Fearless: Leading and Managing Unbreakable Teams

By Tim Kintz

Success. Relevance. Survival. The pandemic has changed everything about management in today's business world. For the automotive industry and similar businesses that rely on in-person sales, digital players are now viable competitors in the market.

This moment is critical—for you, your team, and your business. You need new tools if you're going to succeed. Fortunately, Tim Kintz is sharing his.

In Fearless, Tim shows you how to be a dynamic leader and become unbreakable. Learn how to innovate throughout challenges, soar above the competition, and keep your team one step ahead in certain—and uncertain—times. This follow-up to the Amazon bestseller, Frictionless, is your resource for learning how to manage with facts, not feelings, ensuring that profit and success are always the end result. Tim's Leadership Quadrant provides you with four focus areas to promote strengths and identify weaknesses: leading people; managing sales activities; training for skills acquisition; coaching for career development. Whether you are a new leader or seasoned professional, this book will be your constant companion for navigating the world of management today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Feb 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9781544516271

Book preview

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Copyright © 2021 Tim Kintz

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-5445-1627-1

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To all the hardworking, fearless managers who are willing to work through the grind, pay the personal price to create a culture of success, and help their people achieve more than they ever imagined.

To the leaders who sacrificed their time, energy, and often sanity to challenge me to improve and get out of my comfort zone. I wasn’t easy to manage and probably gave you gray hair, but the lessons I learned from you are priceless.

To my family, who still loves me even after we were quarantined together. You’re my first and best unbreakable team.

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Contents

Foreword

Preface

Introduction

Part I: Earning the Title

1. Overused and Underrated

2. Leadership in a Dealership

Part II: Lead, Manage, Train, Coach

3. The Leadership Quadrant

4. Quadrant One

5. Create the Culture

6. Quadrant Two

7. Inspect What You Expect

8. Quadrant Three

9. Develop Your People

10. Quadrant Four

Part III: Becoming Unbreakable

11. Leading an Unbreakable Team

12. Motivate the Unmotivated

Conclusion

Appendix: Motivational Tools

Compensation, Recognition, and Rewards

Contests, Competitions, and Spiffs

Games, Competitions, and Activities for Trainers

About the Author

Foreword

My family started selling Fords back in 1911, long before car dealerships came to exist. My great-grandfather had a hardware store, and Model Ts were the newest gadget folks could try to sell. In 1935, my grandfather and his brother started our Ford dealership, and now, four generations since our start, I came home to embrace the family legacy.

That was over twenty years ago, and I had so much to learn, from how to sell cars to how to lead the day-to-day business. I consumed every bit of training I could get my hands on—including Tim Kintz’s sessions for sales. Tim didn’t just teach us the ropes—he showed us our potential. And as a young leader, that was exactly the message I needed to hear.

Too many times, the people who can show us what is possible don’t show us how to get there, and the people who can teach practical steps don’t help us see our potential. Tim is the rare leader who can do both. The greatest gift he gave my company and still gives people to this day is to show us what is possible and then teach us how to make it happen.

Showing and developing a team’s potential is part of what it means to lead.

In addition, everyone who has responsibility over a group of people has a fundamental decision to make: will you use your people as a tool for the company, or will the company be a tool for your people?

Some companies choose the former. Their people are no more valuable than any screwdriver or hammer on the shelf. When something like that breaks, you throw it away and replace it—and when you’re frustrated with your people, you throw them out too. But the best leaders know better. They understand that people are how we grow, and when we develop individuals, the whole company benefits.

And after twenty-plus years, I can promise you this: if you believe your team members are just tools to manage, you’re going to be seriously disappointed.

Managers like to believe they can lay down a set of hands-off steps for their teams to follow, and then they’re surprised when nothing goes as planned. Some tell me, I didn’t get anything done today but put out fires and deal with people. What they misunderstand is people should not be an interruption to your day. They should be the reason for your day. The second they become an intrusion, you’re no longer a leader. You’re a manager.

Leaders fully understand and embrace their role as a coach, as a teacher, and as a mentor responsible for helping their team thrive, starting with each and every individual.

And yes, this is all true for the car business, even if you can’t imagine it yet.

Our industry is often seen as purely transactional. Month to month. Feast or famine. You never know what you’re going to get or where you’re going to be. We tend to let that volatility force us into managing—focusing on the details and the bottom line instead of the people who help create it. Honestly, we use it as an excuse.

The difficult nature of the car business should actually turn us into better, more involved leaders.

Why? Because difficult times are best managed by strong, supported, unbreakable teams. Our job is to get them there.

One of my top salespeople said this: Sewell will accept you just the way you are, but they love you too much to let you stay that way.

Tim Kintz gave us that gift years ago, and he’s still doing it today in training and now in this book. He’ll work with anyone from where they are—but he cares too much about you to let you stay that way. That means he’s going to push you a little bit further than you want to go. He’s going to ask things of you that you’re not ready to implement. But he does it because he wants to see you grow—and after decades of teaching, training, and leading, he knows just how to make that happen.

Before you turn another page, leave all of your judgments and preconceived notions here at the door. For the next few hours, remember what it means to be a student. Let Tim’s well-worn wisdom show you what’s possible when you become a better leader, and then teach you how to make that happen.

It’s been more than a hundred years since my grandfather first put a Model T on display, and I hope to one day see my kids take over stewardship of the organization. If they choose to do so, I want to equip them to lead rather than manage, learn rather than judge, and care more about their people than they do the bottom line.

