A Rare Moment Of Self-Callout

We just wrapped up a client's quarterly planning session recently. And we took four hours. We came up with a list of 30 challenges on our whiteboard. We narrowed down of those 30 challenges three to five things that the entire leadership team was going to work on together to move the business forward. But something really unexpected happened at the end of the meeting. The owner did something super rare. He started to look at the list of items that needed to be fixed for the quarter. He looked around at the leadership team and the way that they were responding to the SMART goals that they were setting for each other. And then he called out a behavior that he had noticed he'd been tolerating on his entire leadership team. There were some eye rolls, there was a lot of negativity, a lot of comments about why things couldn't be done, or a lot of focus on why it hadn't worked in the past. This is pretty much where we've learned it from. And

Coaching Help And The Framework

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.

Owners Set The Tolerance Bar

Let's talk about the restaurant owner. What are you tolerating in yourself? Some of the owners that we have had coffees with, done workshops with, done one-on-one coaching with, or just had conversations with, some of them love to continue to show up and complain about their team, to point out what's wrong with managers, struggling managers or problem employees instead of focusing on what's going right. The challenge that we've we potentially pose to every single owner operator that does this is we challenge them to look at these complaints as a trigger for a conversation that they haven't yet had but need to with this employee. Here's a harder question, though. What are you doing? What are you not doing that's setting the tone for everyone on your leadership team or your hourly team? What behavior are you tolerating in yourself that they are noticing every single time you walk in to service? I'll give an example. We had an owner in our group coaching cohort that has been stepping back into day-to-day shifts because she lost a leader, covering an open spot here, taking back a task that she delegated six months ago because she feels like it's the fastest fix. It's short term, it works, right? Long term, it trains her team that she'll always catch what's falling so they don't have to step up and help out. Now, this is dangerous because it also, we've been working for 12 months with this owner to work towards her vision of stepping out of day-to-day operations. And at the drop of a hat, she made a split emotional decision to jump right back in instead of looking at the entire team, figuring out who could step up, how to delegate those tasks, or put some strategy behind how to find someone else to come in and take that job back on long term. So here's what happened when she stepped back out of that position. The standards dropped slowly, not all at once. One operator described it as your expectations start to drop and it's a cancer to the rest of the staff, right? The bad behavior that you tolerate becomes your culture. That's not about one bad hire. That's a leadership behavior that's setting the tone for the entire team. Tolerating something because it's convenient is still tolerating. Keeping someone around because they know the schedule or because losing them would be a scheduling headache is a decision and it has a cost. And I bring this up because this owner said she recognized that she held on to this toxic leader way too long because of how much institutional knowledge they had. What she was surprised and delighted to learn, though, was that as soon as she made that really tough decision to get rid of that person, she uncovered all this other institutional knowledge that was available to all the other employees. And collectively, they were much stronger than that leader. And because she had removed that component, that person, from creating such a culture, a toxic culture, it created more open communication, trust, vulnerability, respect, and a willingness for people to raise their hand and step up and say, I'll help out when needed. So here's a challenge for you, restaurant owners that are listening to this. If your team had to name one behavior you're personally tolerating in yourself, would they say it to your face or would they say it in the meeting after you leave? If you're not sure what this is, I would challenge you to go ask your teams. The feedback can be absolutely powerful. Hard to take, but absolutely powerful and eye-opening. And it might just be the bottleneck to what's stopping your business's growth.

DOs: Overwhelm And Accountability Drift

Now let's talk about the director of operations for those of you that are listening in this role. What are you tolerating on your team? Directors of operations sit in a hard spot, trust me, I get it. You're not on the floor every shift. And so what you tolerate is often sometimes the things that you don't catch. Or you catch and you and you don't act on fast enough. Or it could be maybe that your people please are showing up. So here's an example of that. A multi-unit operator that we've been coaching for about a year has had a really hard time asking their team to do more and delegating things out because he's afraid that it's going to put too much pressure on them and he tells himself that they're already doing so much already. What that's done has forced him to take on more and more and more and more and more responsibilities, and of course let him to burn out. What it's also done is it's and I've had multiple conversations with this team about this through coaching, is it has put the managers in a position to say, we don't want to ask our director of operations for any help or ask them to take to take on another task because they seem so overwhelmed. So if overwhelm is starting at the top with you, director of operations, I guarantee you your team sees it, they feel it, and you're setting the tone for them of what leadership looks like. I'll give you another example. One of our multi-unit operators and our group coaching cohort talked about a director of operations who's excellent with people, but has absolutely gone silent on accountability. Noticing the front area looks sloppy, noticing an attitude problem with a staff member and not calling it out because it's easier to let it ride, or they don't have the energy themselves to actually sit down and have the conversation, conversation, or they don't have the coaching skills to know how to even begin the conversation. The label that we kind of talked about, the team using for it was well, that's just Joey being Joey. If you hear your staff saying that right now and making excuses for your teammates, that's a huge warning sign. The second that that becomes a short-handed comment for behavior, you're normalizing it. So the interesting thing about this conversation was that the fix that came out of the session wasn't a lecture, it wasn't it was a system. It was a structured, reoccurring walkthrough. It was we ended up we identified that there was a misalignment between the owner and the director of operations in terms of the standards. The owner came in with a fresh set of eyes, looking at the entire operation from top to bottom, side to side, front and back. The director of operations was coming in with the same pattern of behavior, the same eye path, looking at the same sight lines. They weren't looking through the same lens that the owner was. And so we had to create, we helped them create a system, a very structured walkthrough done weekly by the person closest to the floor, monthly done by the DM, the DO with a fresh set of eyes. Same checklist every single time. So it's it's not personal, it's the standard, right? It wasn't the director of operations coming in saying, hey, I don't think that you're not paying attention to this or I want you to focus on this. It's this is what we do at this company. Let's go back to the checklist, let's review it together, let's see what's getting missed here. Let's talk about why, let's figure out where the gap is, and let's close the gap together and get a commitment from that manager that going forward, they were going to focus on it. Same goes for the director of operations. So, why does this matter for a director of operations specifically? If you're waiting for someone above you to hand down the call, you're tolerating the same thing you'd flag in a GM. You know how frustrating it is when a GM can't solve their own problems or identify a problem in their restaurant and work towards their own solution together. Doesn't it feel so much better when a GM says, hey, I want to take a moment and celebrate something that we've been having a challenge with and tell you what we've done about it and how we fixed it, instead of constantly bringing you problem after problem after problem. Deferring a decision that is yours to make is its own version of the behavior. Now we've coached some directors of operations that have said, you know what, I don't know what my call is. I don't know what my areas of responsibilities are. That's the conversation that you need to have with your owner. Get it written, get it documented, make sure it's very, very clear so that you've got a roadmap to success for yourself. So here's the challenge for you directors of operations listening to this episode right now. What's the one thing on your team that's become just how so-and-so does it? Or just how this is just how so-and-so is. And what would it cost you to name that thing instead?

