Shared responsibility. Why workshop success depends on everyone playing their part. Join passionate automotive trainer and coach Andrew Ulo as he examines the common technician complaint, the breakdown of shared responsibility in modern workshops. In this episode, you'll learn why workshop success requires both technical excellence and emotional intelligence. Discover how to create accountability without blame. And understand why technicians and management must share ownership of outcomes along the way, you'll hear stories about the automotive industry's complexity and how it demands a new approach to teamwork and why the old us versus them mentality is killing workshop profitability. I'm your co-host Anthony Pearl, and this is the Frictionless Workshop podcast. Let's get cranking.

Andrew. Here's my

favorite

quote. That you hear it in all jobs, and maybe it's because we're getting a little bit older, but there's no good people anymore. But that specifically in an area that is quite technical and with the scale of development that happens with cars and managing everything to do with them these days, there's no good people anymore. That's something that comes up all the time, isn't it?

It's funny you should say that. And at risk of, of getting on a soapbox, and perhaps this is why I do a podcast to, to get on a soapbox, but when you've been doing something, anything for a long time, you start to notice patterns, right? You start to notice things recur. There's cycles to how things operate. I just looking back, when I first started in the industry forever ago, it was really hard to find good people and then it became, it's really hard to find people. And that then, and that's what we were hearing from management. That's what we're hearing from workshop owners. That's what we're hearing from industry bodies. Oh, there's, it's really hard to find good people, or it's really hard to find people. Now I'm hearing this from other technicians. I, I like the people that I work with are peanuts really not very good. Oh, I can't use the exact words because language warnings on podcast. But they have a lot of opportunity to improve. I, I question whether they should be in the industry at all, let alone are they employable? It feels like a Monty Python scheme.

It's not what it was in my day.

Exactly. Um, but this is the thing, like if it was one person, I'd just go, okay, well, you're just really unlucky to have got a bad dude or do debt in your workplace. But when I start to hear again and again and again from foreman, from technicians, we've got insert person. They're useless. They're absolutely useless. I end up fixing all of their problems. I end up spending all this extra time, and I go back to the other things that we spoke about. I'm not getting paid any more to fix their problems. I'm not getting any recognition because of all the things that I do. So you can sort of see that these are recurring loops and cycles within cycles. So there's this lament, you know, where are all the good people going? Whoa. And the, the flip side is these young people these days, you know, that's what they said about me when I joined the trade. Young people these days, look, they have no discipline. And you go, can track, like, honestly, go back and track the things that tick you off. As a service manager, what are they? Okay, so we've got mistakes. Technically we've got lack of attention, but we also got, they didn't turn up, they didn't ring me like, like all of these basic human skills. They just disappeared at lunchtime because they were stressed, because mental health, because in the war, in Ukraine, because global warming, because who knows, we have rules in how we operate. We have, and these people don't seem to fit within these rules. They don't seem to hold the same values. They don't seem to care about their reputation. They don't seem to perceive the world the way that we perceive the world. And so this whole idea that plays out for that at a management level. But when we look at this through technician lenses. This guy's getting away with everything. He does this, he doesn't do that. He should have done this, da da da da. I'm doing all the right things and we're getting paid the same. Hang on a minute, hang on a bit. And, and so you can appreciate, you know, what's, what's that saying? Bad company corrupts good habits. You know that if I have some optimal or underperformers in my business that there is a a time period at which we, we, we want to upskill them or get rid of them. Be because they will do more harm. Than not having a warm body there. And sometimes, and I know businesses that do this, I go, I just need a warm body. Yep. They create all of this hell. But without that, I just simply can't cope with the amount of work. 'cause I don't have enough people. And the hope is that we can find or upskill them enough, we can progress them enough. We can take them from being profoundly suboptimal to being semi suboptimal. And that's kind of the the thing. And yet possibly. When I start hearing this from technicians, I don't know about you, but that raises some red flags for me. The people that are working with these people, and even if they've been in trunk, like I've had a third year apprentice come to me and go, all of the other apprentices in my workshop are just horrendous. I, I dunno why they put them on. Okay. That I don't know about you, but it's, that throws up a whole variety of questions and red flags for me. And so going back to the testing, the idea is there in fact no good people anymore. You know, the frustration of working with not good people, you know, where have all the good people got young people these days? All of those versions of that claim. Is it true? And I'm gonna go, yeah, it's true without question. Don't just have a skill shortage in terms of the number of people available. The people that we have also don't have the skills. So we have, if you like, we have a people shortage and we have a skills that people don't have. Shortage or issue. And so it's a two part thing. And so is there a drop in quality of talent in the workshops? I'm gonna go, yeah. Yeah, there is. And you, you take that idea and then you layer over the non incremental, the massive exponential change in technology that's come through cars. And even if you go back 10 years, you know what's changed for plumbers? What's changed for carpenters? What's changed for. Air conditioning techs, what's changed? Like sure there's changes, but nothing like the automotive industry has seen. Like nothing. Nothing at all. And so not only do we now have people that perhaps don't have the people skills, don't have the values, don't have the comprehension. If they've come from another part of the world, perhaps they don't share the same ideals and the same concepts of what's acceptable and what's not for us. And we see that a lot too, that it's not just a people clash, it's a cultural clash. That's a whole nother kettle of fish, right? There's, there's a whole nother level of skill. If I'm a manager slash leader, how do I lead through that? We have that, but we also have the change in technology. And I'm again, automotive tragic. Well, automotive life, I had the benefit of seeing this incremental change. We went from cars being largely mechanical systems to, with a few electrical circuits, you know, lights and charging systems, and spark ignition and stuff. To cars being an entirely networked vehicle, highly networked vehicle with a few mechanical components. Yeah, we still got brakes. Yeah,

