If you’ve spent any time in a dealership service department, you already know the truth:
Most of the chaos doesn’t come from customers—it comes from the leadership inside the building.
Bad bosses, biased decision-making, missing processes, and broken communication systems damage performance far more than RO backlogs or parts delays.
In this episode of Service Drive Revolution, Chris Collins and Christian Lafferty dive into the culture problems hurting today’s service departments—and what real leadership looks like inside Fixed Ops.
The good news?
Even if your leadership is weak, inconsistent, or outright toxic, you don’t have to get stuck in the dysfunction.
This guide breaks down the biggest culture killers—and shows SERVICE ADVISORS and SERVICE MANAGERS how to rise above them with stronger Fixed Ops leadership.
The Real Problem: Dealerships Promote Leaders Before They’re Ready
Many new SERVICE MANAGERS are promoted because of seniority, convenience, or desperation—not because they’re trained to lead.
Without proper coaching, they run departments using gut instinct or outdated habits, which creates inconsistent results and constant fires.
If you want to understand this issue even deeper, check out:👉 The 9 Reasons Why Service Managers Fail
How Bias Destroys Service Department Performance
Bias is one of the most damaging forces inside dealerships. It shows up as:
- favoritism
- personality-based decisions
- seniority politics
- outdated beliefs
- uneven rule enforcement
When leadership relies on preference instead of performance, fairness disappears.
High performers leave.
Low performers stay protected.
Leadership Fix:
Run your shop on KPIs, standards, and accountability—not feelings.
For a deeper dive into creating performance-driven Fixed Ops cultures, this article is a great companion:
👉 Fixed Ops Success: The Ultimate Guide to Dealership Growth
Bad Bosses Create Chaos (But You Don’t Have to Live in It)
Many dealerships operate like permanent emergency rooms—everything is urgent, nothing is organized, and everyone is exhausted.
Chaos grows when leaders allow:
- poor communication
- unclear expectations
- shifting priorities
- micromanagement
- lack of training
- ignored customer follow-up
A department without direction becomes a department without performance.
Controlling the Controllable: The Leadership Skill That Changes Everything
Chris and Christian emphasize a single principle that separates high performers from burned-out advisors:
👉 You can’t control your boss—but you can control your response.
This mindset keeps you steady, professional, and focused no matter what’s happening around you.
Want more strategies to increase revenue even in difficult environments?
👉 Boosting Service Drive Revenue: Proven Strategies
The “Process Vacuum”: Why Service Departments Collapse
When a service department has no systems, people invent their own.
That’s when you see:
- advisors writing ROs differently
- dispatch favoritism
- technicians cherry-picking
- communication breakdowns
- CSI scores dropping
- repeat customers disappearing
Leadership Fix:
One consistent process.
Enforced daily.
Reviewed weekly.
No exceptions.
When the Boss Is the Problem: How to Protect Your Career
Sometimes the culture issue is simply the person in charge.
When your manager is inconsistent or untrained, protect your career by:
- documenting your work
- hitting your KPIs
- staying calm
- continuing to train yourself
- protecting your reputation
Great leaders are often shaped in difficult environments.
Your consistency will outlast their chaos.
Strong Fixed Ops Leadership Doesn’t Require a Title
Leadership isn’t about authority—it’s about influence.
You can lead from any position by being:
- dependable
- consistent
- process-driven
- emotionally steady
- Committed to excellence
Dealerships desperately need leaders.
If you show leadership behaviors, you will rise.
Final Thoughts: Your Career Success Is Still Within Your Control
Bad bosses, broken systems, and dealership politics do not define your career—your leadership does.
The Fixed Ops professionals who master consistency, accountability, and emotional control will outperform the chaos and rise faster than ever before.
The industry needs real leaders.
You can be one of them.
FULL VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to the big show. What we talk about today is what to do with a terrible boss. We recap our favorite parts of the Top Dog event that just ended, and much, much more coming up on this edition of Service Drive Revolution.
What’s my favorite new band? It is possible that you just said the name of the band. You don’t know, just say you don’t know. Three minutes ago, and it is Tragic Warfare. No, you’re making up band names. I do. So, we just came off of our annual Top Dog event, which is fun. If you saw last week’s episode, we had a round table with the coaches, which was great, always fun. We ran out of time. We wanted to record a bunch of those, but we just ran out of time.
