What Bad Goals Look Like\n

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Today, we're tackling one of the most expensive gaps in restaurant leadership: goal setting. Specifically, why most restaurant managers have never been taught how to set a goal that actually gets executed. By the end of this episode, you're going to understand what SMART goals are and where they came from, what bad goal setting is costing your business right now, and how to end every meeting and one-on-one with a SMART goal that moves your business forward. Let's get into it. Welcome to the Restaurant Leadership Podcast, where we coach independent multi-unit restaurant operators to build systems that drive profitability and reclaim time so they can scale with confidence and spend their time and energy where they want to, not where they have to. I'm your host, Kristen Marvin, restaurant coach and author of Multi-unit Mastery. If you are an independent restaurant owner managing multiple locations, you know the chaos that comes with growth. Inconsistent execution across your restaurants. Managers who won't take ownership. Constantly answering questions your team should already know the answers to. You're stuck in your current role when you want to be playing a bigger strategic role as you scale. You don't have the right leaders in place, or you keep losing them. And you're not sure how to find great people and actually keep them around. We work with passionate independent restaurant owners who found success with their first few locations and are ready to scale strategically. Our clients aren't looking to just survive expansion. They want to thrive through it. They're committed to developing strong leaders and creating exceptional guest experiences. Through the independent restaurant framework that we teach in multi-unit mastery, we coach independent restaurant groups to move from chaos to confidence by focusing on three pillars people, process, and profit. You can grab a gifted copy of the book at irfbook.com. On this show, we bring you real coaching conversations, leadership strategies, and the frameworks that you need to lead like a CEO instead of operating like a worn-out manager. And here's the thing: coaching has changed our clients' businesses and can change yours too. If you've never experienced what it's like to have someone in your corner who actually gets the restaurant world, we'd love to connect. We offer one-on-one and group coaching. Head to kristinmarvin.com/slash contact for a complimentary coaching session and let's talk about what's possible for your restaurant group. Here's something I hear constantly from restaurant operators, and I heard it again just this week. Kristen, we talk about the same issues in every single meeting. Nothing ever changes. Sound familiar? Here's what's actually happening. It's not that your team doesn't care.

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It's not that they're lazy.

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It's not that this generation doesn't know how to work hard or how to solve problems. It's simply that no one has ever taught them how to turn a problem into an actionable goal with a deadline, an owner, and a measurable outcome attached to it.

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That is a training problem. And it's costing you and your business time, money, and momentum every single week. Today, though, we're gonna fix that.

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Let me give you a couple examples of what bad goal setting actually looks like in your restaurant. The first one is about a young manager in a workshop that we just did recently. So we've got a workshop of about 10 young restaurant managers. We ask them to write one goal for the next 30 days around one specific leadership characteristic that they want to continue to embody and how they're gonna move the needle. What we tend, and this this doesn't this didn't just happen in this leadership workshop. It actually happens in every leadership workshop that we've done. We've probably done about 30 of them. What comes back from these young managers is a list of intentions.

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Things like improve communication, get better at scheduling, work on the culture.

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And what we coach them through in the moment is how to create a deadline. We ask them how they're actually going to measure success. There's no clear definition of what done actually looks like to them. It doesn't mean that the managers aren't engaged. They genuinely want to grow. They've just never been taught the difference between a wish and a goal. I know I was like this in my younger days. I had huge ambitions, but I didn't understand how to make them laser focused and how to take that first tiny next step to get me one step closer to achieving that bigger goal.

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When we ask them to set these SMART goals and then we start coaching around each part of the SMART goal, one, how do we make it specific? How do we measure it? Is it attainable?

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Is it relevant? And is it time-bound? That's when the light bulb moment clicks for them. When they hear one person amongst the group actually land and nail a SMART goal, that's when they say, Oh, okay, I get it. This is clear now. I know exactly what to do. And there's a cool dynamic that changes in the room in that moment when they start using these goals uh with the SMART framework. It's it's an incredible learning moment. It's really, really awesome to be a part of. Most young managers have just never been taught how to set a goal. I mean, we coach people that have been in the business for 20 years that don't know how to set a goal. This is very, very common. They've been told what to fix, but they never know how to measure whether they fixed it or not.

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Very, very important.

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Another example of this is an operator who's been running weekly manager meetings every single week, the same agenda, same issues, same conversation, week after week after week. Labor is too high. Communication between the front of the house and the back of the house is breaking down. The training program is inconsistent. Everyone in that manager meeting agrees that these are problems in the restaurant, but nobody walks away from the meeting with a specific action item attached to their name with a deadline on it. I've run a million meetings like this. Um I'm I've been a part of a ton of meetings like this.

