Executive Podcast #318: Reinforcing the Fundamentals of Success

Chris Goede:
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Perry Holley:
Welcome to the Maxwell Leadership Executive Podcast where our goal is to help you increase your reputation as a leader, increase your ability to influence others, and increase your ability to fully engage your team to deliver remarkable results. Hi, I’m Perry Holley. I’m Maxwell Leadership facilitator and coach.

Chris Goede:
And I’m Chris Goede, executive vice president with Maxwell Leadership. Welcome and thank you for joining. I am so excited about today. I may not even stay to script at all. I already did, right?

Perry Holley:
Well, she told me that before I wrote the script.

Chris Goede:
Yeah, that’s right. As we know, Perry prepares the content for us. Spent hours preparing.

Perry Holley:
But I do agree this is a special time.

Chris Goede:
Our special guest today and we’re going to talk about leadership in the field. Perry and I talk a lot about, hey, the things that we share are things that we coach to, we train to, and one of our favorite partners in the world of what we do is Hendrick Automotive Group. And we have a guest with us today, Brian Porta, who leads leads their university. And I’m going to tell you a little bit more about him in just a minute and let him introduce and we’re going to dive in. But I just want to remind you, if you want to download the notes from today the Learner Guide, maybe you even have a question. Today’s question may be, man, how do you guys do that? After we get done having this conversation, I want to encourage you to go to maxwellleadership.com podcast, click on this podcast, then you can fill out the form, put your question in there. We’ll even give out our special guests Brian Porta’s personal cell phone number and you can reach out to him or text that’s how good this is going to be today. You’re going to want to answer that.

Chris Goede:
Today’s topic is titled Reinfor Enforcing the Fundamentals of Success. And I love this title you came up with today, Forrest Perry. Because when I do think about fundamentals, and we just had the opportunity to spend a day yesterday with their team, it was a lot about the fundamentals and they get into the details. It makes me think about the saying where it’s like, you know, how we do some things or how we do all things. And you could just see that yesterday throughout their team. And so we are remote today. We stayed an extra day over. We’re in Charlotte and we’re at Hendrick Automotive Group’s headquarters.

Chris Goede:
And so wearing our Hendrick Blues. We are. We’re wearing our Hendrick.

Perry Holley:
If you see us on. If you’re on YouTube, you can see us in our Hendrick blue and our name tags.

Chris Goede:
Name tags, yeah. Which is a great thing that allows us to just connect right away at Level 2 with the team members around Hendrick. Brian has been a good friend of ours and a good partner of ours. We have a lot of fun, but at the core of what we get to do, it’s about adding value and developing people. Brian has a heart for that, leads the university here for Mr. Hendrick. We have a heart for that and we’re in the field. And so we are super excited to have Brian Porta here with us today.

Chris Goede:
Brian, take just a minute and say hello to our crowd, those that are actually brave enough to watch us on YouTube. Okay. But also listening to us and talk a little bit about your role and maybe even your journey, but your role here specifically now at Hendrick University. And then tell the listeners also just the breadth of Hendrick Automotive Group and the people that you impact around the country.

Brian Porta:
Absolutely. First, I want to welcome you both to the university. I’m so thrilled you all are here. This is so great. Our partnership has been one for well over eight years, so to have you all come frequently and we loved having you all yesterday in the meeting. It really has a great extra flair whenever you and the coaches are with us. So thank you for being here. We love taking care of our teammates.

Brian Porta:
As you heard in our meeting Yesterday, we have 10,000, 950 teammates as of Monday, so our university is responsible for helping train them. We are in 14 states across the country and our job is to make sure that we are promoting the culture and education that our teammates need to do their jobs effectively. So it’s Great to have you here and partner with us in doing that.

Chris Goede:
I want to go a little bit deeper here with you for just a minute. One of the things that I think you bring a lot of credibility as a leader at Hendrick is that you’ve been in the field. Right. And so you have been with Hendrick for a long time.

Brian Porta:
Yes.

Chris Goede:
And then gained credibility through being a leader, a producer connector, and now leading a team that is out in the field, helping do that. Give just a little bit more background on your tenure here at Hendrick.

Brian Porta:
Certainly. I am in my 28th year. I did start on the operations side, so I started selling cars and then was able to do finance.