Did we just do one? Yeah. You don’t remember. We always think we have the coaches in town, and we can do all this stuff, and then we schedule 78 days worth of stuff into two days. Top Dog Week is a blur to me. What’s the name of the band? I forgot already. It’s not your favorite band, so what does it matter? Let’s talk about favorite stuff. What was your favorite part of Top Dog? Your thing was so good.
I don’t even know how to describe Christian’s talk except that it was performance art. The message was incredible, and I was laughing so hard, and then I thought it was over, and then it wasn’t over, and it was even more funny. We have to put that up in on-demand. Do you think it’ll catch the end part? Because that was my favorite part of the performance art for sure. We have to put that in there. Also, for the first time, just for coaching clients, we sent them a link and we let people watch, which was something we were a little nervous about.
We thought about charging for it, but we didn’t. We did get some feedback from the people that said, “I couldn’t make it this year. I appreciate it so much that I was able to watch.” I don’t know if we’ll do that or not, but we learned that we can broadcast from the library, and it looks really cool. The boys did such a good job; it was almost our version of live TV.
That’s exactly what it was. When we film these episodes of SDR, it needs to be edited. There’s a lot of stuff that happens for it to be ready for the public. These guys did all the stuff that normally would take three, four, five days; they did it during the event. It felt literally like a sporting event, right? They switched cameras, the audio, they kept fixing things throughout. I thought it was super cool as a dynamic. We’ve never had a Top Dog before. It’s also funny that every year we try to get big names as a headliner, and we pay an ungodly amount of money for a couple speakers to be headliners. Every year the headliner, the person that we pay the most money to, is the least liked person in the survey. After this year, they almost hated the person who was the headliner.
We did a podcast with them, and it pissed me off so much we didn’t even put it out. It is lost in the archives, forever lost. We told the guy many times—you went out of your way to tell him that these are service people, that it’s parts and service managers in the room—and he kept referring to everybody as car sales and talking about car sales. No matter how many times we told him. That’s happened before, but it was more painful because he was such a jerk.
It was crazy, and he wouldn’t take pictures with anybody, wouldn’t talk to anybody. The guy thinks he’s a huge celebrity, when nobody really knows who the guy is, even though he’s got a best-selling book. Yeah, there were some pretty interesting comments about him, and some of the other speakers I thought made comments about you. People put jokes in the survey. One person said, “Christian should keep telling jokes,” and they put in parentheses, “That’s kind of a joke,” which I thought was wonderful.
I thought that some of the other speakers stepped up where that speaker didn’t necessarily perform to our level. There was a guy that just kind of opted in to help us out with some book signings. I also thought that the guy that spoke to start the event was probably one of the more exciting ones I’ve seen. I liked him a lot, and it was a drummer, so that’s kind of a little bit of you in that.
He was the sweetest; he had everybody in the room playing drums. It’s hard to describe his thing. I don’t want to ruin it because we’ll put it up on-demand, and you can watch it. It was such a great team-building lesson, and the way he put everybody together was great. I’m a drummer, so for a couple of days after, I wanted a drum set. I believe that. One of our employees broke their drum that they were drumming with; I thought that was so cool. He was really awesome.
I always think that internally, Coach Cliff and Coach Hogi did a really good job. Every year I’m usually looking forward to your keynote because you kind of tap into whatever is going on in the industry at that time. You didn’t do that this year, which I thought was even cooler. Do you know why? No. Because it seems like I want to talk about different stuff than everybody else. There’s always this element of, “I love when Chris talks, but it’s over my head” kind of a thing.
I think that’s fair. My idea was instead of trying to figure out what people wanted to talk about, let’s just do a Q&A. We had everybody write out questions; they wrote them on a card, and then you would collect them throughout the day. By the end, I had a huge stack of questions. A lot of the questions overlapped, but it gave me an idea, and I had a couple of hours to prepare. I organized them and tried to prepare how to address what I thought was the commonality between them.
