The title of this NADA Show 2026 session is a triple pun and you have to know a specific corner of American comedy to catch any of it. “Are You Will-ing to Lead? Use an Old School Approach To Stand Out from The Other Guys” hides the name Will Ferrell, plus two of his films, in eleven words. Every slide that follows carries a cartoon of a Ferrell character: Buddy the Elf on the prow of a ship, Ricky Bobby and his father at a kitchen table, a peacock in a suit insisting it be allowed to fly.
Brian Crossin is an Academy Instructor at NADA, which makes this the third session in our series presented by somebody with nothing to sell, after Wired to Win and Decoding Digital. The pattern is holding: the NADA staff sessions contain no vendor pitch, and this one contains not a single statistic, which after several weeks of tracing conference numbers back to their sources is a pleasant change.
It does leave a translation problem. The jokes are the delivery mechanism for the content, and the jokes do not travel. So this piece unwraps the packaging and keeps what is inside, which turns out to be a straightforward and rather good talk about running a dealership floor.
The speed of the captain equals the speed of the ship
This is the spine of the session and it is worth taking seriously, because it is a claim about how much of a dealership’s tempo is set by one person’s mood on a Tuesday morning. The supporting bullets:
- Leaders set pace, tone and direction
- Moods and behaviours are infectious
- Be predictable to be approachable
- Communicate both big and little things when they happen
- Demonstrate emotional intelligence
- Hold toxic team members accountable
“Be predictable to be approachable” is the one that earns its place. Most advice about approachability is about warmth, and warmth is not actually the variable. A manager who is cheerful three days in five and unreadable on the other two is not approachable, because nobody can afford to guess wrong. Consistency is what lets a service advisor bring you a problem at nine in the morning instead of hiding it until it becomes a customer complaint.
The last bullet, on toxic team members, needs a South African footnote and gets one further down.
What a well-respected leader has, and is
The session splits the qualities into two columns, and the split is the interesting part. Leaders have vision, integrity, credibility and emotional intelligence. Leaders are thoughtful, inquisitive, adaptable, accountable and humble.
The first column is what gets you the job. The second is what people describe when they are asked about you after you have left the room, and it is noticeably harder to fake for long. Inquisitive is the one most dealer principals would not list about themselves, and it is the one that determines whether anybody tells you what is actually going wrong on the floor.
This is also where the session connects to the rest of our NADA coverage. Our piece on leading with emotional intelligence in the AI age makes the same argument from the other end: as more of the operational work gets automated, the residual human job is disproportionately the one this session describes.
Words have power, and the small stuff is what people remember
One slide makes a point about throwaway remarks, illustrated with a father walking back a piece of advice he gave his son years earlier and had forgotten saying. The son built a career on it. The father did not remember the conversation.
The dealership version is not hypothetical. A sales manager’s offhand comment about a salesperson’s accent, or a joke about which brand of customer is worth spending time on, gets remembered and repeated long after the person who said it has moved on. The slide’s phrasing is that words have power and consequences, and that sometimes it is the small stuff people remember. In a business with high staff turnover and long institutional memory, that is a practical warning rather than a sentimental one.
Coaching, and the difference between support and pressure
Two sections cover developing people. On supporting growth: help them self-assess, set attainable stretch goals, offer support. On coaching: guiding questions, discovery learning, aha moments, positive reinforcement.
None of that is new, and the session does not pretend otherwise. What is worth pulling out is the pairing of “attainable” with “stretch”, because dealership target-setting routinely gets this wrong in both directions. A target nobody can hit stops being a target within about three weeks and becomes evidence that management is not serious. A target everybody hits is a budget, not a stretch. The word doing the work is attainable, and the only way to know whether a target is attainable is to have asked the person who has to hit it, which is what the self-assessment bullet is for.
There is also a slide on not expecting unreasonable changes and making accommodations, which in a South African context reads more sharply than it probably did in the room: staff who commute two hours each way on public transport are not being difficult when they cannot do a 7am stand-up.
The most important slide, and it is not a joke
Midway through, the tone changes. A slide headed “Tradition or Hazing?” carries two words, humiliating and embarrassing, and it is followed by the session’s sharpest line: get in the car, inspire your people to get in too, and if you haze, they will not get in the car.
Read plainly, that is an argument that initiation rituals destroy discretionary effort. The new salesperson who was made to do something humiliating in their first week will do the job and nothing beyond the job, permanently.
In South Africa the stakes are higher than the slide suggests, and this is our addition rather than the presenter’s. What an American deck can treat as a culture problem is here a legal one:
- Harassment is a form of unfair discrimination under the Employment Equity Act, and the Code of Good Practice on the Prevention and Elimination of Harassment in the World of Work, which came into effect in 2022, covers a broad range of conduct including humiliation and initiation practices. It is explicit that this is not limited to sexual harassment.
- The employer carries the liability. Where an employer knows or reasonably should know that harassment is happening and does not take reasonable steps, it can be held responsible. “It is a tradition here” and “nobody complained” are not defences, and in a dealership the people who do not complain are usually the ones on probation.
- You need a policy and a route to report. If your dealership has never written down what is and is not acceptable in a workshop or on a sales floor, the first time you will define it is in front of the CCMA, and it will be defined for you.