Perry Holley:
When you were like 6?

Brian Porta:

6. No, fortunately I was early 20. Fortunately. But that’s how much I love the company. It doesn’t age us, so it is definitely a treat to be here. Had the opportunity to be finance manager, sales manager, retail operations manager, we call it, and then a general manager. And then after the general manager career, they offered me the opportunity to come to the corporate side where I’ve been since 2016 and absolutely love it because now instead of having one dealership and taking care of those teams, we now have 100 and we can take care of all of our teammates. So it’s really, really a blessing.

Brian Porta:
And I have an amazing team. They do so many great things from my 12 regional trainers that are around the country to our videography team and our instructional design team that we have here at the university. They’re amazing, they do amazing work and I just love watching them every day.

Perry Holley:
They had a full senior leadership meeting yesterday and I was one of the comments that Mr. Hendricks said at the end was be sure to thank your team because they. This is not their day job. They have a day job, but yet they ran the entire thing. It looked like a production company level stuff, but they were all doing it out of their care and love for the company and for Mr. Hendricks. So one thing I took away from every time I’m in Mr. Hendricks presence and the leadership team is they set a really high standard for performance.

Perry Holley:
I think you talk about the basics and fundamentals of success. They are really number one. He always says about the people, but about how we do things. So the word is culture. That came up a lot yesterday and always. But can you, can you just talk about that a bit, how that affects what you at the university, Hendrick University does across the country with the team to maintain and to reinforce this standard of performance.

Brian Porta:
We have the opportunity every day to learn from a Level five leader. And we always talk about five levels of leadership. And to have that front row seat, to hear Mr. Hendrick. Our job at the university is to continue to promote that culture, teach that culture. It’s what makes our company tick. It’s how we do what we do. Mr.

Brian Porta:
Hendrick is extremely competitive, as you well know, especially on the NASCAR side. Having 14 national championships and racing is amazing, and we like to promote that in our dealership. So we are very competitive, but we do it the right way through the culture that he promotes, and that’s taking care of our people, and then our people in turn take care of our clients and our manufacturers. So it’s great to have that front row seat.

Chris Goede:
Yeah, he is competitive. You said on the NASCAR side, he’s competitive. Even yesterday, some comments are made about how Hendrick is going to position themselves, automotive group versus maybe other competitors in the field when it comes to the manufacturers. Right. And I was listening to him going, yeah, man. Like he’s dialed in on the people and the process and the performance because he’s going to compete, right? Like they are going to be the best, whatever it is that he wants to do. It also reminded me of, I remember conversation. So to your point, we’ve been together eight, nine years or so, and I remember a statement that he mentioned early on when he said, I want a consistent culture.

Chris Goede:
No matter if you step into a team meeting of mine or a dealership that’s in California or whether it’s in Charlotte, North Carolina, it doesn’t matter. I want that consistency across the board. Being the leader of the university. And as you look at this, how do you then go about building a consistent culture of training and development throughout all those teams that you guys have the chance to impact?

Brian Porta:
We have to walk the walk, talk the talk. One of Mr. Hendrik’s sayings he always talks about is audio matching the video. So we as the university have to demonstrate that culture when we’re in our classrooms. You mentioned we’re wearing the Hendrick collection, the blue. We all wear the same blue. We all wear the same name tags. So we understand how to communicate with people.

Brian Porta:
So our trainers take that into the stores, into the classrooms and make sure that whatever that message is from Mr. Hendrick, we’re spreading that. We’re making sure we’re doing that as a university. And then our teammates are able to see that whenever they’re in the different stores. So you get that California feeling, Kansas feeling, and then the Southeast feeling.

Chris Goede:
And what I love about the name tags, when you talk about consistency and culture. We talk about at level two, the foundation of influencing people is to be able to connect, not necessarily build relationships. That’s going to come over time, but how do you connect with them? And it’s an incredible little tool that they use here at Hendrick to where immediately when I walk up to Perry, I can with my eyes realize what his personality style is based off of their name tag. So it allows me to connect. Brian and I often have conversations about. He’ll connect me with somebody else and be. Now listen. Okay.

