The foreman capability gap, why it's hidden, who's responsible, and how to start measuring it. Join passionate automotive trainer and coach Andrew Uglow as he exposes one of the most overlooked and costly problems in automotive dealerships, the foreman capability gap. In this episode, you'll learn why the gap is almost never the foreman's fault. Why most dealerships have no reliable way of measuring it. And how vehicle comebacks reveal far more about workshop leadership than most managers realize. Discover the critical difference between responsibility and reach and why service managers carry accountability without always having the relational tools to deliver it. Along the way, you'll hear why so many skilled foreman are quietly burning out and walking away from their roles and what Andrew's professional Foreman method aims to do about it. I'm your co-host Anthony Pearl, and this is the Frictionless Workshop podcast. Let's get cranking. Well, Andrew, I think we've got a very important topic to talk about today, which is the foreman capability gap. The question of course, to start that off is, is there a gap?

Great question. The short answer is yes, and without pointing fingers and without laying blame to say that it's nobody's fault would be accurate. But at the same time, it would also be perhaps untrue because ultimately, at the end of the day, when you look at who's responsible as opposed to who's at fault, the responsibility fits with dealership management specifically. If you zoom in, it fits in directly to the responsibility of service managers. I feel that where there is a capability gap with foreman, and certainly not all businesses have that, but it's wildly more common than you would imagine, and arguably more importantly, it's hidden, but it's rarely the foreman's fault, and I can elaborate on that as we dive into that.

I think we're gonna start off by saying how do you actually identify it and, and measure it? I mean, is there a metric that dealerships should be using? For example,

let me answer that by telling you a story. So one of the products that I'm bringing to market presently is essentially foreman ship. So like you would have an apprentice, do an apprenticeship to become a a, a motor mechanic or a. Automotive technician. The same idea is that you would have your technical guru go and do a foreman ship coaching program, and that they would come out at the other end as a highly skilled, highly capable foreman, dealerships are enormously invested in data at every level. They track and measure everything, or at least I thought they did. And so as part of being able to prove that the, the professional foreman method, which is essentially a foreman ship program, much like an apprenticeship program is going to work well, we have to have a measure. We have to have a way to test and see what is it before people do the program, what is it after they do the program. And after talking to a whole bunch of people in the industry, gurus. Consulting a variety of ais who were helpful at greater lesser degrees. One of the elements that was settled on was comebacks in that the foreman is ultimately responsible for the, the intimate operation of the day-to-day mechanical functionality of the workshop. And so if the workshop is not producing fixed first visit, well you'd, you'd wanna know why, right? That's directly in the foreman's control now. Not all of the pieces are, but a significant majority aren't. So if the foreman has a capability gap, then that would show up in the type and the amount of vehicle comebacks. So vehicles that weren't fixed the first time, and specifically that would show up in careless errors, misdiagnosis things that quote unquote, they should have known. That's a lovely throwaway, but things that they should have known and and didn't know, or repairs that weren't done correctly and either weren't picked up in quality control or actually made it through to the customer. And now the customer's upset and not without cause, and we've now gotta do the job again, which is incredibly expensive. And so I asked a whole bunch of dealer business managers, people who work at a manufacturer level, work with dealer service managers, dealer after sales management. For the development of the business. How can we get more throughput? How can we get more profit outta the business? How can we eliminate comebacks? How can we increase customer satisfaction? All of the KPIs that the dealers obsessively measure, and they're all mesh, they're all integrated or, or come directly out of technician performance. Right? And, and technician performance is a function of foreman performance. And when I asked them, well, how do they measure that? How do they track, how do they know that it came back because. The dealership made a mistake or it came back because the customer's having a special moment and there's nothing necessarily wrong with the car. You know, how do they know? And in the conversation that the response that came back to me was, oh, well that's easy to answer. They don't track. Now you, you could have knocked me over with a feather, like the absolute jaw drop. Like, come on, you're having me on. Surely they must track. Kind of what I've discovered is there's a bit of an 80 20 pattern around this good old Pareto. 20% of the dealers do it, but it's all largely manual. It doesn't really directly integrate into the dealer management systems and I that I'm aware of, and I could be entirely wrong, but that I'm aware of. There really isn't a good methodology or measure for tracking this. Some dealers split the comebacks by internal versus external. As is, as in internal comebacks are the ones that we caught. We did something wrong, but we caught it before the customer got it. And so that's an opportunity to change process, all that sort of stuff. And again, I go, that's function of the foreman. Like that is right in the middle of their to-do list. That quality control functionality, the external ones are ones that that slip the gap, right? They're the ones that make it through to the customer and now the customer comes back legitimately upset. The deal of the ship has to then do restitution, which is for the dealership. Really unfortunate also for the customer. Really unfortunate. And can I offer for the technician and the foreman, like this is a, this is a bit of a black mark against their, their name, right? There's a bit of, well, let's call a spay to spay. There's a bit of shame around this, you know, and, and so there's a lot of stretching of the truth and butt covering. So as they don't look like they're at fault because of. In part because of how dealers go about dealing with comebacks instead of, okay, we missed this one, how do we do better? It's, Andrew, why don't you go and back up to the mechanical as kicking machine and get the as kicking that you deserve for being a peanut. So in answer to the question, no. Well, yes and no. Some do, but they do it manual, but for the most part they don't. And so I go, well then how do you know if your foreman's doing good? You know what the capacity gap is if you don't have some metric or some measure for it, and there's a vague nebulous description that comes back about, you know, what foreman should be doing, and you go, well, hey, you're measuring that. And it just, it's the, you know, that Microsoft Blue Circle that you get when you ask your computer to do something and it just spins and doesn't really do much. That tends to be the response that I get.

