Enabling people to motivate themselves

I learnt what motivated people. People often talk about going out and motivating everyone who works with you. I don’t believe in that now, and I very quickly learnt that I couldn’t motivate anybody.

What I could do was I could put across reasons why they could motivate themselves – so it’s self motivation. I learnt that, if I could do that, then I could build up a team of people.

When we started Kwik Fit, a lot of the original team came with me, and they were good. In fact they weren’t just good, they were the best. The reason we had better people was that they were highly self motivated. We didn’t always get it right – no matter how hard we would try, something would go wrong i.e we didn’t have the right stock at the right time, the job wasn’t right for the customer. But one of the things we learnt very quickly was to concentrate not so much on the things that were right, but to concentrate on what went wrong.

We operated on the 80/20 principle. 80% was right all the time, and 20% needed attention (this could range from a little bit of attention through to needing an awful lot of attention). When we sorted some of that 20%, it went into the 80 – so we could have 82%. But the next day we could find out that 2% of that 80 now needed attention. So it never stopped, and we had to concentrate on that.

The biggest thing to concentrate on was people. 12,500 people worked with us, servicing 15 million cars a year. It was all about how we kept the people in our organisation on our side – and we had the best people anyone could get.

Not everybody was right – we had our fair share of the ones who caused baggage. We had to identify that and put it right. And we learnt very quickly not to cause people to be frightened of failure – if anybody made a mistake, well, they just had to put it right.