Guiding the Tool Belt Generation to Professional Success

In fact, it'll probably be more. difficult because what we're seeing is computerization of just about every piece of capital equipment, a washing machine in your home. You go up to it with your phone, you scan a QR code, and you can talk to the machine, and it'll tell you what's wrong and what you need to do. And I don't know that we prepare the people that are going to repair those things or the dealers that are supposed to support those things. And it almost... could look like there's going to be a change in the distribution channel, Ron, from more work directly done by the manufacturer.

Yeah. You mentioned recruiting. That's definitely something that's going to have to be looked at differently. But also leading these people is going to be done differently, too, isn't it?

A couple of just personal tidbits. My granddaughter is 22, finishing her master's. And we're having dinner the other night, and I'm talking about her generation. She says, yeah, we have a bunch of people that are quiet quitting. And it's the term that's new to this generation, but it's been a fact for a long time. People going to work and only doing what they need to do to get their paycheck to be able to continue. And another little tidbit, my best man was one of the better engine mechanics in Canada. He got married on a Saturday. Sunday, he got on a plane, went up to the Arctic for the next two weeks repairing generators. I don't know that you'd find many newly married people that would do that today. And I agree with them. You know, the work-life balance, I always say it's career, family, and person. And the first thing we drop is ourselves, our health, our exercise, and that kind of thing to keep up with work.

When the pressure gets on, we give up the family, too. We start working 12-hour,13-hour days. And I'm not sure that that's going to be a characteristic much longer, if it is any longer. Like Gen Z, Gen X, and the Alpha, like you're talking about, they have a different view on this world.

It's interesting. This past Monday, Kurt Pease, who retired from a John Deere dealer in Colorado, worked with John Deere, the manufacturer, for years, and prior to that worked with Intertractor. Prior to that, he was a consultant in Mexico. He's middle 60s, and we're talking about rewards and how they impact people's performance and how we have a series of what... We're calling legacy managers who are command and control folks. This is what I want you to do, and I don't want any discussion. Get out there and do it. And then similarly, bringing new employees in, we use the old-fashioned mentoring approach. I'm going to show you what I want you to do. Then I'm going to tell you what I just showed you. Then I'm going to show you again. I want you to try it. And don't change that. Just keep doing it. Get better at it, better quality, faster, et cetera. And that's out the window now.

in order to get people to be engaged, feel worthwhile in their work, feel appreciated in their work. And that's a completely different leadership style.

Exactly.

We have, as you know, with Learning Without Scars, we've got about 150 or so classes, five, six hours each, so that they qualify for academic credits. Two classes gets an academic credit at Technical, Community College, Public, Private, and Universities worldwide. But the schools are now saying to me, we're substituting general education credits with your classes, with your credits, because it's got work application. It's got life application. And, you know, you would think that that would be part of the school approach to life, but it never has been. When you and I went to school, we were taught to write cursive. And here's the... arithmetic, adding tables, multiplication tables, memorize the damn things. That's not how it's taught today. They have to learn it. They have to understand it.

And I don't think our technical schools and our community colleges for the trades have a, I think they're recognizing the need to change, but they haven't done it yet. And they have a hell of a lot of work to do to get there.

Yeah.

What's also interesting, Ron, is back when I started, like you've been an advocate of this for a long time. You were way ahead of the pack for a long time, still are. In 1969, when I started, we had three apprentice programs going at a time,18 to 24 students in a classroom. And every six months they would roll out. So it was an 18-month program and we'd have three going. And we had a 40-foot trailer that we created as a mobile training center. And we took that out to a store so that the people in the different stores would have access to the same materials. But like you're saying, almost all of it was technical repair. How do you do this? How do you fix that? And then to your... comment about the legacy, taking a good mechanic and promoting them to be a boss. If a technician has a problem, the tendency is not to train or teach or mentor or help the technician to understand how to do it.

Get out of my way, let me do it because I'll get it done faster and we move on. That exists all over the place.

And it's so growing. It

Yeah. And the other side of that is everybody talks about, why'd you quit? I haven't seen recent surveys, but it always used to be it was never about money. It was all about the boss. Couldn't get along with the boss. Didn't help me. It was a pain in the butt, blah, blah, blah. And we've got that history for God knows how many hundreds of years. Hard to break out of. Yeah.

Yeah, that's a wonderful way of looking at it, isn't it?