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Three months later, the same issues are still on the agenda.

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When we introduce SMART goals to restaurant leaders, and and say to them, this isn't just a workshop thing, but this is something that you can incorporate in every manager meeting and every one-on-one that you're doing. There's a huge shift that happens in the business. Problems start to get solved, roadblocks start to be minimized or cleared away, and momentum starts to build for the business. Identifying a problem and solving a problem are two completely different things.

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Smart goals, though, are the bridge between the two.

What SMART Goals Are And Why\n

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This is the system that takes operators from chaos to confidence, and it's available right now for you listening to this podcast. Grab your copy at irfbook.com. I will put a link in the footer of the show notes for you. And let's keep going because this next section is going to change how you run every meeting from here on out. I talked a little bit about what's, you know, how SMART goals can make an impact and some of the examples that we've seen that SMART goals are showing up and how they're not showing up. But let's dive into what SMART goals are. So SMART is an acronym that stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. These goals were first introduced in 1981 by a guy named George Doran, who was a consultant and a former director of corporate planning for Washington Water Power Company. The framework was built really intentionally to solve the problem of vague, unmeasurable organizational goals. This these SMART goals can be used not just for the restaurant industry, but for any business. Any organization. It was really built for business leaders managing teams and resources. It was never meant to be just an academic exercise. It was designed to help create accountability and forward motion in real organizations like yours. Since then, it's been adopted by some of the most successful companies. It's used in leadership programs and coaching methodologies in the world. And yet we have found in doing this work coaching multi-unit operators over the last three years that most managers have never heard of SMART goals. And the gap is not their fault. It's no one's fault. It's a training and development failure at the industry level. Why does this matter specifically in restaurants? Restaurants are such high-pressure, fast-moving environments where the urgent almost wins over the important tasks. Without a structured goal framework like this, managers tend to default to putting out fires instead of building systems. We heard this from our regional manager recently in one of our workshops. How am I supposed to be able to work on my development as a leader and lean into specific characteristics when my job is putting out fires? And I challenge that person to think about, slow down a second and think about all those fires that they're putting out, being able to identify what the root cause is of each of those fires and figuring out if A, there's a system in place that needs to be trained, retrained, or coached with a staff, or if there is a system available to them that is not currently in the organization that needs to be set up. So they can eliminate those fires. The result, though, is that the same fires keep happening because nobody's working on the root cause, right? That's why these things keep coming up over and over and over again. You're just putting a band-aid on something. You're not truly sewing up the wound, if you will. So SMART goals really enforce the conversation from what's wrong to what are we going to do about it, who owns it, and by when. So much more powerful. This is the key difference between a reactive management team and a proactive leadership team. The proactive leadership teams are the ones that scale.

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So let's talk a little bit about a few examples of what bad goals look like. We need to get better at communication.