we have an electric motor now that does the, hopefully we still got brakes.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That's a trivial detail. We have mechanical doors that still open and close. You know, they aren't curtains or force fields or something that keep us in the car. We haven't gone that far yet, but like there's, there's a few mechanical things in the car, but it's now an electronic device with a few mechanical bits. And so I've seen that change gradually over time. But for people who step into the industry today, like that's like, like drinking from a fire hose, you know, wrapping your lips around the end of that nozzle and turning that, turning that hose on high, it's a lot of information to get down at a really short space of time, and so that just compounds what the individual is experiencing. Trying to find their feet in an industry and underperforming while they do it.

The Frictionless Workshop Podcast is brought to you by Solutions Culture. For details on how to get in touch with Andrew, consult the show notes below, and don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss an episode. Now back to the podcast. They're being trained on a completely new way of doing things and a new type of engine. So their experience is always going to be different. So they're not gonna make 'em like they used to because they can't and they shouldn't.

Right. And so if we dive into this and we start to look at things a little bit deeper than the surface level, and usually this is expressed in frustration. I've gotta fix up all this person's screw ups, I've gotta, I'm constantly holding their hand and wiping up after them. Um, there's two big chunks that are at play. The first chunk is the environment that they're working in. People respond to the environment they're working in. And if I've got a suboptimal environment, if I'm not, if I'm applying financial management methodologies to humans, I'm never gonna get a good result. I just can, it's not possible. So I need to have leadership. I need to have a, an environment that that is suitable for humans, suitable for people that considers those people things. Sure I have to make a profit. Don't get me wrong, they're parallel, but I just, I find that the environment that often these people find themselves in is not useful. It doesn't serve, it doesn't help the business, doesn't customers, and certainly doesn't help the individual. The second element is the reality is that people today aren't the same. They just aren't. Different culture, different world. Like we, we talk about people being tech dependent, as in technology dependent. Like I remember a long time ago on a galaxy far away, when there was no internet, we never had it. We, you were left to your own devices to be resourceful to figure it out. Now, I just asked Chad, Hey Chad, how do I fix this car? Oh, well Andrew, you need to da da da da da da. And it may or may not be correct. Like's been known to hallucinate once or twice before. And if I give it bad information, I get a bad response back. And so now it's chat's fault, not mine. But the reality is that people don't have the same foundations, that the, the behaviors that we see are symptoms of things that aren't there. And so the reality is, if I want this person to perform, I'm gonna have to do the install. It's like complaining that my car didn't come with leather seats. Well, okay, so it doesn't come with leather seats. If you want leather seats, you're gonna have to put them in yourself. You want the people to hold these values, you're gonna have to install them. That's the reality. It sucks to be you. Sure, but that's the reality. If you want this, you're gonna have to do the work. And so this becomes a problem because one, we don't have in the industry, we don't have good systems and processes for doing the install, or we put them through an apprenticeship and that does some work. That's good, that's useful, but it's incomplete. It's insufficient. We certainly don't have any mechanism. For doing the install for these values and skills and behaviors and stuff. We have compliance, but that's like using a hammer to fix everything. You know? That's not gonna work well. We don't have any training for people in the business for how to do this. We don't have any industry wide things that develop this, that look at people and go, look, this is how we need to operate. If you wanna work in this environment, you need these skills. So let's go and develop those skills and the people skills, not the technical skills. Sure, we do technical skills really well, but we just don't do the other side really well. So, you know, back to this complaint, we can either keep banging our head against the wall and having a Sooky lala moment over it and complaining, oh, you, I'm gonna, or we can suck it up. We can go, okay, so they don't have this, how am I gonna get the, get that to them? And we get the pushback. Oh, well they don't want to, they don't this, they don't. Yeah. Okay. That's all very external. What are you gonna do about it? You know, who's got two thumbs and holds of responsibility here? Well, that's leadership, that's management. So if you are the service manager, you are the foreman. This is on you. And if we go back historically and look at how Foreman did, sure. They were the technical gurus. They were the knowledge holders. They were the problem solvers. They were the ones that did stuff, but they also led the culture. And we don't train them how to do that anymore. That's gone. Foreman is Andrew, how much longer Andrew? Customers waiting. Andrew, why isn't that job done? We have this whole financial framework over managing people, and it just sucks. Just it's awful. It's inappropriate. It's like using a hammer to fix everything and sure, there's things that need a hammer. There's things that need a hammer and a. There's also a need finesse. Things that don't need a hammer.