Chris Goede:
It’s so and so color. So make sure when you talk to him, either you give him a little more time or be very direct. Right. Like. Cause they’re gonna. They’re gonna receive that one way. And I think it’s a. That is consistent across, no matter whether it’s here at the headquarters or it’s in the field.

Chris Goede:
I know that I visit several of your dealerships in the Atlanta market to have my car serviced.

Brian Porta:
Yes.

Chris Goede:
And one of the awesome things where I pull in is the service advisors above their desk have them in these. Everybody can see it when they drive in. And so it’s a natural way for them to go, what’s that about? And then all of a sudden they go, let me tell you about it. And now they’re connecting with their customers. So it’s. When you think about living out the consistent culture of level two and making sure that for you guys, it’s the management by strengths, mbs, it’s consistent across every leader, every team, every dealership to have that level too. And I think it’s just a. I think it’s a great tool that you guys use to be able to do that.

Perry Holley:
I agree and I’ve enjoyed. Like you say, you walk up, I see your color, I see your diagram, and it tells me where you’re going to be high and low. And personality temperament, you know immediately what you’re dealing with on that. So I’ve never seen the MBS put it right, right on your chest, everybody. You can see it when you walk up first time to do that.

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Perry Holley:
All right. I’ve been impressed by being consistent across the entire company, but you started this idea of academies, and I would love you to talk about that. I’ve always about. I grew up in the Vince Lombardi era. He would say, ask him, how are you going to win? How are you going to be successful? That’s why this whole title I came up with, the Fundamentals of Success, is Lombardi said, we’re going to be brilliant on the basics. We’re going to block, tackle and throw better than anybody. And so I know I’ve spoken in a couple of the academies, which was a great honor for me to be involved. But I noticed it wasn’t just a bunch of newbies, new hires coming in there.

Perry Holley:
I saw people that I had been coaching. I saw people that I’ve known in these dealerships for years. They are experienced foes. Can you talk about kind of the thought you had about starting the academies, how broad it started very narrow, but you’ve widened it that aperture quite a bit and how you target that to really get the fundamentals of success into people.

Brian Porta:
Absolutely. And a huge tip of the cap to you, Perry. You were instrumental in helping us with the first academy that we had for our service, our sales managers. And getting that leadership starting the week off of that was so critical. And you having a huge part in that, we really appreciated that. But where that came from is in our industry, typically when you sell cars and anybody that has a sales business, you do really well at sales, you often get a promotion. And then that promotion usually comes with becoming a manager.

Chris Goede:
Right.

Brian Porta:
And at no point in time have we trained our teammates how to deal with people. You’re used to selling and taking care of yourself. Or if you’re a technician, you take care of yourself. If you’re a service advisor, you’re taking care of yourself. But when you do that, you do such a great job, that’s when the promotion comes. And what we’re seeing is in that middle management, we have many folks that are service managers, parts managers, sales managers that do a great job but don’t know how to communicate or how to lead teams. So that’s where that academy came in.

Perry Holley:
And our focus, John calls him, going from soloist to Conductor, you’re a fantastic. Hey, you’re so good at soloing, why don’t you lead the orchestra?

Brian Porta:
Do what precisely right? So we’re teaching them that and that week long academy is combining all of those elements. We first start with the people, then we get into how to work the plan and then the processes that go with that. So some of the software systems that we use, but where the great take comes from those classes is this sharing in the classes. When you have nine students in a class that are experts at what they’re doing in their dealership and they’re sharing those best practices. Yeah, that’s where the true magic happens in those classes. And it’s by a culmination of working with the Maxwell team, working with all of our OEMs, working with our subject matter experts to put those classes together. What’s really important when we got with the variable class, we got our variable managers, our vice president, the variable, all the folks that were important, that needed to make those decisions told us what was important and we teach to that.

Perry Holley:
Teaching in one of them. And I see someone who I consider to be a very high performer and she was in the running to be a GM and is now a GM level. And I thought, why is she here? She’s like the best. And then I was coaching the next week and she was on the call. I said, can I just ask you a question? Was that, was that beneath you? Why were you in there? She goes, oh my gosh, it was the best week ever. This is where I came up with this idea today about what we should talk about is she said, I got. Sometimes you get a little loose on the fundamentals. You get a little loose on the.