The practical test the session offers is a good one regardless of jurisdiction. If the ritual would be humiliating or embarrassing to the person on the receiving end, it is not tradition.
“Hold toxic team members accountable” is harder here than the slide implies
Also ours. American at-will employment makes that bullet a decision. South African labour law makes it a process, and treating it as a decision is how dealerships end up losing at the CCMA and paying compensation to somebody everybody agreed was a problem.
Under the Labour Relations Act a dismissal has to be substantively fair, meaning there is a real reason, and procedurally fair, meaning the person was told what the problem was, given a chance to respond, and given an opportunity to improve where the conduct allows for it. Attitude and toxicity are among the hardest grounds to run precisely because they are rarely documented. The version of this advice that works locally is:
- Name the specific behaviour and its effect, not the personality. “Undermines the service advisors in front of customers” is actionable. “Bad attitude” is not.
- Write it down at the time, every time, including the informal conversations. The record is the case.
- Follow progressive discipline and let the person actually have the chance to change, because a genuine chance is both the fair thing and the thing that survives scrutiny.
None of this is legal advice, and anything approaching a dismissal is a conversation to have with a labour practitioner before it happens rather than after.
Lead anyway
The best slide in the deck has three lines on it. Sometimes they follow. Sometimes they do not. Lead anyway.
It is illustrated with the streaking scene from a Ferrell film in which a character sets off down the street convinced the whole group is behind him and discovers he is alone. The joke carries a real observation: most leadership advice assumes the followership, and the actual experience of introducing anything new in a dealership is that the first attempt gets partial buy-in at best. The session’s answer is not a technique. It is that partial buy-in is the normal condition and you proceed anyway, which is more honest than most change-management material manages.
Paired with it is a slide on acting with purpose: have a realistic plan, and be clear about the reason. The reason is the part that gets skipped, and it is the part that determines whether the second attempt goes better than the first.
The one exercise worth actually doing
The session closes with the only concrete assignment in it, an optimism challenge. Pick a day. Start out smiling. Greet everyone cheerfully. Accentuate the positive, and the slide adds the parenthetical that makes it usable, even if you are kicking and screaming inside.
It sounds trivial and it is testable, which is more than can be said for most leadership content. If the speed of the captain really does set the speed of the ship, then one deliberately consistent, deliberately positive day should produce an observable difference in how the floor runs, and you will know within a week whether the central claim of the session is true in your building. That is a cheap experiment with a real answer at the end of it.
The closing framework asks what you can get your people fired up about, alongside developing your own emotional intelligence, modelling what you expect, building a one-team dealership and making more leaders. Making more leaders is the one to keep. A dealership that produces managers is a dealership other people want to join.
What the session does not give you
Being straight about it, as we have been with the rest of the series.
There is no evidence base. Not a single figure, no research cited, no measurement proposed beyond the optimism challenge. That is a fair choice for a talk about leadership style and we would rather have honest assertion than the borrowed and unsourced statistics we found in several vendor decks, but it does mean nothing here is falsifiable and you are taking an experienced instructor’s word for it.
There is also no guidance on the hardest part, which is leading people older or more experienced than you, a common position for a young service manager in a South African dealership. And the recording we worked from carries no audio track, so whatever Crossin said around these slides, and whatever came up in questions, is not available to us.
Where to start on Monday
- Run the optimism challenge for one day this week and watch what happens to the tone of the floor. It costs nothing and it tests the session’s core claim.
- Audit your own predictability before your warmth. Ask whether your team can guess what mood you will be in.
- Write down what happens to new starters in their first week, then read it back and ask honestly whether any of it is humiliating. If it is, that is a harassment exposure and not a tradition.
- Check whether you have a written harassment policy and a reporting route that does not run through the person most likely to be the problem.
- Take your one genuinely difficult team member and replace the label with a written description of the specific behaviour and its effect. That single change turns an unmanageable situation into a manageable one.
The comedy is doing a lot of work in this session, and without it the content is unremarkable in the way that genuinely useful advice usually is. Be consistent. Say the reason. Do not humiliate people. Keep going when they do not follow. That it took a decade of film references to make a room full of dealer principals sit still for it is a comment on the audience rather than the material.
Source
- Are You Will-ing to Lead? Use an Old School Approach To Stand Out from The Other Guys, presented by Brian Crossin, Academy Instructor at NADA, at NADA Show 2026, Las Vegas, 3 to 6 February 2026. Reviewed from the 21 page handout and the full 36 minute recording.
- The recording carries no audio track, so the slides were read in full but no spoken commentary was available to us, including the closing questions. Everything attributed to the presenter is text shown on a slide.
- The session makes no statistical claims at all, so there was nothing to fact check, and it contains no monetary figures, so there was nothing to convert into rands.
- The film and character references are the presenter’s framing device. We have described them rather than reproducing the dialogue, and have kept the leadership content, which stands without them.
- Ours rather than the presenter’s: the Employment Equity Act and 2022 Code of Good Practice on harassment, the employer liability point, the entire Labour Relations Act section on what holding someone accountable requires here, the commuting example, and the observation about leading people more experienced than you. Nothing here is legal, labour or compliance advice.