Today on Service Drive Revolution. We’ll be talking to a service advisor about burnout and we have a special guest that will help me talk about strong leadership skills.
Our special guest today is Ryan Mutalib, Fixed Ops Director at Weiler Honda of Colerain.
The first thing I wanted to ask Ryan was what do you think as far as leadership goes, what do you think are strong leadership skills in the workplace?
Ryan Mutalib replied to my question and told me,
“I foresee one of the main things is being able to be approachable. My team knows they can come to me with anything and I’m there to help them. I’ve built really good relationships with my staff, so much that we’re able to go out on a personal level as well.
I think they see me working for them. That extreme ownership aspect is having extreme ownership of the team and that I’ve never asked them to do something that I wasn’t willing to do.
I believe they see that in me and they see that I want to work hard to achieve more.”
When I came out to Ryan’s dealer we did a quick strong leadership skills workshop, which by the way, I worked really hard on. I really felt like that was something that I could make a difference in that room.
I asked Ryan what his big takeaways were from that and he said,
“First and foremost, you definitely made a difference. I’ve been hearing just a lot from the other Service Coaches that really were involved in it. We all talked about it and how we went back to our staff and talked to them about what we learned.
We’ve all noticed just the differences. I believe that my biggest takeaway when talking about strong leadership skills was the locus of control.
Are you a person that controls everything that happens to you or do you control your destiny?
Are you a person that lets the world run over you and you’re a feather in the wind?
I was talking to one of my technicians and he had a lot of personal stuff going on and he was telling me how it’s their fault. I heard that and I told him that he was a feather, he was very confused.”
After hearing Ryan’s perspective of my teachings revolving strong leadership skills…
The thing that really moved me about it was that two of the managers went home the first night and told their kids. Which was the whole premise of my strong leadership skills training, but it really is way more than that.
It’s way bigger than just leadership and very personal because it’s a mirror in a sense that you have to do a little inventory on yourself.
Ryan builds off of my point and says this about strong leadership skills,
“We were talking and you introduced the topic of Locus Of Control you have internal or external. As soon as you explained what those were, I immediately started taking inventory of my employees and myself.
I started asking myself, where am I, where are they and who am I?”
When talking about strong leadership skills, what Ryan said a minute ago about being friends with your employees intrigued me.
To learn more about our Services, you can browse our Online and In-Person Coaching, HERE.
I wondered if this was something he believed in? Or is that something he evolved to over time?
Ryan gave a modest answer and told us,
“I think it’s something that I evolved into coming from another industry. You can be friendly, but it is more demanding, especially as a manager. We have to keep it to ourselves and our life is our life.
It got to a point where I was working with these same guys every single day and they’d be in my office just talking about life and what’s happening. Additionally, it got to a point where I wanted to hang out with them outside of work.
I wanted to go get dinner with them or take them to a ball game. We all enjoyed hanging out with each other when we picked up strong leadership skills. We’re all good people and we all like each other, which is really nice, especially in a workplace. You don’t get that too often.”
Christian comes in to explain his insights on Ryan because he’s worked with him before, he tells us,
“Ryan’s done a good job of breaking down that barrier. It’s hard work and it’s a lot of time and I think that this is a big thing. I would say that you didn’t just walk into that situation and everybody was giving hugs. It was definitely some work that had to be done and you’ve had a little bit of turnover.
However, I think that keeping everything in mind, the thing that I’ve noticed over the last few weeks is that you’re not leaving anything to chance. Your understanding of how your store goes has a lot to do with how you’re thinking and having strong leadership skills.
That’s just kind of the thing, I would say that it’s definitely an evolution, but hopefully that training has put you on steroids a little bit.”
Ryan Mutalib talks briefly about pattern disrupting. He explained how he moved Service Advisor’s seats around and how he moved Technicians to different bays. His employees would ask him why he was moving people around and he gave a very obscure answer.
While talking about strong leadership skills, this made me reminisce about the days I used to own a flower shop!
When it would be slow, I would send the girls out there just to take the flowers out, cut them, and put them in different buckets. Just that activity of moving things around, brought people in, and it wouldn’t be that long.
There’d be a line of four or five people just from moving stuff around and rearranging.
Inside the automotive industry, just moving a desk, moving a stall, or a technician, it makes a big difference sometimes. I just wanted to thank Ryan Mutalib for coming onto the show to talk about strong leadership skills.
I hope he’s really careful this Saturday with the moonshine!
If you want to go through Leadership training, it’s new to our on-demand platform.
However, I promise you it’s the best training out there to pick up strong leadership skills. It’s different from anything you’ve ever been through with a completely different approach. This isn’t your grandpa’s leadership training to take care of your employees.
They’ll take care of your customers because leaders eat last. It’s not that this is real transformational leadership. If you’re looking to perform at a high level and really have an advantage in the marketplace and become irreplaceable…
Go to https://chriscollinsinc.com/ and sign up for our on-demand and it’s in there. It’s called the 17 laws of leadership, where you can adopt strong leadership skills.
Got a question? Call us at 1-833-3-ASK-SDR
Learn more about my background and ways to improve your abilities as a Service Advisor/Manager/Overall Person, CLICK HERE TO SUCCEED.
Related Blogs/Podcasts:
Business Outlaws – Outlaw Leadership – 2
#46 – Essential Business and Leadership Books