I felt like it met them where they were instead of me trying to impose something on the room. The thing that we’ve been doing for a couple of years is I do it at night. I talk at night, so they’ve had a couple of margaritas and tacos, and the atmosphere is more fun. I thought it was very entertaining. The ratings were what I thought they would be, but it was a little bit of a gamble. You did get to put yourself in it a little bit. You think it’s funny that we have people rate me at my event? Totally. Would the ratings not be good? I don’t think it’s fair. How anonymous is it, really? The mafia shows up at someone’s house, “Hey, we saw what you put about Chris.” I thought it was good. You did get to share a little bit of yourself.
My favorite was this lesson that at the end of the day, I think it didn’t hit like it could have. There was a lot that asked, “What’s your favorite this or what’s your favorite that?” and you had this beautiful thing—I’ll probably butcher it, but I’m going to try it. Essentially, you don’t want to denote something as your favorite because then you pass judgment and rule out anything else new that might come along later.
So, instead of saying I have a favorite, there’s just some stuff that I’m either listening to now or some stuff that I like. I think you were asked what’s your favorite Christian joke and what’s your least favorite Christian joke; both of those got hit. You’re trying to do the lesson of “don’t judge,” and I think that’s where you were headed with that, and to just be open to try new things. Maybe talk about what happened at the end when it was time for everybody to leave. We’ll talk about that in a second; that was the funniest part of the whole thing.
Not judging is a part of it, but the reason why not judging is an element is when you judge, then it’s final, right? Let’s say somebody cuts you off in traffic and they have a Kamala Harris sticker on their car, and the person driving is like, “Oh yeah, they’re liberals” or whatever it is they would say. At that moment, you actually get rewarded with dopamine for judging because it’s to make us more efficient.
You put them in a box on a shelf, and the quicker you judge, the more efficient you are, and the more energy you save. That was really important thousands of years ago, but it isn’t now because we have Red Bull and sugar. Before sugar, it was important to conserve energy, and so that dopamine hit of judging, making it final, and then moving on to something else served us. It isn’t a tool that the biology serves us anymore.
The judgment is a part of it because the thing with our industry is we’re very judgmental; we either like it or we don’t. Most of the time, the conversations that we have, and the conversations that are the most frustrating for me, are the ones where we’re weighing something on whether we like it or not, not whether it’s effective. For example, there are people out there that will say, “Chris Collins doesn’t like video inspections.” I’ve never said that. I’ve heard it a lot that you don’t. But that’s people’s judgment. They need finality in something because what I’m focused on is the outcome. What we want is we want better inspections to have higher sales per customer. My point is, if you can’t do it with paper, then what makes you think you can do it with a video?
I’ve never been against it. I’m against people doing it who don’t have their processes together. That’s what I’m against. So, what’s a great example of a good boss and a bad boss? What do you think the best thing you’ve learned from a bad boss is? I have two. The first one is a good manager takes the responsibility. He takes the weight of the blame on his shoulders, even when it’s not his fault.
A bad manager immediately throws everybody under the bus. I would say the opposite of that, where the good manager knows that you’re going to make a mistake, and they’re going to encourage you to make mistakes, as long as you learn from them. The bad manager’s going to fire you on the spot because you made a mistake. They’re trying to prove a point to the ownership group that they are not responsible for the mistake that happened.
I had one that I was working with, and I had done something that cost the dealer probably $5,000 in a warranty situation, and I told the owner, and he goes, “Well, don’t do that again.” The service manager immediately looked at me and goes, “I told you not to do that,” and he went out to the owner and told him that. It was really clear to me right then and there. I said, “I’m going to own a dealership before you ever own a dealership,” because you don’t have that mentality. That’s exactly right. The manager has to have your back.
There are certain times when you’re just not that into it, and there’s a reason for it. A good manager figures out the reason and helps you with it. A bad manager just tells you to deal with it, right? The biggest lesson I learned from a bad boss was I worked for a guy that had a company car. They would not let you keep a company car if you had a DUI.
So, he would drive drunk all the time and just tell people to deal with it. I just learned that I’m not going to be that guy. He was a great example of what not to do. I learned more from the bad managers than the good managers because I got to see firsthand what the things were that made me feel bad, or that were frustrating, or that weren’t leading to good outcomes. I just knew when I was in a position of power, I wouldn’t do those things.
