Action Planning: The Road To Culture Change
Posted by
Don Graff on Fri, Jan 27, 2012 @ 01:27 PM
Posted by Kurt Hoppe
Welcome to the Don Graff Dealership Cultural Revolution! This article will discuss a simple way to turn processes into permanent culture.
If you ask most mid-level managers in the car business who were promoted from the sales floor, many will say that the habits they develop and the procedures they stick with every day are a result of "oral history" - they do what their boss told them, and if they had to teach someone else how, it was always "because my boss did it that way".
We try to make sure our policies stick. We want them to be consistent, because doing so insures that as a business owner, we have the peace of mind that everything will run right and the same tomorrow as it did today.
However, as a business owner, can you be expected to remember everything you did, and how you did it, over and over again? As the owner, you are the final resource and the last word. What if you tell a new manager something you didn't have your current managers doing? The chaos that might come from it would be your own fault and responsibility.
Of course, writing things down is important. Creating an employee handbook is crucial, especially for the broad variety of staffers you need to hire to run a successful dealership. But, to truly get what you want out of your business, you need to develop your policies and procedures to a laser-thin point, and then you can always have something to go back to for everyone's reference.
Action planning is not a new concept. Folks in the larger corporate world talk about them all the time. In many ways, most people who hear the term "action plan" perceive it as a "corrective action plan", a piece of paper that says what you did wrong and what you have to do to avoid further discipline for some bad performance. Project managers do action planning all the time, as do the contractors that make improvements to your facilities.
Without an action plan, that spells out what actions have to happen, in what order, and who is responsible for completing them, the contract builder you hired to expand your service drive might have a concrete truck pouring a foundation before the town official issued your permit. Or you would lose three-quarters of your parking lot for a structural steel delivery because the foundation wasn't scheduled to be laid for weeks.
Why, then should your business not operate on action planning? Honda as a corporation comes to mind as a proof of concept for action planning. Their EXCELL program pushes the importance of developing process trees, and when a survey to a Honda customer uncovers a complaint, their resolution to an opportunity bulletin involves making sure the dealership routes the problem to the right person, and a timeline of accountability exists to get the problem fixed before going back to Honda and closing the complaint.
Just about every process or activity that you need to repeat in the store, whether frequent or infrequent, can be laid out in an action plan and kept in a master reference. All you need is to spell out what needs to be done, in what order, who is doing the task, and what your expected results are.
And then, the tough part: Make sure your employees, managers and key staff follow your action plan consistently. EVERY TIME you need to do that sequence of events, you can hold the right people accountable for its success, and if the process fails, you can go back and see why your steps didn't launch as you expected.
This is all about consistency and accountability, dear owners and managers. When you write an action plan, you show a commitment to organization. When you execute it, you stress accountability. When you repeat it, it becomes a process. When your store lives by it, it becomes culture.
For management seminars to improve your action planning ability, and creating realistic expectations for your own dealership cultural revolution, contact Don Graff Automotive today!
Find us online at Don Graff Automotive .com!
We've shared a sample Action Plan below. To download this as a PDF, click here: Sample Action Plan