Perry Holley:
I know this, I got this. I think in Mount Vince Lombardi. I always started, gentlemen, this is the football. He would go back to the very basics. And so she was not offended. It was not beneath her. She took great value. And I thought, how many of us missed that in our day to day opera? We think, well, we got this.

Perry Holley:
I know you got this, but we’re going to practice the fundamentals. We are going to. And we’re going to build those into the teams so that we continue to build that leadership aspect throughout the organization. I was waiting for her to tell me, yeah, I don’t know why I was there. No, she said, I absolutely took a lot from that.

Chris Goede:
Some of you listening today, go, okay, I get it right? They have almost 11,000 employees. They have the budget to do that. He’s just talking about it at the Scale at which he has to do it. This is relevant to where you’re at today. It doesn’t matter if you have a thousand team members. If you have 100, maybe you have 10. You got to begin thinking about it like Brian has thought about it and sharing with us of beginning to think about how are we going about developing our people. There’s a difference and Brian hit on it.

Chris Goede:
A difference between training and developing training is to the skill set. Oftentimes, especially when you think about an automotive group, what’s the first thing they think about? Well, sales training. Most organizations think it’s just about sales training. And so there’s really, there’s more to it. And you’re, you’re really going into. We want to develop the people because you said they become individual contributors that are rock stars. And then we say go, go lead this group of people. And we haven’t developed them.

Chris Goede:
So I know the academy is not just geared towards sales training, although you guys do offer sales training. Talk a little bit about the breadth and your vision for that academy of the different topics that you are training and developing the people. So this, as Perry’s talking about this team member, what were they exposed to throughout the entire week? What are some of the different topics that you do in the academy? The reason being is that if they’re relevant for you and this organization, they’re relevant for Maxwell leadership. I want to hear what they are so that I make sure our team is doing it. But then also those that are listening, those are topics that they can go dig in on and begin thinking about. I need to be developing my people in these areas.

Brian Porta:
Great question. And what we started with on the variable side worked so well. We then had the opportunity to do it on the fixed side. So we now offer a sales manager academy, a service manager academy, a parts manager academy, collision center manager academy. And that’s already in place of what we already have in our finance side. We already have a two week finance academy. So basically we offer an academy for every management level that we have in our store. So usually the first two days, two and a half days are really focused on leadership.

Brian Porta:
We focus on accountability, we focus on delegation because those are things most folks don’t know how to do or don’t want to do.

Chris Goede:
Priorities.

Brian Porta:
There’s egos get involved, they don’t want to ask questions. So we really focus on that individual. And that is what typically is the first two days of that academy. And then the rest of it is where we really get the subject matter experts involved. We really went to your point earlier, Perry. We went and started with the best. We got our best sales managers, our best service managers, our best parts managers and got them together and said, hey, what do we really need to know? We’ve got the vice presidents involved, the vendor partners. If someone’s going through a school, what should they learn? That then became the curriculum.

Brian Porta:
Our instructional design team worked with those subject matter experts to create those classes. And it’s really sourced from our teammates. So we have the people that are doing it the best giving us answers to the test. That then becomes the curriculum. Then we teach to that. And then the idea, sharing the collaboration in the classroom is really. Then when it takes off.

Perry Holley:
Now, John has a saying. John Maxwell says that we’re never good the first time. But I’ve also noticed that you don’t ever. Having known you for a while now, this has been very successful. I get to talk to people, Chris, because we talk to people, they say, yeah, this is very successful. But I notice you don’t ever just rest on that success. Even though you would say that was pretty good. You’re always tweaking, you’re always changing.

Perry Holley:
I think that’s important for our listeners to know that this is about that standard of performance. It’s always rising to you. You’re the one that’s carrying that torch and bringing. You do have a great team. We love being around them, but none of them seem to just stand on their laurels. They push for the next thing, and that’s the expansion of the academies. But the expansion of what’s delivered in the academies has changed a bit over time as well. Can you speak to that? Is there a process? How do you guys analyze what’s working and what’s not working?

