At Hiester Automotive Group, philosophical discussions about purpose and doing the right thing have become the norm.
In January, the four-store North Carolina dealership group started a book club for employees to discuss best practices that they can apply to daily operations.
About 90 of Hiester’s 300 employees have joined the book club so far, breaking into various teams at the group’s stores, centralized accounting office, wholesale parts warehouse and reconditioning center.
The book clubs have led to a cultural shift and higher employee engagement, said Brandon Wright, executive assistant to dealer principal John Hiester.
“The goal for John is to inspire them to be better. That’s our core focus,” Wright said. “If you’re walking through the dealership long enough and consistently enough, you’ll hear them bring up comments from the book or topics from the book.”
Hiester and Wright are frequent listeners of audiobooks on leadership. They often chatted at dealership meetings about books they’d been listening to. Soon, managers began sharing their reading lists, and Hiester decided to launch a book club for the entire company.
“It does help with our staff having more buy-in to our culture, which organically becomes a good recruiting tool,” Hiester said. “When people love where they work and love what they do, they tell the world. And when they tell the world, the world wants a part of what they’ve got.”
The book club teams meet once a week over lunch to discuss the most recent chapters they’ve read. They talk through a list of questions written by Hiester and Wright to get the conversation going.
“They’re not meant to be right or wrong. They’re to get them to start talking,” Wright said.
Club members first read Leadership and Self-Deception by the Arbinger Institute.
“Employees learned that when we betray what we think is the right thing to do, we start to justify that betrayal and see the world in a distorted view; we deceive ourselves with self-justifying actions,” Wright said.
Now members are finishing Start With Why by Simon Sinek. From that selection, employees learned that the most successful companies inspire others “with a purpose or passion for why they exist,” Wright said. “When companies don’t know ‘why’ they exist, they settle for what they get or use manipulations to stay in control.”
Next, club members will read Why Jacob Matters, a book Hiester wrote. Many employees read the book when it was published in 2019, but since then, Hiester acquired a Chrysler-Dodge-Jeep-Ram store in Sanford, N.C., and hired more workers. He thought it was important for newcomers to read the book as a guide to the dealership group’s principles.
In the book, Hiester shares personal experiences in business and lessons he has learned from them. Each chapter ends with questions and activities. Other dealership groups also have used the book for employee training.
Hiester named the book Why Jacob Matters after Jacob Hobbs, an employee. Hiester said the group initially failed Hobbs when he was hired as one of its first product specialists in 2015.
“He was a perfect fit for our company, but we failed him, and after a short period of time with us, he put in his resignation,” Hiester said.
That experience taught Hiester and the management team how to make the product specialist program more successful. Today, Hobbs is a manager.
“Everybody has a Jacob,” Hiester said. “That person that you hired that checks every box but after a short period of time, they move on to something else leaving you to wonder ‘what could have been.’ ”
Hiester says that for employees to be engaged, they must believe they matter to the company, have a voice and a manager who will listen, see a path for growth and receive fair compensation. If employees can check those boxes, “they’re going to contribute to the success of your business,” he said.
The dealership group, which sells 8,000 to 9,000 new and used vehicles per year, has five core values for its employees: character/integrity, a love of people, a get-it-done attitude, professionalism and a servant attitude.
The guidance in the book and the core values hold Hiester and his leadership team accountable to practice what they preach, he said.
“In the beginning, it became what we used to filter out” job applicants, he said. “Now it has become the promise that I make to our employees. I’m going to surround you with people that embody those characteristics. There’s a lot of accountability that goes with it.”
Hiester is working on a second book, drawn largely from employee feedback, about forming an effective recruiting process. He expects it to be available by the end of the year.
“I really believe that in today’s culture and today’s landscape, recruiting and maintaining talent is one of the most important things that we do as leaders,” Hiester said. “This is one of the areas where our leadership team said, ‘We really need to train the next level on how to attract talent.’ ”