How you sell it in is everything, right? And the funny thing is, they know how to do that when it comes to the car. It's how they do it with the individual. Because, you know, we were talking before, um, you know, come in and you go, okay, say to me you need new breaks. Now if they say you need new breaks, but you need it in the next six months. He's very different to the urgency of saying, look, your breaks are down to the final bits. You need to get your breaks done in the next week. Otherwise you risk having a serious accident.

Yeah.

And selling it to me that way goes, okay, let's do the breaks now. Let's get onto it. I can't put this off. And it's the same way that you have to deal with technicians in wanting them to develop and do more things along the way. It's how you sell it into them. When you get that complaint saying that you're just banging your head against a brick wall, that they're not really that interested how you sell it might be the key to, uh, what the response is from them.

Sure. Uh, I'm gonna offer, what we have is, if you imagine two axes, right? The first axe is technical. Technical skill. Technical ability. I like the word ability better. 'cause ability is skill times knowledge, right? It's what I can actually produce. So we have this machine that over time produces technical ability. Okay? So if we look at the scale of things and where we expect our people to be, we expect them to be high technical ability. And so that's efficiency, that's professionalism, that's fixed visits, all those metrics that we track. Conversely, for leadership, we don't have really, we have management as the other horizontal, and it's kind of one or the other. We have high management skill or high technical ability. And if we zoom in and go back to the idea of, well, who's responsible for this? Sure. It's the management. Without question, management of the business, management of the workshop, without question, the buck stops with them and well, what have they put in place to do this? Because the service manager's got a thousand different things to manage. And putting out fires and doing all the stuff that they do well, what system have we got in place to, to look after this? And there's some stuff and there's some leadership that, that we see coming through when I go, you know, 80, 20, 20% of businesses do this. Well, 80%. Not yet. I go back into the piece that's missing in all this. The piece that's been overlooked in all this is the foreman who has the face time with the technicians, the foreman who has the influence with the technicians, the foreman who has the ability to do the install of the values and the behaviors and the methods, and the way we roll the cultural things. Well, that's the foreman's job. Sure, they have the technical responsibility as well, but we've never trained them to do the people part. We've never given them. People ability. We've given them technical ability. We've never given them people ability. And so this is one of the things like I, I feel like I'm on my soapbox all over again, but this is one of the things that confounds me is why haven't we trained our foreman on how to do this? Okay, we expect high technical ability yet great, but that's not their role, and that's. That alone is not their role. And using them for that is to underutilize them. The reality is we should be teaching them to how to influence people, how to deal with the human side of things, how to install values, how to install culture, how to install professionalism, how to do micro learning. So that, and again, I get back to the idea that I get feedback from Foreman, I've told him again and again and again. Okay, so you keep telling him, telling isn't working. What else should you do? And they look at me blankly. 'cause they don't have anything else. No one's explained to them. This is how you install information into someone who doesn't have it. That they don't have a framework for that they don't have, they don't have a tactic for that. They don't even have good practice for that. We just what? Just get outta hammer and start banging. We're surprising, we're not going,

we, and how often is it is that people could just keep explaining the same thing in the same way, and that's not going to make it any clearer for someone who doesn't know you. You have to change your approach to how you're delivering that information and the, and the explanation and the information you make available to them to be able to learn. Otherwise, you're just repeating.

