Seven Core HOW POWER Principles Every Dealer Should Implement This Quarter

Keeping your edge in a competitive marketplace isn’t about inventory, incentives, or location. It’s about HOW you provide your services. 

Your HOW POWER is the way you lead. It’s the guidance framework for your entire organization’s performance. When you understand HOW POWER, you can use it to transform your company culture, the trust guests feel when they walk through the doors, and the bottom-line results.

HOW POWER is a collaborative system of action within a dealership. It includes how people think, how they execute their daily tasks, how they work together, and how they make guests feel. 

In his new book, Creating HOW POWER, David R. Ibarra goes into detail, covering everything from staying positive to creating guest loyalty through intentional, well-designed themes. He shares how sales, service, and leadership can be built into a system of predictable, reliable excellence. 

One of the best things about HOW POWER is that it can be studied every day, in just ten minutes, and the principles are easy to implement right away. It leverages your time so you can ACT immediately.

Here are the seven core principles that you can start using today:

1. A clear purpose – Team members tend to drift when a company’s purpose is fuzzy. Executables fall by the wayside and morale drops, too. In contrast, a strong purpose statement shows teams how to act independently, what their executables should be, and what the internal rewards could be. If you haven’t done so already, design a one-sentence purpose statement for each department.

2. Trust multiplies performance – Trust within a team automatically creates HOW POWER, because it gives team members a safe space to grow. Team members who trust each other watch out for each other, keep each other on task, encourage each other, and celebrate wins together. A culture of trust reduces turnover. It increases CSI and improves closing ratios. One micro-habit you can start building today to increase trust is to verbally acknowledge the efforts of each team member every day.

3. Empowerment and accountability go hand in hand – Team members collaborate best when they have the support they need to do their jobs well. Empower your team members by providing training, one-on-one mentoring, or other confidence-building activities so they can do their best work. 

4. Consistency in Daily Rituals – Your team members will follow your examples. Spend ten minutes a day reading something like Creating HOW POWER and recording ways to implement the ideas. You could also create a 10-minute morning alignment ritual so that every team member is on the same page.

5. Coaching Over Correcting – Calling people on the carpet—especially in public—destroys trust and motivation. A HOW POWER leader reframes this as personal development and guides behaviors instead of demanding outcomes. 

6. Collaborative Problem-Solving – Communication across departments is essential for aligning every team member toward the dealership’s objectives. If your departments aren’t yet aligned, hold a weekly 15-minute huddle for all departments together.

7. Continuous Learning & Adaptation – Expect some bumps and bruises as you and your team members begin aligning better. Dealerships have to evolve with market shifts, customer expectations, and the pure human nature of team members. Keep everyone aligned by discussing one HOW POWER principle together every week.

These seven principles are the antidote to dealership challenges like guest apprehension, turnover, and the digital retail learning curve. HOW POWER increases trust and morale. It improves performance. Most importantly, it dials in customer loyalty.

You can find out more by exploring David R. Ibarra’s Creating HOW POWER. Take one principle a day. Act on it. And watch what happens.