I characterize the leader, and I use this example everywhere, of the conductor of an orchestra. That's the only technician, musician. He has his back to the customer. His audience is the musicians, and he's only as good as their performance and how he motivates, encourages, cajoles, whatever the terminology, to make them better all the time. That is his success. And if you think about it, that's a perfect illustration. We've got lead hands. Remember this thing? We created a job function called lead hands because we needed to find a way we could pay some of their better technicians more. But we left them on the floor. And we said, okay, if anybody needs help, stick your hand up and the lead hand will go help you. And we took the lead hand off his word and went over to another technician to help him. And then he comes back. We made that lead hand the least efficient person on the floor. It's ridiculous. And we all did it. Yes.

Yeah, it's really that thing about the conductor and who's out of tune. I came across the country from New York to LA one trip years ago, sitting beside the agent for Frank Sinatra. And of course, I had all kinds of questions and all kinds of things. And I like Sinatra. I like his music. But there's thousands of people that can sing better than he can. What made him so good? How did he rise to the top? And the agent said he could, Frank would sit in the wings at practice. He'd have a 60 to 80 piece orchestra in front of him and he could listen and he could pick out which instrument, which person was out of tune. There's the talent. There's the gift. Not everybody has that type of thing. Oh, yeah. You know, and the other one about your comment of building relationships. I think everything in the world today is relationships. We never really thought of it that way. And look at the divorce rate today versus our generation.

Maybe we're stupid, but maybe we're smarter. People that have been married for a long time, I tease and say we're a dying generation because we're all getting old. So salesmen, what the hell are we using that term for? They're managing a relationship. That's all they're doing. This transition is difficult, Ron. I don't know how the hell we're going to get and training people to do this. Trusting other people's performance for your success, that's almost an alien concept, even in parenting. So this is going to be a tough road.

think we should approach it?

And a lot of this is thinking, too, and truth-seeking. With social media and the communications we've got over the Internet, a lot of people are taking what they read as truth without verification. And there's a lot of misinformation out there. You know, electric vehicles and batteries is a classic illustration. But that, you know, I have a routine that I followed for years. that about every six months I would get together with whoever I was working with. And I did this in the consulting world as well and said, okay, I've got three questions and I want you to write a list of three to five things for each of these particular questions. The first question is, if you could change anything in your job, what would you change that would make your life better? Give me three to five things. The next question is, what would you change that would make it better for the company? Three to five things.

And what are some things that you do that are a real pain in the butt? Three to five things. And then we would put them up on a whiteboard or blackboard or on a screen or whatever, make the language the same and come up with three to five things. And Ron, at the end of this little exercise, maybe 30 minutes in,20 minutes in, I would say, okay, fine. If these are going to make your life better and they're going to make the company more successful, more customer satisfaction, blah, blah, blah. Why aren't we doing it? And the answer that typically came back is, well, the boss isn't interested in that. We just want to continue to do what we've always done. So that whole change mentality, process improvement, you know, back to 1980 and Demons and Duran, et cetera, that's no longer in place in many businesses. It's diet.

Yeah. Oh, I agree with you.

Yeah, it's funny. You know, that illustration is classic. My very first consulting work was with Canadian National Railways, designing their warehouses. And the trick with... picking parts is travel time. So that kid with the skateboard recognized that if you're smart on how you store things, you'll have the fast moving parts at the front and the back of the aisle. And there's a big gap in between down the aisle where there's a bunch of slow moving parts. So what he recognized is if I can go from the front to the back fast, I mean, just push myself off and go down 50 feet because I got nothing to pick there. I mean, that's brilliant. And it's a guy who's doing the job. And you and I have never think of that because we're not doing the job anymore. We remember how we used to do it. Remember the resistance of here come Vidmar cabinets. Oh, don't do that. My God, that's expensive. Boy, is that ever an efficient way of doing things, right?

We've got to illustrate. I don't know how. That's what Kurt and I were talking about. How do you, and motivate's not the right word, but how do you encourage people to come forward with suggestions of how to make their work and their life better? and have the boss in tune with that. Because both audiences, both groups need to be trained and melded in a way that's productive. Yeah.

Yeah. My daughter's involved in a thing called AVID, which has been around since the 80s, but it's starting to get serious application, which stands for advancement via individual determination. And to your point, that might not work with this leader, but it would work with that leader. There's more than one answer to the same problem, and there's more than one style. of leadership. So what Caroline's got with her classes, and this is middle school, so they're between, I guess,10 years old and 13. Every week, every student on every subject has to stand up in front of their classmates and give a 15-minute presentation on that subject on how it impacts their life.

I listened to Caroline and how this is coming along and I'm saying, wow, where the hell was that when I was coming up? Imagine what those children, those students are going to be like in 10 years' time. That's going to be a generation that will be hard to hold on to. How to keep up with.

