The problem with this environment usually starts from the top and has zero accountability on the management.

Conservative – Conservative view or a corporate structure can be a good environment.  However, if left unchecked the problem you will run into without accountability and benchmarks is a slow bleed.  At some point you will go backwards.  It’s not sustainable.  I’ve found that most underperforming stores were great once, but lost the accountability piece because they had built such a great relationship with their employees that they wouldn’t hold them accountable and blamed their performance on outside economic reasons.  Instead of coaching them up or coaching them out.  Now I’m not saying you don’t want to have a great relationship with your employees; however, you still need to have the tough conversations with them when they are under performing.

High-Performance (Winning team) -High Performance Team – This is what I recommend to most organizations.  It’s having the conservative views with a hard dash of accountability and Key Performance Indicators.  KPI’s are there to keep our team in line.  We all need accountability and disciplines in our life to live long term.  For example, if I eat cheeseburgers and fried food 3 times a day, I promise you long term at some point I will gain weight or have a heart attack.  To better my health and live longer I need to have certain disciplines in my eating habits and exercise to get there.  With a winning team the KPI’s need to be there so if we fall and never get back up there are no surprises when you have to be cut from the team.

In order to maintain a winning culture, you must make the tough decisions to get there.  Now this doesn’t mean you have to curse or treat your employees harsh.  I always believe in treating people with respect and making it a great environment.  Here are 2 examples on how you can hold your people accountable.

  1. KPI’s to hit benchmarks – if they go 90 days in a row without hitting their objectives they are moved to another department or terminated.
  2. Tie some of the KPI’s to Pay Plan – In order to qualify for bonuses, they have to hit certain metrics.

I found no matter how much you try to lead someone or inspire them to do certain things the only way I knew for certain it would be accomplished is by holding the team accountable.  No one likes to be a bad guy, but there is a reason why we have speeding tickets.  If you want to change a behavior; the only way I’ve been able to do it successfully, is to tie it to there pay plan or holding them to it -in order to stay on the team.

As a father of 4 I’ve had to hold my kids accountable to taking their medicine.  I’ve bribed them, googled or YouTube several ways to encourage them to take their medicine to get better.  Unfortunately, I’ve had to resort to forcing them to take it.  Sometimes we all need that extra push to get better.

“A Coach isn’t your friend.  A Coach is there to push you beyond what you thought was possible or what you wouldn’t do on your own.”  Robert Kiyosaki Rich Dad Poor Dad

If you’re going to put a High Performance team together start with this outline:

  1. The Why or Vision is understood
  2. Values
  3. Customer Centric
  4. Players in the right position
  5. Team is self-managed
  6. Accountability -Goals are achieved

In order to win in the game of cars develop a High-Performance Culture.

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