5 Leadership Lessons for Tradies from Automotive Training Leader Gavin Cribb

Guest: Gavin Cribb

Episode: Season 1, Episode 9

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Gavin Cribb started as an apprentice at Ford over 30 years ago and now leads a team of 70 automotive trainers, with a clear view on what actually attracts and keeps the next generation of tradies.

Here’s what he’s learned about leadership in an automotive trade.

Lesson 1: What It Means to Lead a Workshop Team

Gavin's first real leadership test came when he moved to a Queensland dealership and stepped into a foreman role, suddenly responsible not just for his own work but for a workshop's worth of customer relationships and technical output.

There wasn't much formal guidance on offer. He describes it as largely "suck it and see," figuring things out through trial, error, and a fair bit of luck.

What stuck with him was the realisation that a team wouldn't push through smoke, work unpaid overtime, or clean up with a smile unless they were genuinely led well.

"Leadership sort of means showing you're responsible for not just your actions but the actions of your team and team members," he says. "That's really built on respect and rapport."

Lesson 2: Leading Different Generations in the Trades

About a year before this conversation, Gavin attended a leadership conference where a presenter shared results from a large-scale survey asking different generations what good leadership actually looked like, and the answers varied more than he expected.

"Someone from a younger generation sees leadership as flexibility and empowerment," Gavin says. "Someone who may be a mature age likes the authoritative type of structure. Neither of them are wrong."

Managing a team of 70 trainers across those generational lines means there's no single approach that works for everyone. Gavin's job is figuring out which is which, without assuming either is the correct default.

Lesson 3: Attract New Talent with Better Apprenticeship Job Ads

Gavin did his own informal study of what a typical automotive apprenticeship ad looks like on Seek, and came away genuinely alarmed.

"I'll put a whole bunch of automotive apprenticeship ads out on Seek next to an ad for Bunnings," he says. "If I was mum or dad, I'd be going to Bunnings."

Part of the problem, he's found, is that most employers were promoted into hiring roles because they were great technicians, not because anyone taught them how to write a compelling job ad, so basics like mentioning the training pathway often just get left out.

He's also heard directly from schools that don't fully understand what a modern automotive apprenticeship involves and says if we want to attract strong talent into our workplaces, we have to showcase the value of an automotive apprenticeship.

Lesson 4: Collaboration Between Competing Automotive Businesses

As Vice President of the Victorian Automotive Forum (VAF), Gavin has witnessed a genuine shift in how supposedly rival training providers treat one another.

"Ten years ago, we wouldn't share any of that information because we were fiercely competitive," he says. "Now we just hand it over.” Resources, spare vehicles, even direct phone calls when someone's stuck on a compliance or recruitment issue.

VAF now runs three conferences a year and is expanding nationally, built specifically to give frontline trainers, not just managers, a stage and a professional community where collaboration is lifting the standard across automotive training and workplaces.

Lesson 5: Every Level of a Trade Career Comes With Leadership

Gavin pushes back on the idea that leadership only kicks in once you have a title or a team underneath you. Even a single technician working alone in a small independent shop, he points out, is still responsible for outcomes that ripple out to real people.

"You're still a leader," he says. "You're responsible for these huge outcomes that impact a lot of people," like the customer waiting at the counter for their car, relying on the job being done properly and on time.

That framing is part of why he tells apprentices they don't need a promotion to start taking their impact on others seriously.

Gavin’s Advice on Everyday Leadership

"Every day is a school day. Never stop learning. It's not easy showing respect and being the bigger person all the time, but sometimes you just gotta suck it up, because people are looking at you."

Optimism and professionalism, he says, go a long way even on the days that test both.

Catch the full conversation with Gavin Cribb on Tradies Who Lead for more leadership lessons for tradies, out now wherever you listen to podcasts.