Welcome back to the show, everybody. Today we are gonna talk about something that came up in our group coaching session that I ran last week with a group of restaurant owners. And it was the topic of conversation and where it went was so good that I just had to bring it straight to you. We are talking about boundaries today. We're gonna talk about why most restaurant leaders don't have them, what it's actually costing your business, and the sneaky psychological reason so many of us struggle to set them in the first place. By the end of this episode, you're gonna know how to name what's getting in your way, what boundaries look like at every level of your organization, and how to start protecting your time and your team without blowing up your culture. Let's get started. 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 kristenmarvin.com slash contact for a complimentary coaching session, and let's talk about what's possible for your restaurant group. Here's what I see constantly in the restaurant world. A GM who can't say no to time off requests from their team, so they're scrambling every single week to fill the schedule. A director of ops who won't delegate because they don't want to burden their team, so they're drowning instead. An owner who is so afraid of losing people that they're tolerating behavior that is slowly killing their culture. None of these people are weak. None of them are bad leaders. They are people pleasers. And the people pleaser saboteur is one of the most common and most costly patterns I see in hospitality leadership today. That's what we're unpacking on today's show. Let's talk about a saboteur, what it is, and why it matters. Saboteurs are the negative thought patterns that cause all of our stress, our anxiety, our frustration, and our burnout. We all have them. They were formed during our childhood to protect us from something, and they did their job then. And it didn't matter if we were raised in a really healthy, happy, loving childhood or a traumatic one. These saboteurs exist in all of us. The problem is that they follow us into adulthood and they still inform our decisions, even when we don't need that protection anymore. So, like I said, we all have them, and the goal isn't to eliminate them because they're part of us and who we are. It's this this is about taking time to learn to recognize them so that they stop running the show. The one showing up the most right now in leaders and operators in the hospitality industry is the people pleaser. And in the restaurant industry, as you know, it's a business built entirely on hospitality and taking care of others. So this one runs really, really deep. Let's talk about what the people pleaser saboteur looks like. It looks like indirectly seeking acceptance and affection by helping others, rescuing others, flattering others, or accommodating them. Saying yes when everything in you wants to say no. Avoiding hard conversations because you don't want someone to be upset with you, making decisions based on what keeps the peace instead of what moves the business forward. And losing sight of your own needs and eventually becoming deeply resentful, resentful of your team, resentful of the fact that you're saying yes, resentful of your position, resentful of the company that you work for. I've certainly been there, and resentful of the title that you carry and the role that you play within an organization. The real cost is that it jeopardizes your own emotional, physical, and financial well-being. It leads to resentment towards the very people that you're trying to protect. And it almost always ends in burnout, yours or theirs. This topic came straight out of our group coaching session that we ran last week with a small group of independent restaurant owners. The conversation was incredible. It was real, it was honest, and it was full of the kind of insight that only happens when operators who are in it every single day get in a room together and start talking. If that sounds like something you need in your life right now, a community of peers who gets it with structured coaching built in, we want to talk to you. Our leadership mastery group coaching program runs monthly, and the next cohort is forming right now. Reach out to Kristen at ColumbineHospitality.comslash contact and let's figure out if this is the right fit for you. Now let's get back to boundaries. People please are in the restaurant world. Let's talk about why hospitality breeds people pleasers. We chose an industry that is literally built on making people happy and serving others. From day one, we were trained to say yes to guests, to owners, to anyone who walks through the door. That instinct is a superpower for us on the floor, right? It becomes a liability in a leadership chair. The same qualities that make someone exceptional in hospitality, empathy, responsiveness, a genuine desire to take care of people are the exact qualities that make boundary setting feel very wrong. So when does it show up and where does it show up at a manager level? When you allow too many schedule requests because they're afraid to say no. Not building schedules far enough in advance so that they never have clarity on actually what's available. Avoiding performance conversations because they don't want someone to feel bad. Taking on tasks that belong to their team because they don't want to ask anyone to do more work. We're hearing this one all the time. My teams are working so hard, I can't dare ask them for anyone else, for anything else. The problem with that, and it always makes me cringe, is they are choosing to not develop those people and they don't realize it. They're usually making an assumption and it's usually wrong. The result at the manager level is that your managers are overwhelmed, they're