The Best Auto Repair Shop Owners Have a Secret Weapon

Click HERE to SIGNUP for MY NEWSLETTER

Secret by Rick White, President 180BIZ  (Estimated Read Time 3 minutes 13 seconds)

In this episode, I’ll talk to you about the secret to communicating. The secret is to listen. You step back and listen before you start going off from your perspective. The secret to creating an amazing team is to listen. It's to ask questions. It's all about making sure you completely understand the situation, not just from your perspective. There are other perspectives on what's going on. For years, I have said that no matter how foolish someone's actions are, I promise you they made sense to them.  Before you react, understand what their perspective is. Understand what drove them to do what they did. This isn't just about work, it's about home too.

It's about staying curious. It's about not disregarding your emotions. It’s about taking your emotions, recognizing them, and then putting them on the shelf. Then say, “I want to understand more.” By asking questions and staying curious, you take a situation that could be combative, you against them, and make it collaborative. Steven Covey once said, “Seek first to understand and then to be understood.” Why did he say that? Because once you understand something, what you were going to say could change.

This is a powerful lesson that we covered in our last webinar titled Communicating Effectively. If you want to see it, just join the Pocket Business Genius (PBG), if you're not already a member. It's a library of over 50 different webinars that will help you run your business.

Listen and stay curious. So much more happens right when you understand that things aren't happening to you. When you understand that people aren't doing things to you. Believe it or not, your people want to do a great job. But when you bark out orders, don’t think things through, and only see things from your perspective all impact how you connect with people. One of the most powerful phrases you can ever use is comprised of four words.  They are, “I need your help” or “will you help me?” These four words will change everything you do. You could say, “Hey man, we have this situation over here. Can you help me with this? This did not give us the outcome we wanted. Can you help me understand? Can you help? Let's work this together and figure out what happened and what we can do better.”

Now you're collaborative. That's when you have a team. A team isn’t a bunch of people that listen to marching orders. A team is a group of people pursuing a common goal in a collaborative manner. So, your secret weapon is to listen. Not just listen for a couple of words and then know what he's going to say. And stop or interrupt. Listen intently, listen completely. Remove your distractions. Take notes if you have to, but listen completely. Ask questions to dig in so that you're not applying your definitions to their words. This is an important concept, and when you can do it consistently, you will have the team that you've always wanted. A big part of it is based on how you show up and how you engage with them.

That's pretty much everything. Listen, stay curious, ask questions, go deeper, and rephrase back so that they know you were listening and that you got it. That you have their image in your head. Then I need your help. Or can you help me? Work on being collaborative, not combative, and not competitive. When you go into a situation with a bark, even though you don't mean it that way, they will either defend, fight, flee, freeze or fawn. Fawn means roll over and play dead, being submissive. And you don't get anywhere with that. Instead, come to them asking for help and you will have a completely different environment in your shop.

God bless, stay safe, have fun, and go make some money. 

Want to learn more about transforming your business? CLICK HERE to get advice you can use to improve your shop, the day it lands in your inbox."