And, and I go back to what's your goal here? Like really as a business, what's your outcome? Are you just there to make money? Well, we've been doing that for decades and look at the state of their people. And I, I think that we need to perhaps have a good hard look. And this plays right up and down. The idea of leadership is have a good hard look. 'cause if we don't take care of people, no one else is going to. We can't expect people to come into our business with all the pieces that we want them to have. That doesn't exist anymore. And so we can so about it and go, oh, this and all that, and we can cycle through people and we can invest a million dollars plus a year on staff turn if we want to, or maybe we could invest less than that and start to work about developing the people side of things and make that part of people's KPI. Hey look Anthony, we want you to learn how to manage people. We want you to learn how to. In install culture, we want you to learn how to do micro learning. Anthony, we want you to be able to manage customers as part of your role as a, a senior tech or a foreman or a controller. Andrew, we want you to be able to lead millennials. Well, let's, let me show you how you do that because until we do, I, I don't know about you, but I just see a self repeating cycle. I see the same complaint that we've been banging on about for 30 years. Plus happening again

and again and again. I mean, I think if you were to jump in a time machine and go back 30 or 40 years and you were to have this conversation with them, they'd probably be saying exactly the same thing. Oh, we just can't get good people anymore. It's a story that we've been telling. For so long that it almost becomes compulsory to tell the story rather than to address the problem.

Right? It's, yeah, it's easier to have a complaint than it is to, what is it? I must do Something always achieves more than something must be done, and so I've taken this very personally. Anthony, just as we wrap up this idea. This is not a small trivial thing for me. This has been burning my butt for years. Like how do we solve this problem? How do we get around this? How do we facilitate outstanding financial performance for businesses when all of the things are tightening? 'cause they are like, pick one. This is what I'm saying about automotive. If you can be successful in automotive with everything stacked against you and still be successful, what can't you do? So given that environment, how do we. Run better. How do we operate better? How do we, given that it's all the things that it is, how do we do that well? And ultimately it comes down to the technicians. In any workshop, the quality of my technicians are directly proportional to the profitability of my business. Sure, I need good, efficient management. Sure, I need great systems. Sure I need great customer service people. That all helps amplify what the technicians do. But if I don't have good techs, I'm nowhere. I go back to, well, whose job is it not to train the technicians? Whose job is it to develop the technicians? And that goes back to the service manager and more specifically, it goes back to the foreman. Sure, we want foreman that are high technical without question, but we need them to be high people as well. And we get that by training them and there's nothing. There is absolutely zero. I can send them to TAFE and they can do a cert four and workplace leadership or workplace business management or workplace, you know, whatever it is. And okay, nice piece of paper. And they'll learn some stuff, but it doesn't cut the mustard. It's not what they need. And so I've gone and doubled down on this. I have far out, I have invested enormous amounts of time, research, energy. The reason I know all these complaints is I've been testing this over years with people, and so I've developed essentially what is a foreman school? How do you get your foreman up in the scale of people ability or you send them to foreman school? Well, you would send them to trade school to learn the technical. Well send them to foreman school to learn the other side, the people side. And so we've developed a, a program called the Professional Foreman Method, literally right about to launch. So this is, if you're watching this or listening to this, this is October. Early October, we plan to be launching by the end of the month and taking enrollments for, how do you train your foreman? Well, this is how you train your foreman. This is, I'm gonna argue the first time that I know of that there is a foreman school that we teach foreman and controllers how to manage people, not how to manage business, not how to manage technical ability. We'll help with that for sure, but this is how to manage people how to, or better how to lead people. How to install the culture, how to have the challenging conversations, how to get these millennials to do what you want them to do, or what if they wanted to do it? Wouldn't that be easier? Wouldn't that be a better solution? Instead of me pushing these people, wouldn't it be better if I led them, if I facilitated them doing their job? Wouldn't that be a far more sensible way to approach this? Instead of push, push, push, push, bang, bang, bang with a hammer because it's not working. What we're doing now positively is not. I sure we get some results, but gee whiz, for what effort? What time, what cost.

Thank you for listening to the Frictionless Workshop podcast. For details on how to get Andrew working with you and your technicians. Take a look at the show notes. There's also a link to some special content you can access. I'm Anthony Pearl reminding you to subscribe so you don't miss an episode.