What is good leadership? It’s not a simple question to answer, but it’s vitally important when running any kind of business. One thing is certain: a good leader should be able to motivate their team in a positive, constructive way. Here are a few tips on how to motivate your team and get results the right way.
Have Clear Expectations
The first step towards achieving results is developing standards and explicitly outlining them. Let’s look at an easy example. Do you expect your salespeople to meet a certain quota this month? Obviously, you wouldn’t spring this on them at the end of the month. You need to make sure you’re applying this logic throughout the business, not just where it’s blindingly obvious. If you want to hold your team members accountable, you need to explicitly and consistently communicate your expectations to them.
Define Objective Targets
You probably have expectations for employees that are, in some sense, subjective. You expect them to behave in a certain way with customers, to respect their coworkers, to have a positive attitude. These are all perfectly reasonable expectations, but unless you have some clear and objective way of measuring your goals it’s going to be difficult to motivate your team. You can’t only rely on subjective interpretations of job performance.
For a used car dealership one such objective metric might be how long it takes for the average vehicle to move through the used car reconditioning process. With the right tracking tools, it’s perfectly reasonable to measure this and hold the reconditioning department to a certain standard. This is a clear goal that employees can easily understand and it allows them to plainly see whether they are moving in the right direction.
Allocate Resources Wisely
Some managers treat their teams as if they were all the same. The truth is that people differ in abilities, interests, and dispositions. If a member of your team isn’t performing up to your standards, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are slacking or that they aren’t giving it their all. Perhaps they don’t have the resources to acquire the skills necessary to perform their task.
Providing poor training — or even worse, no training — is a serious issue for a business. Even great employees need direction when they are starting out. Make sure that you’re taking this into account and giving each employee the resources they need to perform their duties.
Don’t Be Afraid Of Consequences
While your skill as a manager does play a role in each individual employees success, that doesn’t mean that you are ultimately responsible for their performance. At the end of the day, the buck stops with the employee and if you’ve given them all they need to be successful and they still aren’t performing up to par, there need to be consequences. Make sure you clearly define what these consequences are and when they come into play.
How do you give your used car reconditioning department the tools to be successful? With our ReconTRAC program, we believe we’ve found something that works. Our low-cost tracking and real-time reporting remove the mystery from your used car reconditioning process, allowing you to move more used cars through in a shorter time and maximizing the profitability of your used vehicles. Please, contact us at Green Cloud today for a free demonstration of our powerful ReconTRAC software.
