Our commercial fleet and field equipment maintenance has deteriorated into constant downtime, but neither our Operations Director nor our Head of Maintenance wants to sit in the Fleet Management seat. How do we place and staff an unglamorous seat that neither leader wants to own?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Start by decoupling the work from the personalities. When critical work stalls because nobody wants to own it, the leadership team usually has buried the seat under another department where it feels like a chore rather than a core mission.

Take the Fleet Management seat and define its five major roles on your Accountability Chart. Typical roles include preventative maintenance scheduling, equipment safety compliance, asset lifecycle and disposal, vendor and repair shop management, and fleet utilization tracking.

Once the seat is explicitly documented, look at your existing structure. If Operations owns it, the Operations Director will always prioritize customer delivery over oil changes and DOT inspections. If Maintenance owns it, they get bogged down in reactive mechanical repairs and fail to track asset depreciation and preventative schedules.

Decide where the seat reports based on the greatest risk to the business. In an asset-heavy business, downtime destroys gross margin. Place the seat directly under your Integrator if fleet readiness dictates operational capacity, or under Operations with a dedicated leader who is not also fighting daily dispatch fires.

Do not force an existing manager who lacks GWC to absorb it. If your Operations Director gets it and has capacity, but openly admits they do not want it, they will neglect it. That violates the Want component of GWC. You must either hire an external fleet professional, engage a managed fleet service, or promote a shop foreman into a dedicated seat whose sole quarterly Rocks and Scorecard measurables center on fleet uptime. Make it a legitimate, celebrated seat with clear numbers.