Why Won't My Team Follow the Plan? A Retired Army Planner Says Stop Blaming Your People

When a dealership plan stalls, it is almost never because the team refuses to execute. It stalls because the team never shared the same understanding of the plan in the first place. Retired Army strategist Bryant Love, a former plans branch chief at U.S. Africa Command who led 16-plus major planning efforts across 20-plus nations, puts it bluntly: if ten people leave your meeting with ten interpretations, the starting gun goes off and they scatter across the track.

The fix starts with the leader, not the staff.

What Is "Shared Understanding" in a Dealership?

Shared understanding is the point at which every person involved in a plan describes the problem, the objective, and their own role in the same words. It is not agreement. It is common interpretation.

Bryant's example will feel familiar to anyone who has sat in a Monday manager meeting. The boss gives guidance. Ten people are in the room. Ten people take away ten different things. Then the real meeting happens at the coffee pot: "What did he mean by that?"

If everybody sees it differently, everybody's at the starting line. And then the starting pistol goes off. Either we're going to go in the same direction or you're going to scatter across the track.

In a store, scatter looks specific. Your used car manager thinks the new pricing directive means percent-of-market adjustments on units past 45 days. Your BDC manager thinks it means new scripting on price inquiries. Your desk thinks nothing changed. Three weeks later the aged units are still sitting and everybody can point to somebody else.

Building shared understanding takes time in the room and the right people in the room. Specifically, it takes people willing to question their own assumptions and be wrong. Bryant noted that leaders are not always comfortable with that, because ego is in play, especially with people who got successful doing it a certain way. He quoted a former leader of his: "My way got me here. Yours got you there."

Why Won't My Team Execute the Plan I Rolled Out?

This was the question John Anderson brought to the episode, because Lotpop coaches hear it constantly: I put it in front of them, they told me they understood it, and I still can't get them to do it.

It's inexcusable as a leader to blame your subordinates. You're in charge. That's what the big bucks are for.

Bryant's response did not soften, and he offered two places to look, in order.

First, look at yourself. Is it the message? Is it the delivery? Is it clear, or is it vague and aspirational? He pointed at vision and mission statements as the tell. You should be able to read one and know exactly what the company does and where it is going. When it reads like a poster, it produces the scatter effect.

Most leaders will not land here on their own. As Bryant put it, when there is a problem in the organization, almost nobody says "this is a leadership problem on my behalf," because that means putting yourself out there. It is always something else. It is always the people.

Second, look at what you are developing. If your team has no sense of duty, commitment, or loyalty to the store, ask why not. Then ask what you did to build it.

What Happens When a Dealership Has No Leader Development Plan?

Bryant's read on this was direct: if there is no leader development approach inside a dealership, you are failing, and "I can't get them to do it" is the clear indicator.

The alternative is the pattern every store has run at some point. New salesperson walks in. Here is your desk, here is your phone, here is the paperwork, off you go. Sink or swim, and by the way, produce or there is the door.

He argued the ROI runs the other way. When you develop people, you build loyalty to the brand. They stay even when somebody waves more money, because the internal math becomes: I like working with this crew, I am welcome here, I am being developed, and the feedback I get on my performance is not punitive.

"It may be a short-term investment," he said, "but you're going to make some money. And you're going to reach the potential of your market and your organization."

What Are "25-Meter Targets" and Why Do They Trap Managers?

25-meter targets is Army planning shorthand for the problems directly in front of you: the immediate, the urgent, the fire you are putting out right now.

Bryant's point is that misalignment guarantees you spend your entire week on them. When execution starts before understanding is shared, "you're going to spend most of your time putting out fires, not looking up and out or long."

Used car managers live this. The day fills with a bad trade appraisal, a recon bottleneck, a deal that needs re-desking. None of it is optional, and none of it moves your 30-day sold percentage. If your calendar is all 25-meter targets, that is a symptom of an alignment problem upstream, not a time management problem.

Can AI Make Me a Better Dealership Leader?

Partially, and Bryant was specific about the limit. "There is no technology in the world, there's no AI, nothing that's going to speed cognition, leader development, maturity, or experience."

He described the danger from firsthand experience, having done contract work helping refine a major AI company's models. AI can synthesize an enormous amount of information quickly. It should never make the decision for you. And the requirement to think critically is higher now than it has ever been, not lower.

He shared the example of a master's student who ran every source article through AI for summaries, assembled a polished paper with no grammatical errors, and then could not defend a word of it in the oral exam. Clean output, zero retention.

Chris Keene tied it to football: programs that run the same base scheme from little league through high school produce players who struggle at the college level, because they have never had to think outside the formation. Same risk on your sales floor.

Strategic patience is what Bryant offered as the counterweight. It means having an appreciation for time and being able to visualize where things are going 12, 24, and 36 months out. It is effortful thinking and it is a skill you have to keep developing. His skeptical aside was worth repeating: when somebody tells him they are a strategic thinker, his first thought is that they probably are not.