Yeah. But Lou Holtz, you know, Notre Dame coach and speaker and a whole bunch of other things said it. He said everything is about winning. So win is important. He said, but winning isn't about the game. It's what's important now because it changes. Seasonal changes with different type of application. You're in forestry or mining or material handling. And from one order to the other, from one phone call to the other. And the other thing that I recognize, and see if this resonates with you, we've downsized staff to the point that we're getting way too much done by way too few people. And customer service is paying the price for that. I see that everywhere. Are you sensing and feeling and seeing that too?

You mentioned mining. Are you seeing much in the way of autonomous machines and mining in Arizona and New Mexico?

I'm also sensing that dealers haven't figured out how to work with that yet. We've got sensors in all kinds of componentry. We've got telematics that will take it all into the dealership. We can remotely monitor everything that's going on with the machine. But I don't see a lot of dealers that are setting up, I'm calling it mission control or whatever, to say, hey, wait a second, that machine's been idling for two hours or the air filter's clogged or the engine's overheating, just to use illustrations. I don't see many people doing that.

Yeah, that's the second piece of that relationship. First is the boss to the employee. Then is the employee to the company. Then it's the employee to the customer. Then it's the customer to the company. And, you know, I don't know that we've done a good job with those things. And I think it's a matter of trust with the customer. Maybe you can comment on this. How much does the mine site trust us? I think you alluded to the fact that we're up to something here. That's a big barrier for us, too.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, just one person can blow it.

And I'll give you another illustration in dealers that I work with in. We would give annual rebates based on volume and growth and all the rest of that stuff. But we would give it to the mine manager. We wouldn't give it to the operating managers. And the mine manager would say to the operation, the mine guys, buy from these people. And they would say, what the hell are you talking about? I don't want to buy. They're terrible. Not knowing. And in many cases, the mine manager, the big boss, wasn't going to share that information with the operators because they wanted to get productivity out of them. Yeah, yeah. It's, you know, GDP is a measure of output per man hour. And a lot of the world is driven by stock markets, investment guidance, and it's based on GDP. Well, if you want to drive the GDP up, take the number of workers down. And that's what we've seen. And similarly, in the last...

I'm going to say 10 to 15 years, we've had a delay of a generation shift in leadership and ownership. Instead of being gone between 50 and 65, now they're being gone between 60 and 75. And that transition delay means there's a bunch of younger managers, like you said,45 to 55, that are stuck. They can't get the progression that they believe. But the older generation, the ones that are still here, I'm saying, They are risk averse. They protect the status quo because they've never made as much money in their lives and they don't want to jeopardize it. And we're blocking the whole transition, aren't we?

Yeah, I used to. That's another exercise I used to do. And I put it in training classes to run as a leader. I'd sit with the team that I'm working with and I'd say, OK, what do I do that you like that I do and you want me to continue doing it? And that's an interesting discussion. It's kind of complimentary and easy. So it starts on the easy side. And the next question is, what do I do that you don't like that I do and you want me to stop? And once you set the stage properly, that becomes a meaningful discussion. So you've got to personally take a look at it and say, well, is it my style? Or is it the thing? Or is it skills? What do I need to do to overcome that? Because it's still something I have to do. And then the third piece of the discussion was, well, what do I do that doesn't make any difference to you? And that last piece, I always used to take and say, well, damn, I don't need to do that. I'm going to give that to somebody else to do.

And that's how the team started growing. All of these things are interesting. In order to be successful, you have to make yourself completely useless. You have to be whatever the hell the audience wants you to be. That's hard to accept.

No, but I think your company was one of the very few that had a job function doing what you're doing. Where I started, it was the same thing. Wherever there was a problem, and I was blessed, wherever there's a problem, they stuck me and said, go see if you can fix that. I mean, talk about fun work, right? Yeah. Now, that scares a lot of people, so you've got to be able to understand the person. So we need... kind of personality discussions. And that takes me to performance reviews. I don't think they're a very well done element of leadership. Yeah. Did you ever get training on how to do a performance review?

And too many people check off the box on the once a year performance review. And once a year is a waste of time. Yeah, yeah. Almost any interaction you have with an employee should be a performance review. It's a, you know, how can I help you? Yep. You'd laugh at this. That's partly why I think your dealership and you stick out. You did things differently. You looked at things differently. You were after performance. You were after success. But you didn't do it by yourself. Like you said about the technician, you're not going to get into a discussion about how to do it. So my best man and I, that engine expert, He was a general service manager when I was a general parts manager, and we weren't happy with the relationship. So we asked for, got permission, and we swapped jobs. So I became the service guy, and he became the parts guy. And I put on coveralls, got down on the floor, and pulled wrenches.