So you've gotta be working between what the foreman's doing and what the front office is doing as well, because there can also be some misalignment there that's causing the problem along the way.

Yeah. So this is a complex compound problem. So this is exactly the sort of problem that we see in automotive technology on the cars, where it isn't just one item that fails, it's a, a compound series of failures, but. At the end of the day, I go back to, well, who's responsible here? Ultimately, the responsibility rests with the service manager. He's the manager of the service department. It's his responsibility. The challenge for the service manager is that. Whilst he has the responsibility, he doesn't have the reach.

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Yeah, so I mean, talk to me about that

difference of, you know, responsibility versus reach 'cause. Kind of easy terms, but gotta get your head around what that actually really means, particularly in the dealership,

right? So this is, this is a distinction that I don't think a lot of people are across. And as a consequence of that, assumptions get made, and we all know what happens when you assume. So the difference between responsibility is, well, ultimately at the end of the day, who gets held accountable? And that would be the service manager. Now, accountability, like other things flows downhill, and so that accountability then would flow onto the foreman. But if the foreman hasn't been given the skills and the training and the knowledge and the resources to be able to be effective, well, what other outcome were you hoping to get? So the big difference or the big contributor between. Responsibility and reach is relationship. And so whilst the technicians have a largely formal, and it certainly does depend upon the size of the workshop, the bigger the workshop, the more formal the relationship between the service manager and the technicians who are doing the work. Not that they're not friends, but they're more colleagues than friends. Whereas with the foreman, the foreman's, the guy they go to for help, the foreman's, the guy we hope that they trust, the foreman is the guy who is the technical library for the business. You know, they're the ones who know all the shortcuts, all the different bulletins that are happening. All the don't do it this way, do it that way. They're the ones who stand in the gap for the, for the technicians when something. Goes south, that wasn't planned. And so the foreman has a deeper relationship and arguably a deeper trust with the people. And because they have that relationship. And if they don't, that's gonna be like number one or two on their list. And it doesn't happen overnight, but it's something that you can grow with time. Because they have that relationship. They can say things, and I'm not talking HR compliance or not, but they can say things. They can leverage behavioral levers that the service manager can't. The service manager, while he's responsible at best, will get compliance. There might be a little bit of personal engagement as well, but the foreman can demand personal engagement. Now, that's not to say he'll get it, but he can ask. The, the personal engagement, we call it technician engagement, is the difference that makes the difference between a high performing technician and a less high performing technician. Let me say it nicely.

