The most important part of the Mid-America Trucking Show
April 23, 2024
The Mid-America Trucking Show (MATS)—According to a number of people I spoke to there, the event was smaller than last year, but don’t let that fool you. If you’ve never been, you’ve got to know that this thing is absolutely huge. There’s a wildly broad range of vendors, food, attendees, and entertainment—it was nonstop. So what tied it all together? I mean, sure, it’s a trucking show. But it turns out there was something else going on just underneath the surface, and I’m going to call it Dale, Kevin and Dean.
Dale
In the middle of the Thursday session, a guy came over to our booth—I’ll call him Dale (not his real name). He had been a driver for about 30 years and had been coming to MATS for even longer. He told me how he was there with his dad, who had also been a driver but was now retired.
I learned about Dale’s preference for Petes but that he also used to run a Freightliner that, fully loaded, could still beat his dad’s Kenworth up a mountain even when the Kenworth was empty. He told me that he could appreciate how people felt about Volvo engines, but there was really nothing like the sound of a Detroit 6. We spoke like that for about 20 minutes, and then his dad was ready to go and they moved on.
An afternoon session
One of the reasons we were there at the show was to do an education session for the Best Fleets to Drive For program. Mark Murrell (his real name) and I got up on stage on Thursday afternoon and presented some of our findings from this year’s competition. There was a lot of data and some interesting trends came out of it, but one of the big takeaways was how drivers felt about communication and how well (or how poorly) companies were managing information and feedback with their drivers. This was not a trend unique to this year alone.
After the session, we were approached by a bunch of folks, two of whom were with a small company in Kentucky (one a driver and one a manager). What they were particularly interested in was that the driver survey portion of the Best Fleets competition is anonymous—they were excited about getting an unvarnished picture of how their drivers felt.
Kevin
Back in the exhibit hall, a guy named Kevin (not his real name) came over and spoke very bluntly about what he felt was the biggest problem in the industry: no one listens to drivers. Then he listed 5 different things companies could be doing to make drivers’ lives easier and more efficient, but no one ever does it.
To be clear, Kevin knew that we weren’t the ATA, or policymakers from Congress—he just wanted to tell someone—anyone about this very simple but pervasive problem in the industry.
Dean
On the Friday morning of MATS, I had the good luck to get on the Dave Nemo show—they were broadcasting from Louisville specifically because of the trade show. I had a chance to chat some more about our findings in the Best Fleets program, and as I sat around the table with Dave Nemo, Jimmy Mack, Lyndsay Lawlor and Dean Croke (all their real names), I mentioned that one of the secrets to the most successful companies in the competition was their ability to weaponize the knowledge of their drivers to inform and improve different processes and programs throughout their organization.
Suddenly, they all pointed at Dean, who was sitting to my left—apparently, just 30 minutes before I got there, he had been talking about that very same thing; about the necessity and value of listening to your drivers and how that information will absolutely have strong positive effects throughout the company.
The point is that two things were happening at the show at the same time—on the one hand, the knowledge that drivers should be listened to (both in their own right and also as a source of information for improving the business) exists—the guys who approached us after the education session, Dean’s point, and also what a lot of the companies in the Best Fleets program are doing. This isn’t something new, and it isn’t rocket science.
On the other hand, the lack of putting that into action occurs in a bunch of other places—it’s a longstanding experience for drivers across the industry, which means that not enough companies are doing it. Just ask Kevin.
So how do you bridge the gap? There are a lot of ways a company can collect good intel and insight from its drivers—create a driver advisory board, gather regular feedback through surveys, or create a private Facebook page where drivers can tell you what they really think. But that’s only half of it. Because if your drivers are going to feel like they are being listened to, they’ll need some indication that you’re going to do something with the information once you’ve gathered it. You’ll need to close the communication loop by following up on what they tell you with regular updates—even if that sometimes means letting them know that they won’t be getting something they’ve asked for because of some broader business reasons. Whatever the answer is, active listening means showing the speaker that you’re doing something with what they are telling you, even if that’s just acknowledging what they are saying.
Dale, again
As Dale and I talked, he mentioned that his dad was getting older, and this might be his last chance to get to MATS. And that’s when the real importance of this show hit me. To be sure, there’s a lot of cool stuff there—but it’s also a place where there’s a chance someone might listen to you, even for a little while. Maybe it’s about detention time, or how no one thinks about teaching drivers to manage the last 100 feet of a trip—or maybe it’s just about how good that old Freightliner was at getting up a mountain.