Fearless is an excellent place to begin.

Collin Sewell

Proprietor, Sewell Ford

Preface

My first book was published a year almost to the day before this book’s release. Frictionless: Closing and Negotiating with Purpose represented training material I’ve developed and used for over a decade, specifically focusing on the skills that would help salespeople survive an increasingly digital age. Weeks later, the entire country shut down as part of the COVID-19 pandemic response, sending a shockwave through our industry and driving us all online more than ever.

For years, I’ve warned that our industry was on the brink of extinction if we didn’t evolve. Over the course of 2020, that shift suddenly became a reality that’s impossible to ignore. People who never wanted to touch technology have been forced onto Zoom calls. Stores have been forced to face the state of their websites, then figure out how to deal with online leads more efficiently.

There was no way to predict what happened in 2020. A national emergency of this scale wasn’t on anyone’s radar. It’s never been clearer: managers and salespeople need to be ready for anything. Unfortunately, too often our managers are the least trained people in the store. The pandemic forced managers in our industry to face every level of operations from a whole new perspective, and the gaps in our skills, teams, and resources have become painfully clear.

As in Frictionless, I’ve taught the material in this book for years. Over and over again, I’ve watched managers realize they didn’t know what they didn’t know. Surviving isn’t enough anymore. If we want to stay ahead of competition, keep growing in the middle of a crisis, and keep good people on board through it all, we have to change the way we manage. It’s time to become the Fearless leader most of us were never taught to be.

Introduction

In the 1980s, a manager and a coach led a premiere college baseball program in Arizona. They both knew the game. They both loved the game. And they approached the game completely differently.

The manager was old-school, to say the least. He was strict and inflexible, great at pointing out what players did wrong and terrible at telling them what they did right. The coach, meanwhile, was more progressive. Some would call him a player’s coach. He knew how to motivate, how to inspire, and what players needed to thrive.

When a new kid came through on a recruiting trip, the coach wouldn’t just sell him on the baseball program. He would spend most of his time talking to the parents, listening to them and what they cared about, and answering their questions. Sure, he would sell the family on why the player should choose his program, but he wanted to learn about the kid more than he wanted to convince them to join.

I know, because I sat in that office as a cocky eighteen-year-old prospect, and I’ll never forget what Coach Kazanas—Coach Kak—told my parents.

He said, I can’t promise you Tim’s going to make it to professional baseball. What I can tell you is that he’s coming here as a boy, but he’ll leave here as a man.

I’m not sure I’d say I was a man at twenty-something, but he did influence the rest of my life. Not only was I better at the game when I left Coach Kak’s program in Arizona, but I was better equipped than I would have been otherwise. Not because I was managed well or even because we won—but because of the way Coach Kak led our team.

Your Team Speaks for You

I love Coach Kak, but to be honest, I didn’t want to play in Arizona because of anything he said or did in that meeting with my parents. He didn’t have to sell us anything at all—his best recruiters were his players. The team chemistry was undeniable, and it was easy to be there. They weren’t just biding their time until they hit the next level like I saw in so many other programs. There was something about the culture that I wanted to be part of.

And it paid off.

Even the most monotonous practices could be fun and feel like a game. He set up friendly competitions with winners and losers—whoever won would get to leave early while the loser dragged the infield to get the field ready for the next day. He recognized us publicly for doing well and talked with us privately when we needed to improve.

It wasn’t all unicorns and lollipops, but if emotions are like a bank account, Coach Kak was always making deposits. He built us up with encouragement, fun, and trust, so when he needed to make a withdrawal with some straight talk or strict correction to keep us in line or to get more out of us, we were ready to respond.

There wasn’t anything wrong with the manager as a person, but his old-school mindset and ultra-strict policies did nothing but keep our emotional bank accounts in the red. He focused on our failures without recognizing our successes. He managed us out of fear with little to no fun. He called players out in front of their teammates and only seemed to motivate the players who appeared to be his favorites. When he called on us to do better, we had little left to give him. While our coach was always depositing into our emotional bank accounts, the manager was always overdrawn.

After a successful season, the manager was given a job in professional baseball, with the assumption that he could recreate our program’s success with pro players. Needless to say, his career in baseball ended shortly after. While he was capable of managing details, the coach was the one who led us as a team. The culture of motivation, fun, and competition that Coach Kak created turned into a culture of winning. It drew out the best of us. We would run through a brick wall for our coach, while the manager felt like a brick wall himself.

More than thirty years later, I’m still in touch with Coach Kak—and he’s still making a difference, both in the game of baseball and in helping kids achieve their dreams.

Promotions Don’t Make Leaders

You’re not here for baseball.

You are here to get the most out of your team.

Most of us, especially in the car business, don’t know any better than what we’ve been taught when we become leaders. Just like my college baseball manager moving up to the pros, we get promoted based on past performance and potential, then we try to make it work in our new role.

The reality is that we can’t change today’s outcomes with yesterday’s techniques.

It takes a leader to equip a team for success, and true leadership requires more of us than managing positions, playing favorites, and yelling when things don’t go our way.

Put it this way—how often have you said one of these phrases:

We need to sell more, but we can’t find good salespeople.

My salespeople just aren’t motivated.

My salespeople aren’t competitive.

Millennials and young people are lazy and aren’t motivated by money.

Why should I give bonuses for them to do what I already pay them to do?

More than you’d care to admit, I’d guess. You’re not alone. Most of us have said these things at one point or another. So how is that working out for