DIY leadership skillbuilding: Chas Voyles' journey from the bathroom to boardroom

Great leaders know how to delegate. But when it comes to building up your own managerial skillset, as the old saying goes, “If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself.”

No one else is going to care more about which rung of the ladder you end up on, or how fast you get there. Both are dependent on how much effort you’re willing to put into career development and unlocking your leadership potential.

Keeping with that spirit, we are focusing on several leaders in the fleet maintenance sector who have climbed up to the C-suite by pulling on their own bootstraps and using methods available to everyone. 

Charles “Chas” Voyles, Jr.
Associate Director of Customer Service and Fleet 
International Motors

Some people start out sweeping the shop floor. At 19, Charles "Chas" Voyles wished he were that lucky. The year was 1984, and he just finished vocational school in St. Louis, looking to land his first diesel shop job. He was invited to ADM Trucking’s apprentice training with 19 other people (a rarity for fleets nowadays). The glut of potential hires allowed ADM to drill down for work ethic and attitude in creative ways, Voyles recalled. That’s why he started out with a toilet brush, not a broom.

“Back then, they didn’t care so much about what you knew fresh out of technical school; they wanted to see if you were actually going to work,” Voyles said.

So the 20 recruits got to scrubbing. “It didn’t take long to wean down to two people left: me and another guy,” Voyles recalled. “We were hungry and wanted to learn truck repair, and so we scrubbed toilets.”

After four months getting face-to-face with commodes and urinals, he was finally promoted to sweeping. After this boot camp, Voyle’s real training began with a grizzled Army sergeant who fought in Korea and Vietnam named Bob Elliott.

The war veteran had a reputation for being hard to get along with, but Voyles said they got along great due to the apprentice having a “two ears, one mouth attitude,” meaning he listened twice as much as he spoke.

Elliott became his mentor, teaching him how strip down 9L Detroit Diesel 6V92 engines to the block and put them back together as a soldier would with a rifle.

“I listened to all of his tricks and adopted the way he approached truck repair—and I started getting good,” Voyles recalled.

He soon moved from the engine room to the rebuild facility, which Elliott ran. Voyles learned A/C systems, painting, suspension, and alignment. This is how Voyles learned to hook two wrenches together to get more leverage and bust stubborn bolts where an impact wrench could not reach.

The secrets to quick and correct electrical troubleshooting and perfect welding techniques were next revealed by Elliott. Voyles could cite a hundred similar examples.
But the time came for Voyles to step out of the shadow.

“One day, he called me into his office, and I thought I was in trouble for something, and he just says, ‘Charlie, you’re in charge,’” laughed Voyles.

Elliott was going on a three-week trip, and before he did, Voyles learned everything he needed and, though nervous at the start, got the hang of it. He was rewarded with the midnight shift as shop foreman, managing truck and trailer repairs and work orders.
At the end of the shift, with the sun barely up, many of the guys went off to the bar for beers, though Voyles never did. He admits it “felt a little weird, because you kind of put yourself as a little bit of an outsider.”

Voyles had a wife and child at home and, like his mentor, didn’t drink. That military-regimented aspect of Elliott is what Voyles may find most enduring. “He helped me set standards for my life and taught me discipline I’ve maintained over the course of my career.”

He built the very important skill of accommodating customers as a service director for a Freightliner dealership in the 2000s. He volunteered several hours of his time doing tractor-trailer inspections with a JB Hunt executive at an off-site location. While crawling under trucks, Voyles listened to the exec discuss the fleet’s pain points. Hearing how downtime affected the fleet, particularly the driver trying to make a living, helped Voyles empathize and “develop a different mindset,” one where he could be the solution.

“It just started a fire within me to be very involved with the fleets,” he recalled. Soon enough, he developed a reputation as the fleet guy, and more business came through the dealership.

He then moved over to fleet service manager at the company formerly known as Navistar to handle big accounts for them, moving up the ladder to his current position as associate director of customer service and fleet.

Voyles is now around the same age as Sgt. Elliott was when they met. Unlike his war-weary mentor, Voyles has a lot of optimism regarding the industry’s younger recruits and their curiosity.

“What’s beautiful is that they’ll come to an old salt like me and they’ll ask questions,” he said. “And I think one of the reasons that I can give good input is because I’m not stuck back in the 80s.”

And this might be Voyles’ strongest skill: leading the way by following up on new trends and technology. He has embraced AI LLM tools such as Claude’s Sonnet and Haiku tools to conceptualize and model engine and tribology data to understand engine oil detergent impact on wear and useful life. Predictive and prognostic maintenance are other areas he’s dove into headfirst.

“I’m not done growing,” he asserted. “I’m still pretty on fire, and I got a lot of ideas.”