Leadership is the Greatest Gift - What a STORY

Leadership is the Greatest Gift 

Imagine having the opportunity every day to assist a teammate for the game-winning goal and to celebrate victory as a team.  Accepting the gift of leadership gives you that opportunity every day.  And your team stretches across all aspects of your life – your family, friends, colleagues, and community members. Your assist is like a spark of electricity sending positive vibes and waves across teammates. That’s the gift of leadership the ability to positively impact the lives of many. As solitary individuals we impact a limited number of people, but as we make the daily decision to be a leader, the impact becomes exponential.  

And this past week I had a front row seat to witness a group of people lead like I never could have imagined before, let me share their story with you. At the company I work at we have 2 businesses – a business-to-business company and a business-to-consumer company – one is operating commercial fleets and the other is selling pre-owned cars.  So, you can imagine, these are dramatically different businesses, with very different skillsets required and experiences.

Our consumer auto business developed a COVID-19 case, and as an incredibly employee first company, we shut our pre-owned showroom down and closed the business for the foreseeable future until we could get everyone tested and return to work safely.  Well half-way through the first day of being closed and unable to serve our great clients, a group of leaders in our other business, our commercial fleet business took the lead. 

These individuals, with absolutely no experience selling pre-owned cars to consumers, dropped their day jobs and re-opened the dealership to welcome our clients back into the showroom and to get them behind the wheel of the cars they needed.  On the surface, this sounds pretty cool, but maybe not amazing until you stop and think about a few things.

1. No one had any training in how to sell cars
2. No one knew how to do all that crazy paperwork you have to do when you buy a car
3. No one had the time to put their day job on hold to take on a new job they didn’t know how to do
4. No one had anything to gain personally by doing this

And that is where I had the chance to witness leadership in action, and watch one group of people provide another group that was unable to work due to COVID-19 restrictions, the greatest gift possible. 

The senior leader, Adam, held an early morning training session on “how to sell a car”.  For context, the students were all leaders in the operations of the other business – they were individuals that were more familiar with driving operational efficiency and productivity than they were with car pricing, test drives and warranties.  But they all strapped in, took notes on how to sell a car, do the paperwork and please the consumers.

After about an hour of what probably seemed like 2 minutes, the dealership opened on schedule, the prospective clients came through the doors and introverted operational specialists became extraverted sales professionals! So, how was that even possible?  How did people with 20+ years’ experience in one area, pivot over a breakfast training session and a few motivational words to a completely different role? One word leadership.

This group of special people – Amanda, Candice, Anne, Adam, Marcus and more (sorry if I am missing some people), simply spread their gift of leadership with the team that was at home quarantining and making sure they were safe while their clients were provided outstanding service.

See, when we embrace our gift of leadership, we not only can do what we do, we can do the extraordinary and do things we never knew we could – thank you to this team for embracing their inner gifts and overcoming any fear, uncertainty and doubt they may have initially had to chip in for their fellow team members!

As I stated above, their gift was a spark of electricity sending positive vibes and waves across their teammates from another business.  

b FEARLESS