The Real Cost Of Weak Goals\n

Building A SMART Goal Step By Step\n

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Okay. There's when somebody says the word communication to me, I laugh and I have to ask the question, what does that mean to you? Because there are a million different types of communication and forms. And when somebody says we need to get better at communication, what I think they're saying and what they're saying are two completely different things. So better how, between who? By when, measured how. This is a complaint dressed up as a goal, but it will never get done because nobody knows what done looks like. They don't even know where to start. Here's another one. I want to reduce turnover, don't we all? Right? By how much? In what time frame? In which department? What specific action is that person going to take in order to make that happen? Without answers to these questions, it's just a wish. The thing that I love about these questions too is that it's helping leaders develop their strategic thinking skills. It's very easy to point out a problem, but when you challenge people to come up with a solution, that's where the real strategic thinking comes in, and that's where leadership starts to show up in a positive way or a negative way. Here's another one. We should work on our training program. Should. Should is one of the most dangerous words in a manager's vocabulary. We say this all the time when we're coaching our clients. When that word comes up, we say, you know, stop shooting all over yourself. Should has no owner. It has no deadline. It lives on next week's agenda forever. Let's improve the guest experience. Again, we all want to do this, right? It's so broad though that it's meaningless as a goal. What specific aspect of the guest experience? What does improvement look like? How will you know when you've achieved it? So there's a pattern underneath all of these, right? They've identified they identify a symptom, but not the solution. They have no owner, they have no deadline, they have no measurement, and unfortunately, they will never get done because there's no accountability attached to them. They're all, you're, you're just in a brainstorming session at that point with no real action or accountability behind it. That stops momentum from moving forward in your business. So what does it cost you from an operation standpoint? Time wasted in meetings that produces nothing. Team frustration when the same issues keep surfacing. When you're talking about the same thing over and over and over each week, it's so easy to get disengaged. Oh, we've heard it before. We're not going to do anything about it. Who cares? Loss of credibility for managers who consistently set intentions that they never execute on. This is a huge one. Momentum that builds and then evaporates because nothing ever gets finished. And real dollars. You've got unresolved labor issues, right? Training gaps, um, other operational inefficiencies that all have a direct line to your PL. So again, I want to dive a little bit deeper into what SMART goals are. Let's break down this framework a little bit. So S is specific. The goal needs to answer what exactly are we doing, who is responsible, and where does it apply? A weak specific goal is improve labor cost, but a strong one is reduce front-of-house labor percentage at the downtown location. Okay? Measurable. The goal needs a number attached to it. If you can't measure it, you can't manage it. So a weak example of this is get labor under control. The strong, measurable action item to this is reduce front-of-house labor from 38% to 33%. Even when you get to 37, 36, 35, 34, those are still huge wins and you're helping yourself reach the goal. A is for achievable. The goal needs to be ambitious but realistic. Setting a goal that is impossible destroys trust and motivation for your team. But setting one that is too easy creates complacency. So the sweet spot here is a goal that stretches the team without breaking them. Ask yourself when you're talking about setting these goals do you have the resources and the tools and the time to actually accomplish this? Or is this something that needs to be pushed off down the line? R is for relevant. The goal needs to connect to your larger business priorities, your annual vision, your quarterly focuses, or a specific operational challenge that you're trying to solve. Random goals create random results. So ask yourself again in this moment, why does this matter right now? And how does this move the business forward? If it doesn't align with your vision and it doesn't help you get one step closer to your vision, it doesn't make sense. Again, that vision is your North Star and your compass, and every decision, every question, every problem should be measured to that vision. The T is for time bound. Every goal needs a deadline. Deadlines create urgency. Urgency creates action, right? There's accountability here. So a weak example of this is we'll work on this over the next few months. When I hear something like that, I always push. It's never good enough. When, when, the strong response here is by May 31st. So here's what that entire goal that we just kind of talked about looks like in the SMART goal framework. By May 31st, our front-of-house labor percentage at the downtown location will be reduced from 38% to 33% through a revised scheduling template built and implemented by the front-of-house manager. Progress will be reviewed weekly in our Monday manager meeting. That's a SMART goal. It has an owner, it has a deadline, it has a measurable outcome, it has a clear action plan attached to it. And every single person in that room knows exactly what success looks like. Let me give you a couple other goals, um, SMART goal examples here. By the end of quarter two, our food costs at the West Side location will be reduced from 34% to 30% through a weekly inventory audit process built and owned by the kitchen manager. Here's one more. By April 15th, every manager on the leadership team will have completed one structured one-on-one with each of their direct reports, documented and shared in our leadership tracker. I would take that one step further and challenge when are those going to be started and who's the first person that you're going to sit down with, and how much time you're going to spend in these one-on-ones. The more specific you can get, the clearer that picture is for the manager, the easier it's going to be for them to take action.

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Let's talk about how to end every meeting of one-on-one with SMART goals, right?

