Follow
This is the second of three parts of my interview with Steve Stigliano, former General Manager of Gold Coast Cadillac on management skills. We are discussing what management skills are needed today that may not have been needed 10 years ago.
In Part Two we focus on employee training.
GP: Steve, in our last section we spoke about a GM’s need to understand digital marketing and to get the education they need to have great conversations with their team. We also spoke about a default reaction to just sending employees to conferences to get educated. Do you see that the issue seems to be that when the employee returns the GMs haven’t taken the time to understand what the employee learned, how to implement the new idea and most importantly how to measure it.
SS: That is exactly what I meant. It has to start from the top down. You can send someone to a conference but then they come back and you have no idea what he or she is talking about. They begin the conversation saying, “Ok, here is what we have to do, we have to adjust some of our traditional marketing, we have to optimize our website, we have to get our SEM in place,” and the GM will say, “OK that sounds good,” but they really don’t understand what that means.
By truly getting trained, a GM can now bounce ideas back and forth off of each other and begin to implement a plan of action.
GP: Why don’t more general managers go to conferences or learn enough to have these conversations? Are they intimidated? Is it because they feel that they have to know as much as that employee? What is the hesitation?
SS: I think there are a couple things that some people may not have thought of. When general managers are in the business for 10 to 20 years they have worked their way up through the ranks to get to this position. Many of them are not that tech savvy. They may be great salespeople or can tear apart a financial statement by just looking at it but they are not really tech people and they can get intimidated by all of the terminology.
So they hire someone to do the job but because many GMs have a Type A personality, like I do, we feel we should know everything about the job. What we should be doing is getting a solid understanding of the marketing manager’s job and what the terminology really means. Not just knowing the words but understanding the terminology drilling a little deeper. This is the struggle GMs deal with. Do I dive in or ignore this new part of the job.
GP: What I am hearing, is that a GM needs to get to an understanding of what that digital marketing person or vendor does in the same manner that they would when they’re talking to their used car manager on correct pricing or talking to a GSM about sales, leads, front end gross etc.
SS: Exactly. What they have to understand is they do not have to do their job, just hold them accountable so they can manage the P&L more effectively.
GP: We will close out our interview on management skills with Steve in our next article.
If you liked this article please share it. If I can ever be of service, or you would like me to review anything for you, please reach out to me on Twitter @glennpasch or on LinkedIn.
Glenn Pasch is the current CEO of PCG Companies as well as a father, husband, writer and part of the National Speaker Association.