And after a week or so of that, the guy said, well, why don't you take the coveralls off, go back in the office, because we're wasting too much of our time. But we had scanning for labor collection. In 1971, we had order stations on the shop floor in 1972. We didn't have the technology to support it, so we used a phone. And we had, I think, eight, something like that, eight order stations on the floor in the midst of eight to 12 mechanics. And they'd go in and there was a, remember the reader, microfiche readers? Yep. And all of this, so there was a reader in there. There wasn't really a computer. There was a... A gun that we could scan cards. And they'd pick up the phone and it would ring right into the parts department. We had ladies with headsets on. And I know that sounds sexist, but they had many better, many way better typing skills than the men did. And it cleaned up the language on the guys. Yeah. And it kept them in the bay.

So we saved time. It was beneficial all the way around. Delivered parts to them with a wired guided like train through the shop floor. That's almost what it is 50 years ago. Yeah. If we got on a plane now, Ron, and ran around to 100 different dealerships, how many of you think are doing that in their shops?

That's a shame.

And I agree with you. That's why this tool belt generation, I think by broadening the job functions, it's going to bring more progress, more improvement than with us being stuck on a... a tool built on the shop floor. Different job functions are going to force us to look at things differently, and that's a blessing.

And in the education world, they're calling that gamification.

We're trying to have contests across schools, across disciplines. Volvo has a contest that names the best technician in the world. And they do it regionally. And it's quite a thing. And, you know, people want to be recognized. Everybody wants to do a good job. Everybody, you know, the other part of that thing, which really bothers me, everybody can do more than what they think they can do. But people are very leery. They're anxious. They're nervous because they're afraid to make mistakes. And I say to people, what am I going to do? Shoot you? If you're not making mistakes, you're not learning. If you're not making mistakes, you're not testing your boundaries. And our potential is way more than our actual realization. So, you know, the customer service thing that we talked about along the way, expectations and perceptions, that's how you measure customer service.

But unless you're talking to the employees that are involved or the customers that are involved, you don't know what the expectation is and you don't know what the perception is. Every day we should be sitting with the technician, how'd you do today? Do you have any trouble today? And then with the pandemic, like you said, we got hurt in a whole bunch of ways. And then last fall,2023, the Federal Reserve started getting serious about interest rates. We're going to raise it because inflation is going up and blah, blah, blah. The front page of the Wall Street Journal, big business is going back to performance reviews so they can identify the people are going to let go. That's not what a damn performance review is supposed to be for. You know, so we got some big work ahead of us to get these things changed around. I think you hit on a really important subject. And I'd like you to. Listen to the podcast that Kurt put out. It's up there now.

And putting these two things together makes a big difference. Identifying the tool belt, what the job functions are, it's recruiting, it's training, it's performance reviews, it's identification of how we can help you. It's all positive stuff. And how do we get companies to get going, get off the snide and get it started? We need more people that are 30,40 years younger than you and I. than we are, where you were when you were 30. We need a whole bunch of guys like that and gals. Any final words of wisdom you want to share as we wind this thing down?

Congratulations.

I couldn't agree with you more. I'm having more fun doing things now because of technology. But we're so far behind. Like yesterday, we were talking with some family. A hundred years ago, medicine to today to a hundred years from now, medicine. And then. All of our classes, we're using avatars now. So I've got male, female, different ages, different nationalities, European, Asian, African, blah, blah. And it's hard like hell to recognize who's a real person and who's an avatar. So a guy was talking to me a couple of three weeks ago, and he said, I can put four of you up on the screen. One of them will be you, and the other three will be avatars of you. And then this is the thing that I'm fussing with now. He said, I can have an interactive discussion with you for 15,20 minutes, the four of you. And I'll bet you a hundred bucks. You can't tell me which one is you. And I couldn't. Wow.

So what I'm trying to do in our education is have artificial intelligence and machine learning, be able to have enough data that anybody can ask a question and the computer can answer it. Now we're kind of talking in a different way, aren't we? Learning becomes whatever you want to learn about. Ron, this has been wonderful. Thank you very much for your time and the blog. It goes up next week. This will go up next week. Keep enjoying in your 70s as you all the previous generations and decades. Thank the audience for listening. We hope you enjoyed this candid conversation and look forward to seeing you at the next one. Thank you. Mahalo. Thank you for listening to our podcast. We appreciate your support. Should you have any thoughts or comments, please don't hesitate to contact us at www. learningwithoutscars. com. The time is now. Mahalo.