Teaching SMART Goals To Your Team\n

Tools Workshops And Next Steps\n

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Because again, these can be used every time you sit down with someone. The meeting close that creates the most minimum here is the one that has a SMART goal attached to it. Most meetings, again, the ones that I've been a part of and run for many, many years, most meetings end with a vague sense of what needs to happen next. But here is how you close every single meeting with clarity and accountability. Reserve the last 10 or 15 minutes for every meeting for goal setting. This is very, very important. We do this in our leadership workshops because it takes a lot of time to get clarity here. Ask each person in the room, based on everything that we've just talked about, what is the one thing that you're going to commit to before we meet again? Using that word commit is such a strong anchor for them. That is something that wakes somebody up. They understand that it's a very serious ask, and hopefully it's something that they get excited about. Push them through the smart filter in this game. Get specific, attach a number, confirm it's realistic, connect to the business priority, lock in the deadline. This is a huge one. Write it down. Every goal gets documented with the owner's name and the deadline attached. Put this on your meeting agendas, put it on your one-on-one agendas. Make sure that you've got it somewhere where you remember, don't write it down and push it over to the side. Or if you're one of those managers that constantly loses their notebook, don't put it there, or don't write it on a piece of POS receipt paper that might get thrown away or washed in your jeans when you go home from service. Open the next meeting by reviewing the last meeting's goals before anything else. Did we do what we say we're going to do? If not, why not? That conversation is where real coaching happens. If somebody is failing to deliver on a SMART goal that they have set for themselves, it may not be because they're a poor performer. It may be because they have realized they're setting the wrong goal. They don't have the resources that they need in order to get it done. There's lack of clarity on where they're going. And in that moment, that's again where leadership development really shows up. When you can help them open up and be really vulnerable about what's getting in their way, you're teaching them how to be a strategic thinker and how to remove those roadblocks. That's what leadership is all about. That's our job as leaders is to coach. So in a one-on-one situation, one-on-ones without smart goals are just conversations. Conversations are valuable, but they don't move the business forward, right? Now, there's a difference here. If you're just starting your one-on-ones with a team, and let's say you're new in position, you need to take time to build relationships and trust. So move to the SMART goal part of the conversation in your future meetings when you feel like it's right, when you have trust, open communication, mutual respect, and you can start asking your team to move things in the right direction. You've got to spend time as an owner or an operator in a new space gathering as much information as you possibly can to make sure that you're not asking the team to set smart goals about something that's not relevant to the business, right? That's why the R is built into the framework. End every one on one with the same question. What is one SMART goal you're committing to before we meet again that's going to move you or the business forward? Again, write it down, review it at the next one on one. This over time builds a culture of accountability from the inside out. Your managers start setting goals for themselves between sessions. Because they know they're going to be asked about them. One goal, one person, one meeting. This is the rule. Not five, not a laundry list, one goal that is specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound. Done consistently, this practice will do more for your team's development and your business momentum than almost anything else you can implement. We see this a lot in our leadership workshops as well. We ask people to set a SMART goal and they come back with five or six things. Where a lot of us are hyperachievers in this business. We take a lot of action items on. We take a lot of pride in writing long to-do lists for ourselves, checking things off the list. We get that dopamine rush every time we cross something off the list. We're used to accomplishing a hundred things a day during service, right? You can tell I'm going into hyperachiever right now because my speech is getting faster. We're used to solving a ton of issues. We're super adaptable. We know how to pivot. Um, there's so many strengths that the this industry has brought to us. But slowing down, being intentional, focusing on one thing at a time is not something that a lot of us are good at. So when someone's first learning about SMART goals, really challenge them. Start with one thing. You can have your list of five. That's that's phenomenal, but accomplish your first one and then move to the second and then move to the third, and so on, and so on. So let's talk about how to teach this to your team. Don't assume that your managers know what a SMART goal is. Again, every time we do this in leadership workshops, we ask people and maybe one person out of the entire group raises their hand. So this is a very um, it's a large missing component in the restaurant space. That's not a reflection of their intelligence or you as a leader or their work ethic. It's just it hasn't been introduced to them. So introduce the framework in a team meeting or workshop setting with some real examples from your own business. You've all got a ton, which are great. Practice it in the room. Have each manager write a goal that they're currently working on and then challenge them to rewrite it using the framework, right? How is it specific? How are you going to measure it? How is it attainable? How is that relevant to what we're working on right now as a business? And what's the time bound aspect of it? Watch what changes in that moment. Again, look for those light bulb moments with your team when they have a moment of insight and something changes for them mentally. That's coaching. Make it a non-negotiable part of your meeting structure. Every meeting ends with smart goals, every meeting opens with SMART goals, and you're always reviewing the last one. You want to celebrate the goals that are being accomplished as well for your team. Super, super important. Coach against the goals in your one-on-ones. When a manager misses a goal that is a coaching opportunity, not a disciplinary one, get really curious what got in the way for them. Chances are they need something from you in that moment that hasn't been identified yet, and that's okay. Your team is not failing to execute because they don't care. They're failing to execute because no one has taught them how to set a SMART goal that's designed to get it done. And that ends today in this conversation. Smart goals are not a corporate concept, they are practical, proven tools that work in any restaurant at any size, at any level of the leadership team. Again, for more tools and more support on this, grab your copy of Multiunit Mastery at irfbook.com. The meeting frameworks, the one-on-one structures, the goal setting tools, they're all inside the book for you. If you want to bring a leadership workshop to your team, we can do these in person and virtually. We're happy to teach this framework to them. Reach out to us at ColumbineHospitality.comslash contact, and one of our teammates will reach out to you. We would love to hear some feedback as well on how your SMART goal meeting went, some of the goals that your team is setting, and some of the goals that have been accomplished. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Can't wait to hear about your goals. Have a great shift. We'll talk to you soon.