inconsistent, and they've built a team that has learned that they can push back and win. Where does it show up for you as an owner and an operator? Not delegating because it feels like burdening people. If you are setting the tone and you are doing this, this this behavior sounds familiar to you, your managers, I guarantee you, are doing the same thing because they're learning it from you. You're tolering tolerating poor performance because of the fear of losing someone outweighs the cost of keeping them. You're making scheduling and staffing decisions based on avoiding conflict instead of running a good business. You're carrying the weight of the entire organization on your shoulders because asking for help feels weak. And the result, again, is burnout, resentment, and you're putting a ceiling on growth that no amount of hustle can break through. There's a lot of talk around boundaries in this next generation of people that are coming into the to the hospitality industry. We know, based on research, that six million people left the industry during the pandemic, and those positions have been filled, but they've been filled with people who have less experience and a fundamental, fundamentally different relationship with work. The institutional knowledge that we're also used to, and the short learning curves in terms of training are gone, and things are different now. This generation is setting boundaries, 40-hour work weeks, mental health days, protecting their time off, and they're not apologizing for it. There are two schools of thought that we're seeing on this issue, and the or this opportunity, how you want to look at it. One says that people just don't want to work anymore. The other says there's an opportunity to build a better business, one with clearer systems, smarter scheduling, and a culture that people actually want to stay in. The operators who are winning at this right now are the ones who are choosing the second school of thought. They know they're going to have to hire potentially more people to do the same amount of work that they had in years past because people are not willing to work over 40 hours a week, and they understand that that is going to lead to longevity and more retention with the staff, better guest experience, and they understand that they have to put more systems in place than they've ever had before in order to make the business more reliant on systems and less reliant on people. But here's the thing: you can't build a boundary-respecting culture if your own leaders don't have boundaries themselves. It all starts at the top. So, what do boundaries actually look like in practice? Let's talk about the manager level. Scheduling and saying no. Clear availability expectations set at the higher and reinforced consistently, not negotiated week by week. Schedules are built, we always love, at least three weeks in advance, so that there's a real framework for when to say yes and when to say no. A culture where the answer to an unreasonable request is no, delivered respectfully, directly, and without apology. You have to protect the business. What happens when you hold the line? People test it, some people push back, and the vast majority steps up. The team gets stronger, not weaker. What happens when you hold the line? People test it, some push back, and then the vast majority step up. The team gets stronger, not weaker. What happens when you don't? The most entitled voices set the standard for everyone else, and your best people get frustrated and leave. What does it look like at the director and regional level? It looks like delegation and letting go. Not delegating is not protecting your team. It is stunting their growth and guaranteeing your burnout. The fear of asking too much of people is one of the most common reasons leaders hold on to work that belongs somewhere else. When you keep everything to yourself, you rob your team of the opportunity to rise, especially when you're working for a growing organization. It doesn't make any sense for you to continue to pile on work and responsibility and then hold the line for them so that they don't get to take on that responsibility and grow as well. Expectations for each role need to be specific, measurable, and designed to be achievable within reasonable hours. Not because hours don't matter, but because clarity of output matters more than time in the building, especially right now when labor and cost of goods are more expensive than they've ever been before, and we are not seeing any changes in sight when it comes to those prime costs. If someone can do the job in 40 hours with clear expectations, that is a win, not a warning sign. There are so many companies now that are requiring managers to work 40 to 45 hours a week, get their job done within that specific amount of time, and then go live their life. We've even had an operator say, you know what, it's okay if we have a rough shift here, shift here and there, because you are out of the building. Let's learn from those mistakes. Let's see what we what adjustments we need to make and let's get better for it. At the owner level, this is about protecting your time and energy. You can't lead from empty. The badge of honor around working 80 hours a week is not a flex, it's a red flag. That's a huge mindset shift from the way that we used to think about the business. We all worked hard because it we were passionate and proud of the grit. And that led us to burning out and to creating a reputation around the industry of not taking care of people. And that's what we're working to change. This looks like posting manager schedules, having eyes on who's working, when, and proactively catching problems before they come crises. That is leadership. Knowing what your regional manager is doing and