Three Roles of an Effective Leader

I need your opinion on the following. Is the following subject a column in MPN? Is it worth and entire chapter in the book? Is it the theme of my next book? As usual, some of these thoughts are random. (Those of you who write will recognize that, of course.) Please leave me your input, folks. Thanks.


I have found that there are three common "hats" interchangeably worn by all of the great leaders I've ever been around; three specific areas of focus they have in common. To further make my point, the great companies I've been around (bands, churches, sales teams/departments, etc.) also have a similar balance of those three components.

I've borrowed the following terms from a popular vernacular to make the discussion easier. The three "titles" of great leaders are:

Evangelist – The Evangelist “converts” thinking. He is the guy that gets the team to think a certain way – to change their paradigm. This guy speaks in terms like, “Do something FOR your customer not TO your customer.” Once that mental conversion has been accomplished, it’s time to bring in the…

Teacher – The Teacher delivers practical skills to the team once they believe the system. He’ll help them to understand and memorize WordTracks; teach them when to talk and when to listen. This guy gives the team a greater degree of ownership and succeeds in small and measurable increments.

Preacher – The Preacher is mostly a motivator and cheerleader. He keeps all the conversion work done by the Evangelist locked in place. He’s the “Stick Factor Guy” if you will. The team must often be made to remember what they believe in order for it to remain fresh in their minds. Often when the Preacher is speaking, you’ll get more of the, “Oh yeah… I used to do it that way” than you’ll get “A-Ha”.

I've also come to believe that when you create and environment that has all three of those elements, you're more able to not only attract good people, but to grow them into great people.

And the rules shall set you free...

Until Mozart subordinated himself to the absolute unalterable rules of music – Do, Re, Mi, etc., – he could never have released to the world, the amazing compositions trapped within him. Once he mastered the piano by having learned how to do what it forced him to do with it's rigid structure, he was then (and only then) free to make the piano do what he wanted it to do.

Until you understand and subordinate yourself to the rules of buying, you cannot create a selling procedure which facilitates a purchase. You must first submit to what MUST take place prior to a purchasing decision before you can summon the creative energy needed to facilitate that buying decision; not just on a global level, but with each individual customer encounter.

Shrinking the Waiting List in Service

Can it be done?

(This is a column I'm preparing for March release in MPN Magazine and I need your help.)

We’re working with a dealership where we’ve been able to improve their efficiency from 16% to 82% in a matter of a few months. Much of the improvement was actually achieved within the first month. The most immediate and obvious manifestation was that one of their techs who had never billed more than 80 hours in a month. He shot up to 125 hours in the first month, and he’s sustained that level for four months as of this writing. The not so immediate albeit much more important, their Service Department is profitable for the first time in the five years under the current ownership.

I can hear you asking, “How?” …which is exactly what I asked Bob Fitzpatrick, our Service Department Trainer. After all, you can’t just magically create more work… can you?

Here’s his reply. “Well, Otis” in a rather c’mon-Otis-try-and-keep-up tone, “you know that 2 week waiting list most Service Departments have in the heart of the season? And you know how it never seems to grow much past 2 weeks? And you know how it never seems to shrink much smaller than 2 weeks either, until of course, the season starts winding down? Well did yuh ever wonder why?” (Bob actually talks to me that way. But then so do most Service Managers.)

The reason that it never gets any longer than 2 weeks, is because most people just won’t wait any longer than that. Likewise it never gets any shorter than 2 weeks, because people will wait that long… but no longer! Most high end restaurants have a similar dilemma trying to reach their capacity on a busy Friday night. People will only wait so long for a table, no matter how much they wanna impress their date. The only way for restaurants to improve their “turns” is to get more people in and out. It’s the same thing with Service.

So what I need from the pool of genius on this blog is the "how". How do you shrink that waiting list?

Competition or Collaboration?

How are you approaching your customers? More precisely, do you know how your employees are approaching your customers? Are they approaching them with a spirit of competition or collaboration?

Here’s a very accurate way to define the difference. If you and I are gonna compete, I’m gonna win. If we’re gonna collaborate, we’re BOTH gonna win.

You’ve gotta make an accurate assessment of how your customer is approaching you as well. Sometimes when we simply wanna take care of him, he’s trying to beat the snot out of us. Not exactly collaboration there either.

One place to illustrate my point is how we approach price: Are we trying to beat the customer at the negotiating game or are we trying to help the customer make sense of the financial aspects of his purchase decision?

It's such a habit that sometimes we push our customer into trying to beat us up when he showed up in the spirit of collaboration. He often walks in to make some choices and we leave him only one by arguing about or discounting the price before the customer ca pick out or decided on a bike. That’ll push him into defense mode at a minimum, but often we start a big drawn out messy negotiation which ends up with nothing but two pissed off parties and no sale because there was never a commitment to buy. Then we’ve rendered ourselves enemies instead of friends. That is the antithesis of collaboration. Now we’ve only got competition left as a way to communicate.

Not many customers are willing to endure that just to buy a bike from you. Some will but most won’t. I wonder how often that’s what’s actually happening. We end up believing that the customer is a knuckle-head and he's convinced that we are; all just because we didn’t take the time to meet him on his terms. He did his part. He showed up at the place where he believed the professionals were. We didn’t do our part by asking the kinds of questions needed to determine how we could meet his agenda. Nope, we just told him what he couldn’t do when all he wanted to learn from us was what he could do.