Most general managers have at least one sales manager who works six or seven days a week, 12 to 15 hours a day, and still can’t get the store to its number. Everybody respects how hard that manager works. Not many people ask what all those hours are telling them.
When a manager has to touch every deal, every customer and every decision, the store can only sell as many cars as that one person can get their hands on. If that’s 20 or 25 deals a month, that’s what you’ll get, no matter how many salespeople are on the floor. More hours won’t change it. The manager has become the bottleneck, and working harder only moves the line at the desk a little faster.
The second cost is harder to see. When every decision runs through the desk, salespeople stop thinking. They do their part of the deal, then they wait, then they ask. They never build judgment because they never get to use any. A salesperson can be three years into the job and still come to the desk for answers they could give themselves.
I know this one from the inside. When I was desking deals, I was proud of how quickly I could solve things. I’d hear the first part of a problem, see where it was headed and hand the salesperson an answer before they’d finished talking. On the busiest days I sent salespeople back to the table with a new number based only on their read of the customer, because I couldn’t get out there myself. It felt like I was keeping the store moving. What I was really doing was teaching people to wait for me.
It shows up outside the sales floor, too. If one manager is the only one with a real working relationship with the service department, the other managers end up routing every service question through him. Now there’s a second line at his desk.
Guardrails Instead of Approvals
The way out is to decide ahead of time where the lines are. I describe it to managers as a highway with guardrails on both sides. The manager sets the guardrails: how far a salesperson can go on price or payment before the desk gets involved, which steps no deal skips and what always comes to the desk. Inside those lines, people drive. They make the calls that fall inside the lines without asking first.
When somebody hits a guardrail and makes a bad call, that’s the time to coach, after the fact and in a positive way. You don’t jump into every deal to prevent mistakes. You use the mistakes to build judgment. People get better faster when they’re allowed to make decisions, and once the decision is theirs, so is the outcome. They start owning results instead of waiting for permission. If someone keeps hitting the same guardrail after you’ve coached it, that’s a different conversation, and sometimes it ends with letting them go.
Most stores can write their guardrails down in an afternoon. The hard part is holding to them on a busy Saturday, when it’s faster to grab the deal yourself.
Start With How The Manager Sees It
Before you change anything, find out how your managers see themselves. I use a one-page self-check for this. Each manager rates themselves on 10 practices as strong, getting there or needs work. One of the 10 is letting people make decisions, which means giving them room to handle things within the process instead of jumping in on everything. It takes about five minutes. Nothing gets posted and nothing goes in a file. It just gives the GM something real to talk about in the next one-on-one, starting with whatever the manager marked as needing work and what help would make a difference.
Two questions are worth adding to that conversation. First, ask the manager to name one thing that worked really well last month and one thing that didn’t, and be specific. When I ask managers and GMs that question, I almost never get a specific answer. Second, ask them to rate themselves from 1 to 10. I’ve never had a manager tell me they’re below a 7. If the hours they’re working say one thing and the number they give you says another, that’s the conversation to have.
The Day-off Test
Here’s a simple check for any GM. A great manager should be able to take his days off and still hit his numbers. If your best manager can’t miss a Saturday without the month falling apart, you have a process running through one person.
Pick one decision that comes to the desk today and hand it back this month, with the guardrails written down. Then watch what happens the next time that manager takes a day off.
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