Is Your Manager Coaching — or Just Managing? A 10-Point Self-Check for GMs and Owners
Your managers are either coaching your floor up or managing it into a ceiling. This 10-point self-check tells you which — before your next 1:1.
In this episode of Dealer Leadership, Jason Rigby walks through the Manager Self-Check, a free worksheet for dealership owners and GMs. Your manager rates himself on ten practices — Strong, Getting There, or Needs Work — and then you talk about the ones he marked Needs Work. No scores get posted. Nothing goes in a file. It's a coaching conversation, not a ranking.
The ten practices:
- Coaches people, not just manages them
- Gives the team clear direction every week
- Lets people make decisions
- Communicates so people actually hear it
- Owns the numbers that matter
- Talks about how people are doing and where they can go
- Stays open to better ways
- Works with the other departments
- Improves the process
- Recognizes good work in front of the team
In this episode:
- Why "sell more cars" is not direction — and what real weekly direction sounds like
- The difference between a manager who owns the result and a manager who explains the result
- Why "that's how we've always done it" kills more deals than a bad CSI score
- How one manager touching every decision turns himself into the bottleneck
- The 20-second huddle habit that gets good work repeated
DOWNLOAD THE FREE MANAGER SELF-CHECK (3-page PDF): https://dealerleadership.com/worksheets/manager-self-check.pdf
Print it, keep page 3 — that's your directions page, the manager never sees it — and hand pages 1–2 to your manager before your next 1:1. Have him rate himself, talk through the Needs Work items, and ask what support would actually help. Revisit in 30 days.
More free worksheets for dealership leaders: https://dealerleadership.com/resources/worksheets
Bring one stuck person, process, or number to a free 30-minute Leak Finder Session: https://dealerleadership.com
Jason Rigby — Dealer Leadership jason@dealerleadership.com
Bring me one thing that's stuck.
Thirty minutes, free. A person, a process, or a number that won't move. We work on it on the call and you'll know by the end whether more of this would help your store.
Text me one deal that fell apart today, one flat salesperson, or one CRM number that doesn't make sense.