“Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.”
It’s been almost 250 years since Benjamin Franklin said those words, and they’re just as true today as they were then. As a fleet manager, staying on top of developments in the fleet industry is critical to your success and to the successes of the company you work for and the customers you serve.
Fleet managers possess a unique combination of skills and talents as well as experience in dealing with a broad range of issues in many different areas, and time spent honing those skills and talents can make you more effective at your job and invaluable to your employer.
Take some time to evaluate yourself with regard to the following five key characteristics, identify areas where you need to improve, and then develop an action plan to help you achieve your objectives:
Time management:
These two words are thrown about a lot in corporate management, but understanding how to delegate your time and your responsibilities is a key factor in ensuring you can juggle all the varying demands of effective fleet management.
Ideally, you need to develop a sense of the degree of importance of all the issues you face. Learning to identify which issues can be postponed and which issues are truly urgent can ensure you stay on task.
Try pigeonholing issues into one of these four areas and then addressing them in order: 1. Urgent/important; 2. not urgent/important; 3. urgent/not important; 4. not urgent/not important.
Adaptability:
Fleet management evolves every day. Shifts in the economy affect your fleet costs and your customers’ ability to compete. Remaining flexible in the face of change is critical to your success as a fleet manager; don’t simply accept change – embrace it and look for ways to use change to benefit your fleet, your company and your customers. Look deeply into every change to uncover unique opportunities to keep your company at the top of its field.
Communication:
Having good communication skills – both written and oral – means you can communicate goals as well as concerns at all levels, and communicate them with assurance, tact and understanding. Work on being concise; the ability to communicate even complex issues with brevity is key when presenting presentations to senior management. Learning to self-edit to avoid being wordy is important, both for written and oral presentations. If you’re nervous about speaking in front of a group, consider enrolling in a Toastmaster’s program to improve your public speaking skills.
Inquisitive mind:
Good communication and the ability to persuade management relies on a concrete knowledge of the fleet industry and your own company, so be sure to stay abreast of developments in both. Reading fleet industry magazines, following websites and keeping up on social sites are all important to stay on top of current developments.
Keep an eye on your company’s blogs, internal communications and social sites, as well, so you understand issues that are important to management. That kind of in-depth understanding can help you propose solutions that earn the respect of senior executives.
Leadership:
Being a great leader is about a lot more than telling other people what to do. At its heart, leadership is about setting a consistent and positive example and providing guidance that enriches the fleet team as well as the company overall. Great leaders inspire by adapting to change, listening to concerns at all levels and providing firm and balanced answers to critical questions as they arise.
Leaders are also able to communicate a vision for their team that reflects both the department goals and the goals of the management. As a leader, you must also value the opinions of others and work hard to create a spirit of cooperation and teamwork, encouraging contributions while providing opportunities to learn and be rewarded for positive accomplishments.
Sound like a lot? It is. Great fleet managers are constantly working to improve themselves in these and other key areas. The key to succeeding in these and other critical areas is to be honest with yourself about areas where you need to improve, then developing a plan – and acting on it – to help you achieve a new level of success.
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