Ryan Englin on Grow Your Moving Company: The Role of Personality Traits in Management

I went back on Grow Your Moving Company with Wade Swikle to talk about the thing that quietly wrecks most frontline teams. Not the work. The conversation.

Wade and I recorded our first episode about two years ago. He asked what has changed since then. Honestly, not much, except the pain has been going on two years longer. Owners are either numb to it or finally fed up enough to fix it. COVID pulled back the curtain and showed employees that a lot of employers care exactly as long as the employee takes care of what the employer cares about. We split people into essential and non-essential and then acted surprised when they decided to take control of their own careers. Now they have AI in their pocket giving them answers, and employers still lead the same way they led in 2009.

Here is what I told Wade. In the blue collar trades, we are terrible at talking to our people. I don't sugarcoat it. We walk in with "you're here to work, I don't care what's going on at home," and then we wonder why nobody tells us the truth. The fastest bridge across the generational gap is not a new pay scale. It's communication.

Always be curious

Wade asked when to deliver hard feedback. Not after a brutal job when the guy is fried. Not before one when you wreck his whole day. So when?

There's a difference between having a conversation with an employee and talking at an employee. The instinct is to hit them with "the customer called, you screwed up." Now they're deflated and you still have no idea what happened. Every story has three sides. Yours, theirs, and what actually happened. So be curious first. "Tell me about the job today. What were your challenges?" Then, "I got a call from the customer. Tell me more about that."

Do it as close to real time as possible. Wait until noon becomes four, four becomes next week, next week becomes six months, and now you feel like a jerk for digging up old stuff. That's on you, not them.

The controller who waited 18 months

I told Wade about a controller who called me ready to fire someone that day. The employee strolled in 45 minutes late almost every morning. I asked how the employee responded when she addressed it. She hadn't. For a year and a half she said nothing. The employee was genuinely surprised it was a problem. She had justified it in her own head. Nobody said anything, so the start time must not matter.

Two weeks later? On time every single day. That's all it took. She quit about three weeks after that, and that's fine. She made that decision. The controller finally enforced her own policy.

No one should ever be surprised they got terminated.

Did they follow the process?

Before I assume someone messed up, I ask one question. Did they follow the process? There are four outcomes and you only get to blame the employee for one of them.

No process exists. That's on you. The process exists and they didn't know about it. That's on you. They followed it exactly and the mistake still happened. Your process is broken, so that's on you. They knew it and chose not to follow it. Now you have a behavioral issue, and that is a real conversation.

If an employee costs me a thousand dollars, I just invested a thousand dollars in them. Firing them is not how I get my ROI. Theft is different. Integrity issues have no home on your team. But a mistake is tuition. Take a good person and give them an amazing process and they perform like an A player. Take that same person, give them nothing, and you struggle. This is the exact reason I build systems around behaviors and traits instead of gut feel, and it starts with knowing what a rockstar actually looks like in the role. That's the whole point of the Core Fit Profile.

Accountability is not rule following

Wade brought up a driver caught on his phone hours after a written warning. Here's the distinction most owners miss. Following rules is one thing. Accountability only exists when you have commitment and buy-in.

Did that driver commit, or did he nod his head to end an uncomfortable conversation? Sit down, read the policy line by line, and ask directly: are you committed to this or not? Now the next violation is not "you broke a rule." It's "you gave me your word and you broke it." Completely different conversation.

Personality drives delivery

I hate the compliment sandwich. It's the dumbest thing ever created. Give me the meat. When you dance around it, I lose respect for you as a leader.

But that's me. High extroverts need to be liked, so hitting them with pure criticism reads as rejection. High steadiness people want the checklist. High C people want black and white. You don't get to demand that every person adapt to your communication style. You adapt to theirs. That's leadership work, and it's the same work I walk owners through inside the Core Fit Hiring System.

One last thing. I ran a workshop with 18 service leaders and asked what made them loyal. Every answer was personal. My boss gave me time off when my spouse was sick. The team showed up at the hospital. I was more than a number. People don't come to work to make you money. They come to work because they have a personal life they want to take care of. The second your company stops helping with that, they look elsewhere.

If you liked this, I go deeper on tough conversations and building accountability into your systems on Titans of the Trades.