how many hours they're working, knowing how many hours your GM is working, knowing how many hours their AGM is working, your executive chef, your Sue chef, you should have eyes on these things. Don't wait till you start to hear those signs of them saying, Oh, I gotta come in on another Sunday, and I gotta cover the ship for somebody because they wanted the day off. Don't wait for those flags to come up. Be proactive with your systems. It looks like designing a business that does not require your constant presence. It's not laziness, it's the whole point, right? You didn't start, you didn't want to start a business so that you could be chained to it. You wanted to have freedom of time and money and purpose and energy and a life that you want. So let's talk about how to start naming and managing the people pleaser. We'll bring it back to people pleaser now. Step one is naming it in the moment. So the people pleaser shows up really as a feeling, a pull towards saying yes to something when your gut is saying, Oh, I don't really don't want to do this. It's a tightening when you think about having to have a hard conversation. And it's a sense of guilt when you prioritize your own needs. When you take a day off and you feel guilty. When you feel it, name it out loud if you can. Oh, my people pleaser is here right now. You can't manage what you can't see. The second step is to create a pause. People pleaser thrives on immediate action, the immediate yes, the immediate rescue, the immediate accommodation. Building a pause into your response gives you the space to choose instead of react. Take a breath and say, let me look at the schedule and get back to you. I need to think about that. These are complete sentences. Step three is ask the right question. Before you respond to any request that triggers the people, please, or poll, ask yourself one question. What is the best decision for the business and the team right now? It's a balance, right? When you take care of your people, you take care of your business. Not what keeps the peace, not what makes this person like me. What is best for the business and the team? That question is your filter. Use it every single time you start to feel people pleaser come up. And step four, dismiss it or act on it, but choose. Our thoughts are not who we are. The people pleaser is a voice, it's not a verdict. You get to decide what you do with it. Acknowledge it and then make a choice. Over time, the choosing gets easier, the voice gets quieter, the boundaries get cleaner. I have been working with saboteurs for years, and I still have to recognize when they come up because, like I said earlier, they're they're always going to be a part of who we are. They've helped make us successful, but they've also held us back, depending on how much of how out of balance they are. And so the sooner that you can start recognizing these thoughts and then naming it, the quicker you're going to be able to manage your negative thoughts and get really clear on the on the choices that you want to make in order to be the leader that you want. So, how do you build a boundary respecting culture? Again, like I said earlier, you got to model it from the top. This starts with you. If you don't have boundaries, your team won't either. If you're texting your team on their days off around the clock, they're going to do the same thing for you because that is the expectation that you have set for them. Put expectations in writing, handbooks, onboarding materials, job descriptions. Clarity is kindness. If your team is constantly asking you questions, figure out where you can put, and especially the same questions, figure out where you can put those answers in training materials for your team. Post schedules in advance and stick to them for managers and for hourly staff. Make it safe to say no to requests, to extra shifts, to taking on work that isn't theirs. Recognize the leaders on your team who are doing this well and name it out loud. That is how culture shifts. Coach the people pleaser and your managers with curiosity, not criticism. They learn this pattern somewhere and they can unlearn it with the right support. We do leadership workshops around these saboteurs because there are 10 of them and they're different for everybody. And it's so powerful to watch a young manager go, oh, I'm a sickler. Oh, I'm avoiding tough conversations because I'm afraid of hurting people's feelings. Oh, I'm a hyperachiever, and so I love to make lists and do everything myself. And I get a rush of dopamine every time I cross something off my list. But I but they start to understand that the quality of their work diminishes because they're taking on too much. So those moments of insight are super, super powerful. Boundaries are not a soft skill, they are a leadership skill. And in the restaurant industry, they might be the most important one no one ever taught you. The people please are saboteur is costing your business real money in burnout, turnover, an inconsistent culture, and in leaders who are too overwhelmed to develop their teams. You can name it, you can manage it, and you can build a team that is stronger for it. If you want to be in a room with other independent restaurant owners working through exactly this type of challenge, that is what our Leadership Mastery Group Coaching Program is built for. It's a small group of powerful, successful operators who talk about real challenges, we have real conversations, and there's structured coaching. We meet once a month for an hour, we slow down, we get real, we share moments of insight with each other, resources, and tools. Reach out to us at calling my hospitality.comslash contact and let's talk about whether this next cohort is right for you. Have a great shift and we'll talk to you soon.