Mardi Gras & Managers In The Swamps

The Southern California Coastline west of Downtown Los Angeles was often referred to as “Detroit West” or sometimes “Asia USA’ – for it was where the US Headquarters of all the major Asian carmakers – Toyota / Lexus, Nissan Honda, Hyundai, Kia were all established within a few miles of one another.

At one time or another, I worked as a Consultant with a number of the Specialty Automotive firms working in the business in the area, particularly such as CraneMorely, Sandy Corporation (based in Michigan), Carlson Marketing (Based in Minnesota), and Maritz Performance Improvement Corporation-MPIC, (Based in St. Louis)

The Nissan Way was a major project, run by a large team at Maritz (MPIC) and I was one of the senior consultants in that effort.  There were many “performance improvement specialties” included in this effort to improve the overall performance of Nissan management and operations.

The signature effort at the core of The Nissan Way was to totally revamp the way that the Retail Operations Managers (ROM) around the country, the men who worked to manage and improve the performance of Nissan Dealerships would do their jobs. Up to this time, they had been using a standard paper briefing book with ledger style documents supplied by HQ: a complicated pile of papers to review with the dealers in what were often painfully short meetings, often interrupted with distractions.

The centerpiece of this effort was to fully automate their operations by replacing the Briefing Books and all the paper with personal computers, containing customized documents, spreadsheets, forms and ready-made tools designed by Maritz, and supervised by Nissan. 

I was the Senior Consultant on this project from the start.  I met with all key players and the software developers to create the array of tools, the templates, documents, the applications, and to create the Coaching “Instructor Guide” and handouts the ROMs would use. I was designated as the lead to travel to each of Nissan’s 9 Centers to meet with the Retail Operations Managers there, and perform at least one and possibly two “Ride Along” Coaching Sessions as they visited two or more of their Automotive Dealers in Management.

Pre-Coaching: System Design

Lead designer and writer, focusing on the process to identify the key areas of the performance improvement initiative. I wrote the spec and recommendation for the development of a custom laptop information system, AutoROM.

This software application enabled Nissan’s Retail Operations Managers (ROMs) to capture dealership performance data and automatically process it into a full report on performance improvement opportunities for individual dealerships.

Coaching Ride Along Event: New Orleans Louisiana

I had contacted the first ROM I was to meet in New Orleans and we arranged date and time for me to arrive in February.  I arrived at the airport and phoned my ROM contact, and he somewhat sheepishly admitted he had miscalculated the date: I had arrived one day too early – on the Final Tuesday (aka “Fat Tuesday”) of  the Mardi Gras festival.  So he advised me to go and see what was happening in the City and where to meet him first thing Wednesday morning.

(The only thing I will say about Mardi Gras is that it was very energetic)

My Nissan ROM contact picked me up at my hotel, and he had his Laptop in place and I suggested we have a short breakfast before heading out to meet the first dealer.

The key Coaching issues for this work were both Internal and External

Internal Coaching Issues

The ROM Sales Manager Group were middle aged to older men with strong field sales backgrounds who faced “culture-shift” in the computer age:

1.      Established older / mid-age successful sales execs.

2.      Accustomed to secretarial / filing / document support at office

3.      No typing skills whatever

4.      No document organizing skills (e.g. file naming, organizing, file location etc.)

5.      Using a computer “convincingly” in a leadership situation with their Dealer Owner

6.      Operating computer document to show data, and generate reports.

Computer Coaching Session

1.      During breakfast I quickly demonstrated some basics on how to operate the machine, and pointed out the Training files that would help him get up to speed.

2.      I had him demonstrate he could do the basic operations on the machine before we visited the dealer.

3.      I emphasized that using “live” computer reports would make it easier to answer Dealer Questions than just reviewing static printed pages.

Dealership: Nissan-Pontiac Dealership, thibodaux Louisiana

It was a substantial drive from New Orleans out into the far countryside to the rural town of Thibodaux, located in the the Cajun Country and Acadiana area.  I was impressed by the lush countryside, exploding with green grasslands and towering trees. We drove out to the Nissan-Pontiac Dealership which stood alone surrounded by what looked by open land and farm areas; on the way in we had passed through active farms and homes in the area.

The Dealer Principal welcomed us, and my coaching client (somewhat tentatively) opened his new laptop and began talking.

The Dealer Principal wasted no time. He had one question on his mind (I was to find in subsequent Ride-Alongs that ALL Dealer Principals were driven by this same question).  It came down to this:

Question 1: “Where do I stand competitively in Sales Performance in my local region for Nissan?”

Question 2: “Where do I stand competitively in Sales Performance in the state of Louisiana for Nissan?”

Question 3: “Where do I stand competitively in Sales Performance in Southern Region.”

I pointed out the files for the ROM to open and pointed out the Stats the Dealer was talking about and it did not take long before the ROM was tracking the data on his own

Old Habits Die Hard

The ROM and I met with two more dealers in his area and by the time we hit the third Dealer he was operating the Computer and the Software like an expert.

I told him he should be proud of himself, that he had adapted and learned the machine and the data so fast and so rapidly.

He was not sure about the computer, and his lousy typing skills.

Back at the Region Office, I asked the GM to get all of the Region Operations Managers in a room at the same time for a meeting.  By this time I had done a Ride Along with all of them.

It quickly turned into a Group Coaching session – cantered on resistance to change.  None of them really wanted to talk about what was bugging them.  But the reasons were fairly evident. None of them, like my first ROM, had any basic Office, Document, or Typing skills and the Laptop was now demanding that they catch up to a new world and a new way of doing business.

I took down their concerns and before I got on the plane home, I had generated a recommendations report for an Action Plan to a Change Program, with Training and Support.

Over the next six months, similar Change, Training and Support programs emerged at all Nissan Regional Canters I visited.

This was the price of New Technology – and the Culture Change it introduced.