What Should I Ask Myself Before I Put a New Process on the Floor?

This is the most immediately usable piece of the episode. Chris Keene pulled it out of Bryant's advice to put yourself back in your frontline team's boots. Before you roll out a new tool, a new pay plan, or a new process, answer five questions on behalf of each person it touches.

1. How are they feeling about this right now?
2. What are they thinking that they are not saying out loud?
3. Where are their obstacles in actually doing this?
4. Who are they counting on to make it work?
5. Why are they even here in your store to begin with?

Bryant validated the framework and added the caveat that matters most: every person will answer those five questions differently, and your approach has to be tailored to each answer. Your 30-year veteran and your two-hour-old new hire are not accepting or rejecting this idea through the same lens.

Chris's takeaway from that exchange: leaders do not just need to know the differences, they need to know how to coach the differences.

What Does "Steady Hand on the Tiller" Mean for a Dealership Manager?

When Bryant left AFRICOM, one of his intelligence planners told him, "We're going to miss your steady hand on the tiller." He unpacked why that compliment mattered.

A leader has a profound effect on the climate and intensity of the room. You are cognitively managing your team whether you intend to or not. Walk in stressed and everyone senses it. Then the question becomes whether the urgency is real or false, and false urgency usually traces back to insecurity somewhere up the chain.

Buffer your people from noise above you

If it is chaotic at the ownership level, part of your job is absorbing that. Bryant's version: "Hey, you guys do what you do. I'm going to cover you. Take your time."

Slow down to speed up

He pointed the audience to Daniel Kahneman's System 1 and System 2 thinking. When someone asks a question in a meeting and the expectation is an instant answer, ask where that answer is coming from. If it is data, fine. If it requires thought and you fired it off anyway, you are pulling from an old mental model. As one of his mentors told him, we have a tendency to rearrange what we already know. That is moving deck chairs on the Titanic. It feels like progress and it changes nothing about the direction of the ship.

John Anderson's response to this was the most honest moment of the episode. He described holding up a mirror while Bryant talked, recognizing how often he reacts to something internally and then spends the next hour asking himself why he did not think first.

What Are the Four Components of Critical Thinking?

Bryant teaches applied critical thinking, formerly through the Army's Red Teaming school and now under a program funded by 1st Special Forces Command. He broke it into four parts.

1. Self-awareness

Knowing your own hot buttons and mental models. Personality instruments like MBTI or Personality Dimensions are data points for reflection, not verdicts. The value is in asking why a particular behavior irritates you. That colleague who thinks out loud through an entire meeting is not wasting your time, that is how they ideate.

2. Applied critical thinking

Tools you actually use rather than concepts you admire. Bryant was pointed here: most coaching stops at introspection and goal setting. He cares about application and how you build teams and leaders with it.

3. Groupthink mitigation

Preventing the strongest personality in the room from dominating the thinking. Some of your best people are internal processors who have the right answer ten minutes after the meeting ended. If your format never gives them a lane, you never get it.

4. Fostering cultural empathy

Not "I feel you." A colleague of his described it as looking through a transparent Rubik's cube, turning it to see every angle. Practically, it means forcing disagreement with yourself. Take the opposite position on your own plan and try to disprove it, so you either kill it, strengthen it, or build something better.

Be firm in principle, flexible in approach.

Two lines from this section are worth writing on a whiteboard. The first is the one above. Bryant hates checklists because nothing kills emergent thinking faster than a form, but with zero structure you get free range chickens. The second came from one of his mentors: to grow, you have to be willing to destroy a part of yourself.

And the definition of the job itself. As a planner, Bryant was told his role was not to have all the answers. It was to extract and leverage as much intellectual brainpower off his team as possible. That includes the day-one hire, who understands a generation of buyers and a set of shopping behaviors your 30-year veteran does not.

The Bottom Line

If you cannot get your team to run the plan, the plan was probably never shared, only announced. Start with three obligations: clarity, direction, and inspiration, and audit yourself on all three before you audit anybody else. Before your next rollout, work the five frontline questions for each person it affects, and accept that every answer will be different and each one needs coaching differently.

Then set the tempo. Be the steady hand, buffer your people from noise above you, and give the room permission to slow down and think instead of reacting. None of this is soft. It is the difference between a store that scatters at the starting gun and one that runs in the same direction.

For more on turning alignment into weekly execution, read How to Run an Inventory Meeting That Actually Works and 7 Reasons GMs Reject Dealership Software ROI, which digs into the one thing that earns real buy-in.

Book mentioned in this episode: The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli.

🎧

Full episode: Leadership Lessons from the Battlefield to the Showroom

Show notes, the complete transcript, and every place to listen to the full conversation with Bryant Love.