Updated: Jun 20, 2020
Your role as a restaurant manager is no joke. It is certainly not easy leading people and managing a restaurant at the same time.
Aside from implementing restaurant marketing strategies, overseeing food quality, developing menus, entertaining and serving customers, you are also responsible for recruiting, hiring and training your staff. It is indeed multitasking at its finest.
Now, let's focus on your role as a leader to your people. What kind of manager are you to your employees?
The one thing that you need to do as a manager or leader in the restaurant is not to view yourself as a manager but rather as a coach.
Statistics show that most employees don’t quit their jobs because they find it hard or difficult, but they quit because they don’t feel valued at work.
One of your roles as a restaurant manager is to ensure that you have a strong team to keep your business running.
It is important that you build a good working relationship with your staff because it will make them stay and not easily give up.
More than a manager, you need to be a coach to your staff to help them develop their full potential. As a coach, you are responsible for training the people, analyzing their performances and instructing them through encouragement and motivation.
How do you play your role as a coach?
1. Communicate with your team
When you look at sports coaches, they are always observing their team. They are standing on the sideline and they are watching their team all the time.
They may be doing a lot of different things but they always keep their eyes on their team. They focus on their team for them to know how they can improve their performance.
Same in the restaurant, as a coach, you need to effectively communicate with your team for them to work effectively.
By consistently observing what your people are doing, you can see what their strengths and weaknesses are.
Communicating does not necessarily mean that it should always be verbally, a coach listens not only to words but more importantly, to nonverbal cues.
Good communication means you can express yourself clearly to your team through words and your actions, and vice versa.
It is a two-way process that builds understanding and camaraderie to the entire team.
2. Give more feedback to your team
You must communicate with your team so that they can receive and give feedback.
Just like what sports coaches do, when it is time to perform, they are standing on the sidelines and watch their team.
When it is not game time, they are coaching their team by giving them instructions on what they need to work on and how they can progress on that.
As a coach, you do understand people's shortcomings and instead of viewing that as a mistake, you regard it as an opportunity for you to intervene.
You are coaching to serve and look for that opportunity to get there and assist. Taking away any obstacle that hinders your people to perform well.
3. Engage your team by involving them through delegating the task
Whenever you walk into your restaurant or you walk in the kitchen, observe your servers and your kitchen crew.
Figure out what are their movements and what is that they could do better. How could they be more efficient?
Intervene and try to suggest like saying "Instead of doing that, why don't we try this?" or "Maybe we should do it this way, let's try this."
This is engaging them in the process.
You must have that view as you are not just managing people by telling them what to do, but you get to engage them.
Be in the workplace to be a part of their actual training. Coaching them means helping them to learn rather than teaching them.
You have to have a game plan every single day, every single shift for every single person for them to grow.
A coach does not train the team by just merely giving them what to do. That's not how it goes, there's got to be a game plan, right?
You must have a strategy and you must be obsessed with training your team intensely.
Keep in mind that the stronger your team, the less stress you will have as a restaurant manager.
So think about how are you going to make your team stronger today and how are you going to coach them to success. Invest in your staff because they are your greatest weapon in having a successful business.
If you find yourself solving or facing the same problems over and over again, it is because the team needs coaching, a lot of coaching.
That's it, they do need coaching, otherwise, you should not be dealing with the same problem. Like once people have been coached and learned what is 2+2, you should not get back in there and tell them again that 2+2 is 4.
It is just frustrating when you have to solve the same problem over and over again. It is because we need to get in there and figure out what is the source of the problem.
Coaching the team can help a lot because once they know what is 2+2, then you don't need to get there and tell them what the answer is, hopefully, they will figure that out.
This simple mindset shift can help you in making this whole journey as a restaurant manager and a leader in your restaurant less stressful.
It puts you on a perspective that we have a long term duty to set people up for success.
The work they do in our restaurant is simply an opportunity for us to help them achieve their goals. Coach them what's the right way to do and what's not.
Teach them the value of responsibility and hard work for them to grow with a strong work ethic. The world desperately needs that.
Lead by example and be there every day for our team and coach them.
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