What would you give to clone the best employee you’ve ever had? Maybe you have a seller who’s brought in the most new business three years in a row, or a general manager who knows exactly how to handle every situation. How much stronger would your business be if you had six or 10 more of that employee? That’s a question the team at Cassity Jones sought to answer and they found a solution that secured them a ProSales Excellence Award in Education.
“We were talking about one of our top general managers,” says Cason Shrode, president of Cassity Jones. “He’s the best leader, makes the best decisions, communicates with employees … all the things we want. What would three more of him be worth to our company? The answer was millions of dollars to the bottom line. It’s a needle in a haystack to find him on the market,” Shrode says, which led him to another question: “How do we build him?”
Education in House
The Texas-based dealer always ensured its 170 employees were attending local training sessions, but those programs were primarily one and done. Send folks out to the training and hope they come back and implement something that they learned. The best outcome would see the employees internalize that training, but keep it to themselves. That outcome might benefit one employee and help them be more efficient or make better choices, but there’s only so much one person can do in a team environment. To really effect change, the leaders at Cassity Jones knew they would have to develop a program internally.
“We would talk about a decision made by our leaders or a poor choice and say ‘Why would they make that decision?’ ” says Shrode. “We realized they’re making that decision because they think it’s the best or they don’t have the skill set to lean on to make better decisions.”
Crafting an entire educational program from scratch is no small task, so the team brought in outside help and hired a leadership consultant to come in. Together, they brainstormed everything from topics to cover, how to implement the program, to the skills they wanted employees to end up with. Ultimately the team decided it wasn’t right to focus on numbers or how to sell specific products, and instead to focus on soft skills. These were then bundled into four specific areas and spread out over the course of a year:
1. Operational Agility
The first phase deals with tangible elements of running a dealership. The participants look at everything from profit and loss statements to processing and sales.
2. Strategic and Critical Thinking
An external speaker with leadership experience is brought in to speak with the participants. Participants discuss hypothetical
LBM-specific critical thinking scenarios and discuss possible solutions.
3. Communication Adaptability
Assign a book for participants to read and discuss, with a focus on storytelling, delivering a strong message, and communicating.
4. Leadership Flexibility
Candidates visit the battlefield in Gettysburg, Pa., to learn about leadership from a historical perspective.
Our judges were particularly impressed with the depth of the program and its one-year time frame. One judge wrote, “They have hit on all four areas where everybody should be focused. While some people label the shelves and make it easy to pick products (which is necessary), Cassity is teaching people ‘Why!’”
A Full-Company Benefit
For the first year of the program, six employees with leadership potential were selected, but going forward anyone in the company can be considered. Momentum inside the company is building for the second year, despite no internal promotion.
That doesn’t mean the company keeps the lid on what candidates are doing. After the first formal session of the quarter, each candidate is assigned a mentor from the executive team. This mentor rotates each quarter, exposing each candidate to different management styles. Working together, the candidates take on a specific project or idea that they then implement at their branch. The candidates then present their ideas in a sustainment session. Both the initial formal session and sustainment session can be attended by anyone in the company, and other employees are encouraged to ask questions and challenge ideas during the sustainment presentations. This process exposes almost everyone at the company to some aspects of the class and encourages interactions that don’t always happen during the normal course of business.
“The candidates are learning how to interact with senior levels of management, learning how to present ideas to people at that level,” says Shrode. “The other thing is, the executives are learning just as much. John Jones, the CEO, says this is an outstanding program.”
Putting together an in-house educational program like this isn’t cheap. Shrode estimates that the company spent around $10,000 for each quarter of the program, with the final trip to Gettysburg being somewhere around $70,000. The return on that has been hard to quantify in terms of dollars saved or earned so far, but the leadership team at Cassity Jones is still incredibly happy with the program and is already in the early planning stages for the class of 2020.
A Learning Organization
Teaching leadership can be a tricky proposition. If your company is structured well and you have strong relationships with customers and suppliers, how do you notice when people are making the right decisions? For Cassity Jones, the time and money invested in its inaugural class has manifested in smaller ways.
“One of the first things you notice from the candidates is the shift in the way they talk and communicate,” Shrode says. “By putting them in this program, you see their minds start opening to the big picture. The way they communicate in terms of understanding different priorities, it’s not such a closed-in view. You can see their confidence develop.”
That the company dedicates one quarter of its training to strategic and critical thinking with the use of critical thinking scenarios impressed one of our judges, who claims it’s a skill set that is often overlooked in leadership training courses. These scenarios are designed to put the candidates in a difficult position where there really is no right answer.
Shrode asked all of the company’s senior general managers to provide challenging real-world scenarios that completely stumped them. One scenario pitted an entire sales staff against the top salesman at a branch over ethical pricing and skimming money off the top, while another challenged a 15-year working relationship that was disrupted by lack of payment and arguments over price. Another scenario came up: After a particularly long string of bad weather, on the first sunny day, half of your drivers and a yard hand are all unable to work. With five scheduled deliveries, how do you mitigate loss and prioritize deliveries? What would you do in that situation?
One of the words the company has used to describe its future leaders is “agile.” These leaders should be able to react to changes in the business with minimal friction, make decisions on the fly, and be able to slot in wherever they are needed. As the leadership program develops, it needs to be just as agile as the candidates in each class. What does a year in the program look like with a majority of sales team members? What if none of the attendees have direct reports? These are the discussions the Cassity team is having now to ensure the leadership development program continues to evolve.
“Leadership is going to be our differentiator in the future performance of our organization,” Shrode says. “Everyone in our organization should be a leader. Pullers in the yard, they should be a leader in everything they do. Unless we can continue to develop that talent, we aren’t going to be where we want to be.”