Yeah, I think I learned more from my bad bosses than I did my good ones. My good ones were so good that I thought everybody was like that. Then, when I went to work for the bad one, I was like, “Oh, wow, this is crazy.” I had a manager that was so bad that I quit. He said I was going to quit. He said, “I’m going to make your life miserable until you quit.” I walked out and got a job at a motorcycle dealership selling Harley Davidsons, and my parents were so upset. They were like, “You went from working at a Mercedes store to selling Harleys?” I was like, “I’m making three times the money I was making at the Mercedes store.” It was great.
The first rule of working for a bad boss is that you need to be aware. You need to know that you are working for a bad boss. Sometimes, people are just in a situation and they’re suffering. It’s a real thing. The second is to know that you’re a victim. People don’t like to admit that they’re a victim, but I think that’s the first step to getting out of it. You have to be aware, you have to admit that you’re a victim. You have to plan your escape.
I think the biggest thing to learn from a bad boss is that you have a tremendous amount of control. It’s almost the opposite of what we talked about at the Top Dog event. It’s the internal locus of control. The good boss is always taking the weight, but the bad boss is also creating an environment where you are in control of your destiny, because there’s so much low performance around you. The bad boss is usually low performing himself. He’s not watching, he’s not doing what he’s supposed to do. He’s so concerned with not being blamed for something that he’s not paying attention to you. It’s a real opportunity to step up and make yourself invaluable. So that you have control.
You can actually learn more from a bad boss than a good boss because there are so many things you can learn not to do. I had a really bad one that I actually had to report to the corporate office, and he got fired, I remember being so nervous about that. Like, I was like, “I can’t do this.” I was on a conference call with him, and he just kept screaming at me, I hung up the phone, I called the corporate office and reported him. I just realized at that point, you know, my time is way too valuable to let somebody yell at me, or be a jerk, or abuse me, or whatever it is. I’m just not going to let it happen anymore.
That takes guts. That takes courage to do that. The one thing that’s funny is, I’m always saying that the things that are really frustrating in service are things that are out of your control. You cannot control the economy, the weather, car count, or whatever it is. The thing that you have the most control over is you. When you have a bad boss, it is 100% within your control to change the situation. It’s almost like a perfect situation to decide to grow and do all these things because you have no other choice.
So, Top Dog ended with me kicking people out of the building. The guy that had the drum set was there, and the drummer was doing something else, and there were still people there, and they’re just hanging out. They’re having a good time. They had a couple of margaritas, and they’re just hanging out, and they’re talking. And I was like, “Hey, we’re done,” and I went back to the front door, and they’re all still talking.
“Hey, you guys got to leave. It’s over.” I literally had to go around the room and go, “Okay, you, you, you, you, you, you.” And they were so happy. It’s just a fun thing, right? I was like, “Man, this is great. I love this energy.” You had to use your outside voice. You’re trying to win the Nobel Peace Prize, and you’re screaming at people. No, I know. I wasn’t screaming. I was just talking in my inside voice loudly.
It was just so fun, and the people that were there, I just love that energy, and I love that kind of enthusiasm, and that they want to be around each other. That’s a good problem to have. Well, that’s what’s so cool about it, right? It’s like you can tell that they like what they’re doing. They’re talking about work, which is something that would not happen in most situations; they’re talking shop, and they’re enthusiastic about it. They’re having fun. It’s great. It was really a testament to the coaching team, the clients, and the whole crew.
Well, thanks everybody.
Thanks so much for watching this episode of Service Drive Revolution. We’re uploading new stuff every day, so make sure you subscribe and click the bell icon so you don’t miss out. If you have a question you’d like us to answer on the show, call 833-ASK-SDR, and we’ll answer your question on the show. That’s 833-ASK-SDR. For special deals on our books and training, head over to offers.chriscollinsinc.com. I’m Chris Collins, and I’ll see you in the next video.
đź”— Related Resources
- Boosting Service Drive Revenue: Proven Strategies for SERVICE ADVISORS and MANAGERS
- The 9 Reasons Why Service Managers Fail (and How to Avoid Them)
- SERVICE & PARTS DEPARTMENTS ARE CARRYING AUTO DEALERSHIPS THROUGH ONE OF THE ROUGHEST MARKETS IN MEMORY
Feel free to explore the linked articles above for deeper insights into each strategy. If you have any further questions or need additional resources, don’t hesitate to ask!
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