Brian Porta:
We have a tremendous amount of information sharing and we get it from Mr. Hendrick. He always wants to be the best. Doesn’t want to be the biggest. Doesn’t have to be the biggest, but wants to be the best. And in order to be the best, you constantly have to be training, getting better, challenging yourself. We share across all our different brands. So we get all of our general managers on our calls for all the BMW stores and all of our General Motors stores, all of our Honda stores.

Brian Porta:
And we put up all the information. And Mr. Hendrick always talks about how your record says who you are. I mean, your record is what you are, and we believe that. So if you’re running a Honda store and you’re running a Honda store and you’re number two in the market and you’re number 12 in the market, you best be calling Chris, saying, hey, what are you doing? We’re constantly sharing those best practices, trying to get better. And if you’re sitting there as the 12th place Honda store and you’re the second place, you’re not going to like sitting on those calls because you’re not getting the recognition your teams aren’t getting. And you’re doing the same thing. You’re selling the same cars, often in the same market.

Brian Porta:
So if he can do it, why can’t your store do it? And we’re very open about that. And we’re very, very much encouraged by Mr. Hendrick and our leadership team to go out and find the reason. Just you heard him talk about just yesterday in the meeting. Go find out those that are doing it better than you and aspire to try and learn that and bring it into your environment.

Perry Holley:
It’s a feedback culture. I mean, they’re constantly sharing information and a lot of they don’t like it. I mean, you know, I’m number 12, you’re number two. They don’t like. But they know, like you said, those calls, the information exchange and the publicness of it is that we all see the scoreboard.

Brian Porta:
That’s correct. It’s a very public scoreboard. And it also gives great satisfaction when you do take number 12 and become number two. That happens all the time. It’s great when they actually learn and put those best practices in place and then are able to get the results because of it.

Chris Goede:
Well, as I, as I wrap up, I have a couple of thoughts that I want to share. Even just off that last conversation right there, one of the things that is completely evident is that you guys do measure results and all organizations should, by the way, or you won’t be an organization. As Perry and I said, sometimes if you just hang in level two, you don’t go to level three, you’re not going to have a job very much longer. But it’s never put in front of the people. Like that is the consistent message. Like you can drive those results and have that performance. I know, at least from Mr. Hendricks point of view yesterday.

Chris Goede:
But it never is something that needs to be put in front of people. People first, always. Right. And then be able to drive that. The other thing is that I love what you said and those that are listening, say again back. How do I start? What does this look like? There’s two big things that Brian shared that I don’t want you to miss. Number one, he said, we go to those that are in the field that need to be developed to figure out what are they missing. I think this is key because as leaders, sometimes we go, well, I know what Perry and Brian need this week.

Chris Goede:
I can’t wait to give it to them. And we’re missing the boat because oftentimes those that have the. Not oftentimes, probably 100% of the time the answer and understand the real issue to the problem, whatever that problem is, whether it’s a leadership development problem or a training skill set problem, are those that are closest to the problem. Those are the ones in the field. I love what you said. And so I want to challenge everybody, say, hey, those that you’re thinking about on your team that need to be developed, go to them. What are the areas that they need to be developed or they need to be trained, and then help build a program about that, my last comment is, when you create a culture like this and you begin to invest in your people, even if it is as simple as we’re going to listen to this podcast each week and we’re going to come together and we’re going to start our meeting for the first five minutes and say, what was your number one takeaway? What it creates is this best practice and this sharing of what’s going on in each other’s world and begin sharing those ideas and say, well, man, I took this. Or I heard Brian say that on the podcast and that was my number one takeaway.

Chris Goede:
When you create that, you automatically lift the level of both the EQ and the IQ of the team members that you are developing. So, man, I need to go back and listen to this again because there’s lots of little nuggets in there that Brian shared today that you can then say, how do I apply this to my team, to my organization, and it’ll make a difference.

Perry Holley:
Fantastic. Well, thank you, Chris. Thank you, Brian, for having us in your studio and we’ve enjoyed every minute of this. Just a reminder, if you’d like to get the notes from this episode, if you’d like to learn about our offerings, like the five levels of leadership or maybe some of our other podcasts in the podcast family, you can do all that at maxwellleadership.com/podcast. You can also leave us a note or a letter or ask a question. We love hearing from you. We’re very grateful you’d spend this time with us today. That’s all from the Maxwell Leadership Executive Podcast.