As a business owner for the last twenty years, I’ve learned to handle big changes from a business management perspective. Implementing a new business management system can be a challenge, but there are multiple things, controllable and uncontrollable, that can create dealership change management in an organization.

Besides putting in a new business management system, your employees may have to endure an ownership change, adding or closing locations, adding or deleting product lines, major changes in employee benefits or policies or, God forbid, the death of an owner or key employee.

Whenever a big change happens at your dealership, ensure owners and managers do everything that they can to manage it.  How these business disruptions are handled can have a HUGE impact on your employees.

Three Keys to Successful Dealership Change Management:

1. Maintain open communication. All employees need to understand how the change impacts the goals and direction of the dealership. Link the change to the goal and actively communicate it to everyone and you will engage people.  Keep everyone involved in the transition and ask for input to achieve buy-in from your employees.  Probably the most powerful piece in open communication is to inform them about the process. And, the more transparency the better when it comes to managing change.
2. Dealer Principals and key managers must become “change” coaches. Change coaches should be positive role models (even when they don’t agree with what’s going on), moving the team forward and encouraging everyone to stick to the plan. Good change coaches help people change but GREAT change coaches make the change stick. Focus on the goal – always associate the change to the goals and direction of the dealership. Lastly, change coaches need to identify who is resisting change at your dealership.
3. Managing resistance is the last key to successful dealership change management. Now you’ve identified them, you can help them through the transition. Some people handle change much better than others, and that doesn’t make them better or worse, just different. Open communication and being a great change coach will get you part of the way there, but you’ll have to up your game when dealing with resistant employees to experience optimal results.

Now for the bad (or worse) news – no matter what, the dynamics of change dictate things will get worse before it gets better.  Thomas Edison once said, “discontent is the first necessity of progress.”  When your dealership undergoes a major change, everyone will fall into what I call “The Valley of Despair”, where fear, uncertainty, and doubt set in. Your goal as a change coach is to ensure that the time in the valley is minimal.  Using the tools presented in this article, you will prevail.