Coaching the heart and not the mind is the best way to keep moving in the right direction

Training the heart rather than the head is the best way to inspire employees to become the best advocates for Jaguar Land Rover says Driving Experience General Manager David Saunders.

Speaking at TREK 2018, a global training event for Experience instructors, he explained that the motivation behind running training sessions that are more hands on rather than classroom based will inspire loyalty and passion for the brands.

Following this approach has ensured David’s staff turnover has remained as low as two percent, and keep every colleague he works with happy, adding:

“Using the old analogy of we are teaching people to fish. We give our guys a fishing lesson and they go back and learn to fish in their own markets using their own tackle and bait.

“If we train their hearts, they will stay with the brand and share that passion with their customers, but they will also want to learn more. They will want to create an organisation that learns and shares, and with TREK we have created a learning programme where all the attendees have a shared experience and build a network as a result.”

Off the back of the networking and friendships built from TREK 2017, a group of 20 instructors went out to Russia to learn how to become the best ice drivers on Lake Baikal off their own intuition, which David says shows a learning organisation in action.

The ethos of TREK to learn, share and develop means that each instructor is a positive advocate, and those same learnings are disseminated down to their teams. David believes it is something that can be replicated across Jaguar Land Rover.

“The history of TREK was borne out of helping inspire retailers when Land Rover was participating in the Camel Trophy, and the aim was to share the spirit of the event with retailer staff,” he says. “Instead of instructors we would have sales executives, parts managers, service guys and technicians working as a team from each retailer.

“It engaged them about the products and the brand, teach them to recognise the different skills across the organisation and how they work together. It worked 20 years ago and it could absolutely work now.”

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