Yeah, I mean, and that's the key here, isn't it? That building that relationship that is going to tip you over the edge and give you that bit can make a huge compound difference to the business.

Yeah, absolutely. This is the piece that I think that that distinction between reach and responsibility that gets missed because it's relational. There isn't a line item in the, the service department's balance sheet for trust. What's, what's my level of trust between my technicians and, and the management? What's the level of trust between my foreman and, and, and the technical crew that that doesn't show up? That there isn't a line item for. Staff turn, there isn't a line item for staff disengagement. There isn't a line item for all of these emotional things. Now, to dealership's credit, they perhaps, with a couple of exceptions, track and measure everything with rigor. Like it is good for the most part. The dealers that do this well, it really is obsessive and I, and I mean that in a really positive way. Because it doesn't fit a process, because it doesn't fit a formula, because it doesn't fall into a financial metric. It gets missed entirely. And the, the consequence of that isn't that the problems don't occur. The problems still occur. You still have the impact, but you've never measured it. You've never captured it, you've never quantified it. So what ends up happening is you start to miss all of these one percenters that are the difference that makes the difference to your bottom line. You don't know why. 'cause you've got all the process, you've got all the systems, you've got all the methodology, you've got all the technology, you've got all the AI assistance and chat bots and all these other pieces. But because the relational part is relational, how can you track that with a financial metric other than looking globally at the KPIs that you're already looking at?

So let's bring it back down to the basics as well. I mean, you talk about the foreman capability gap. What do we define that as being in the end? Because to me, there's capability in terms of knowledge, but there's capability in terms of what they're able to do. They may not be the same thing. Having the knowledge is one thing, but having the ability to actually deliver it is another.

Yeah. So this is, again, I go back to this is one of these complex compounded challenges. So formin typically. How did a foreman become a foreman? Well, they just woke up one morning and they were one. There was no school that they went to, like they had to do for their trade. There was no training class that they went to, or if there was, it was really around financial metrics. There was no training on how to have a difficult conversation with a technician who's disengaged. There was no training on how to engage technicians, how to encourage your technicians, how to take all of the know-how that's in your head and convert it into a form. That the person, the technician that's working on the car can consume and apply. Like they weren't trained on any of that. And because foreman are generally technical gurus and generally very resourceful, they make it work. But it's all scotch lock, sticky tape, gaffer tape, zip ties, and silicon. Like it's, it's functioning. But for, for how long? And I go back to the measures. All of the pieces that are making it work fall outside of the measurement functionality that that dealers track. And so here's the foreman, like the duck on the pond, all calm and serene on the surface, but underneath paddling, like the proverbial and. Barely keeping their head above water. And so this is one of the things, let me drop a dirty secret. Just before we close. This is one of the key contributors to foreman burnout. I have spoken to, can I offer wildly more foreman than I would care to count who used to be Foreman and Art? And you have the conversation, oh, I thought you were running the, the workshop there. I thought you'd gone to the foreman controller role. I thought you were. He goes, ah, no. You can't pay me enough money to do that. It was living hell. I had a gut full and worse. I get text messages from people who they, they go, Hey, Andrew, just letting you know, I've pulled the pin at insert dealership here. I, I won't give you the feedback that they gave me on the dealership's management style and performance, but just it wasn't kind. And I've decided to drive trucks. I've decided to go into landscaping. I've decided to go into forklift maintenance or, or all sorts of stuff where they feel that they're better recognized and rewarded and supported. And I go back to just 'cause you don't measure it doesn't mean that it doesn't have an impact. And we, we see the dealers do the, the deck chair shuffle, you know, so they're moving all the, the systems and methodologies and processes and stuff. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with those things. You, you desperately need them, but when there's a massive hole in the hole, it's really not gonna help. You haven't addressed what's really driving. The technician staff turn the foreman, burnout the customer, comeback the loss in lifetime customer value, the comebacks silly mistakes. These are all symptoms of what really is a deeper issue. And whilst foreman aren't the sole cause here, because like we said, it's a complex, complex problem for are the low hanging fruit. They're the lever that you, you pull by giving them the resources, the skills, the training, by helping give them the. Capability to perform in the role because now you're in a very different position. You're no longer reactive trying to figure out what's going on. You're, you're actually in a position to start to drive these non-measurable drivers via relational means through your foreman.