GMs: Tolerance Hits The P&L

Okay, general managers, let's talk about what you're tolerating on your floor. This is where tolerance shows up in dollars and cents fastest. Labor, food cost, guest experiences, because the GMs are closest to the daily behavior. Let's talk about an example here. A GM kept a high performer on the staff well past the point where the behavior had turned corrosive, great at the job, terrible with the rest of the team. Described as someone who would run into a burning building for you, but become had had become more of a saboteur than a helper. How how many times have we heard this? They're so great with guests, they're just awful at sidework. I can't find a nickel for every time I've heard that when I was in my career. It and it's bullshit, right? Like you can help someone be well-rounded. The tell here that it had gone on too long was that the same issue kept coming up in every single manager meeting, right? We used to call it this person being in the news. How many times have you talked about Susie in your leadership meetings? Who's doing something about it? Who's coaching? Again, if you're continuing to complain and bitch about employee, it's a trigger that a conversation needs to be had. And it's important to understand the root cause of why you're not having that conversation. If you need support, we've got tons of coaching tools here. If you need coaching skills from your leadership, ask. Sometimes just asking someone, hey, can I tell you what's going on? And would you provide your perspective? Sometimes that just takes that emotion and that fear away from us and gives us exactly the simple tools that we need to go call out the facts of the conversation and walk away, knowing that you're both aligned on what the corrective action needs to be moving forward and what success looks like. I'll give you another example. Smaller, but just as real. Staff member who wasn't clocking out properly between their double shifts, quietly running up overtime and getting a pass because the manager didn't want the confrontation or the coverage gap. Tolerating small stuff on the clock adds up to a real labor bleed, and we all know how important that is right now, more important than it's ever been. One of our managers that were in, or one of our restaurant owners that were in the group cohort said half the job is doing the job well, the other half is getting along with your team. And both of those things really count, right? A GM who only measures skill and ignores the second half of what I just said is tolerating by omission. The test here for it, have I held on to this person for too long? Is if you're again, if you're having the same conversation about the same person back to back in manager meetings, there's your answer. I want you to pay attention to that next time you've got uh your operations meeting agenda that you're putting together or that you are participating in. A challenge question here for you to think about in terms of your team. Is there someone on your floor right now that you're managing around instead of managing? I have been guilty of this, and I've let AGMs do it before when I was in a GM position that were writing the schedule. They would say things like, Well, Joey's having a conflict for with Susie, so I'm just gonna make sure that I don't schedule them together anymore. That is not resolving the problem. I guarantee you there's going to be continued conflicts that show up with those employees. The conflict may just be a simple misunderstanding or difference in perspective between Joey and Susie. Get to the bottom of it instead of making your scheduling that much more complex because you're you're trying to bend over backwards to put band-aids on things to coddle your staff.

One Fix To Make This Week

Let's wrap this up. Tolerance is never isolated to just one level, right? It travels. What an owner tolerates in themselves becomes what a director of operations tolerates on the team becomes what a GM tolerates on the floor. Fixing it has to start at the top of that leadership chain, not the bottom. So the challenge for you listening to this as you as we end the episode today and you go on about the day is I want you to pick one behavior yours, your teams, something that's happening on the floor, and do something about it this week. Not a plan for next quarter, but this week. If you want a deeper framework here, we've built it for you in multi-unit mastery. This framework is going to help you build the standards and the systems that will make what you're tolerating a question you rarely have to ask twice. Grab a copy of multiunit mastery at irfbook.com. Have a great shift, and we'll talk to you soon.