Process and Accountability
It still amazes me that there is a lack of understanding that you can not hold people accountable without a defined process; and you can not have a defined process without some level of accountability. The two go together like peanut butter and jelly; two peas in a pod.
proc·ess - a systematic series of actions directed to some end
ac·count·a·ble - subject to the obligation to report, explain, or justify something; responsible; answerable.
In my new role as a trainer in car dealerships, I see it everyday and when I reflect on my time as a leader in my store, I was missing it as well. Most of the problems we face in the dealership, and in any business, can be traced back to no clearly defined process. A process starts when we decide what our expectations are and then write them down. Once we write down our expectations we can then start to create a process around them. The clearly defined and written down expectations then become a draft for the job descriptions for your staff. This becomes the first step to accountability; making sure your employees know what is expected of them.
In a lot of car dealerships the only expectation is to sell cars; this is why some stores must use monetary means to get results for something that should be a condition of employment. Great customer satisfaction scores should be a condition of employment, but how many stores must spiff a salesman to get the desired result. If we are not getting good customer satisfaction scores it is because we have failed to set the expectation, create a process to ensure the desired results and we have not held those responsible for poor performance accountable.
The same can be said for the Internet sales process. How many leads are we failing to answer because our only real expectations are to sell cars? Sure we must pay attention to response times and response rate; but only because the manufacturer holds the store accountable for these measurements. In most stores, a good salesperson is given the task of Internet Sales with the goal to sell cars. There has been no thought given to how to follow up, how long to follow up, what our communications with the customer is going to look like, how we are going to price our cars and I could go on and on.
You cannot have accountability without some type of process. Likewise, you cannot have a solid process without accountability. If you feel like there is no accountability in your store, start by looking at your processes. Do you have a clear process that is understood by all? Write down the expectations and build a process that leads to the expected results; write down the key performance metrics, you cannot build a process without having some type of measurement.