I mean, just to wrap this up, you just mentioned something in the end there, which is curious to me, is. That it's not measurable, but I mean, is it measurable? I mean, is there a measure that you can put in place that is at least going to provide a standardized way of trying to see if there is a problem and where that problem is?

Alright, so given the presently at the moment, we're seeing the cost of fuel go nuts, right? My, my inner Scotsman just looks at the price of fuel and goes pale clutches its chest and slides down the wall kind of thing. Everyone's going, well, yeah, with this cost of fuel, we have to increase our prices. It, it drives certain buyers over other buyers. You know, it, it's a, it's a really malicious, um, cost driver that we could do without, as to what should form and measure. I go back to silly errors. I go back to silly mistakes. I go back to this. Do we track actually what really happened on that job? Deloitte's publish. Dealer benchmarks. One of the dealer benchmarks is that your comebacks should be as low as reasonably possible. Again, things aren't always directly in the dealer's control, but you want to control the things that you can control. But if you don't measure your comebacks, how can you possibly know what's going on? And given this is like fairly in the foreman's lab. Why don't you create a spreadsheet and just go, every time I get a comeback, let me capture the repair order. Let me capture the VIN model and type, let me, well, which system was it in? Was it involved in like maybe every time Anthony gets a a diesel car, he screws it up. So, okay, maybe I don't want to give Anthony diesel vehicles. Or conversely, maybe Anthony should get some training on how to work effectively and efficiently on diesel vehicles. What sort of fault is it? Was it a silly area? Did the, the spanner fall out of Andrew's pocket when he was driving the car into the customer parking area? He didn't notice. Customer gets in, sees the spanner and goes round to the front desk, explodes all sorts of unspeakable things that we can't see in the podcast and goes, what else did you miss on my car? You left your tools in here. If you can't get that right, what else did you do with my car? So like silly mistakes. That just shouldn't happen. These are the sorts of things that directly in the foreman's responsibility, this is right in their hands. Something they can move the needle on. But if they're not measuring the type, how do they know? Now, if it's parts that's messing you up and causing all your comebacks, okay, foreman can't do a lot around that. But if it's data that's coming from the service advisors or foreman can do quite a bit about that. So track and measure. Just Jerry Rigg a piece of paper. Put three or four columns and you know, ro vehicle type issue. An avoidable yes no on the end of it you could do that. And at the end of the month, have a sit down with the technicians for a start. Have a sit down with the front customer facing team, the service advisors, and go, Hey look, we're noticing this is a starting to become a trend. How do we solve it? Let's put our heads together like the proverbial, and go, well, we could do this, we could do that. We could adjust this process. We could put this in place. Some of them we don't know. Service manager, help me deal the principle. Go and have a word with someone in the, the manufacturer to encourage them to get the parts here on type. You know, whatever needs to happen, but if you don't know, how can you address it?

Today we've pulled back the curtain on the foreman capability gap, why it exists, why it stays hidden, and why your comeback rate may be the most honest metric in your workshop, but we're not done yet. In our next episode, Andrew dives into the. Foreman bottleneck what it looks like when the foreman becomes the go-to fixer for everything. And everyone. In the workshop we'll explore how well-meaning service managers and technicians can unintentionally overwhelm their best people. Reveal the powerful 1 3, 1 framework that helps foreman stop being rescuers and start developing their teams. And discuss why communication is at the heart of every bottleneck. The foreman bottleneck drops in a couple of weeks, so make sure you've subscribed so you never miss an episode. A reminder as well to check out the show notes below. There are details on how to get in touch with Andrew and his team. And of course there is also a workbook that you can download from this episode, so stay tuned to the show notes below so you can find out all the information on how to get ahold of it. This podcast is produced by my team at podcast done for you.com au helping professionals share their expertise through powerful podcast content. If you found value in today's episode, wherever you are tuning in, please like, share, comment, and subscribe so you never miss an episode. And remember. To keep your engine running smoothly, you need a frictionless workshop.