How to Manage Your Restaurant Management Team to Success

 Are you struggling to manage your management team? Do you feel like you know what to expect from them on a daily basis, but it just isn't happening? Understanding what they should be doing isn’t enough. Strong managers are essential if you’re a restaurant owner who wants a life outside the restaurant. In this video, I explain how you're the solution to this challenge and what you need to do to change. Click to watch or scroll down to continue reading.

Even after you’ve told your managers what you expect and show them, they can still struggle with doing it on a consistent basis. So how can you change this nauseating merry-go-round?

• First, it's following a proven formula for success. 
• Second, you have to consider your mindset.

Let’s start with mindset. You've probably heard me talk about mindset here on my YouTube channel. The importance of having a growth mindset and not a fixed mindset. A restaurant owner with a fixed mindset says, “Oh, look, here's a challenge. Oh, it's the government's fault. It's my vendor’s fault. It's my employee's fault. It's my customers. It's Yelp.” This is a cycle of blame. When an obstacle appears, this mindset goes to making it somebody else's fault. They avoid looking internally and prevent themselves from finding solutions.

On the other hand, somebody with a growth mindset can see that same challenge and say, “You know what? There's another challenge in front of me. I can out learn it. I can outspend it. I can outwork it. I'm going to find a way around, up, over, dig under it, whatever that challenge is, I can get through it. I know that I will grow my company. I'm the leader my restaurant needs. I can always see there's a positive future, even though there are challenges in front of me.”

Examining your mindset and how you regularly react to challenges and successes is key to finding your way to having a management team you can hold accountable. If you see them as a part of the plan for success and see how you play a role in their success, you will have a more effective management team.

The next part of understanding how to manage your management team to success is following the Restaurant Prosperity Formula. I developed this formula based on my observations of the most successful restaurant owners I’ve ever worked with. It’s also the title and subject of my book.

If you follow the Restaurant Prosperity Formula, you will have freedom from your restaurant and the financial freedom you deserve. The formula starts with leadership. You must become the leader your restaurant needs and that's where having a growth mindset is critical. Assuming you have that growth mindset, assuming you know what your strengths and weaknesses are, and how systems are going to help make up for that weakness, you become the leader and say, “This is the direction we're going.”

You can't let fear or disappointment or sadness dictate your outcomes. That’s what a restaurant owner with a fixed mindset will do. Instead, you guide people, even if you make mistakes, you just eat the mistake, and you go. You keep moving forward.

After leadership you add systems, so that it’s a literal formula of leadership + systems. There's a system, a process, a way of doing everything and anything in your business. Systems allow you to impose your will without being there and allow you to grow from one restaurant to multiple, making sure the guest has the best experience every single time.

Examples of systems are checklists and cash controls, following specific steps every time to create a culture where the details matter. The systems make up for leadership weaknesses, whether making up for your lack of attention to numbers or a lack of people management. Systems make sure every task is done the same way every time exactly how you want it done – your way.

Now, these systems don’t work if you don’t train your managers how to use them and follow them and hold employees accountable to them. That’s the next part of the formula. You have leadership + systems + training. It doesn’t matter what you know; it matters what your managers know. You have to share the knowledge, look for more knowledge, and continue sharing it. You grow, your managers grow and your restaurant grows.

Now imagine systems + training are the top part of a fraction – the numerator. Underneath them is accountability, the denominator.  are on a line, a division symbol, if you will. And underneath there's something called accountability. It does not matter if you have systems, it does not matter if you have training if you're not willing to ultimately hold people accountable to those systems. Checklists are a great system for making sure everyone is doing what is expected, every shift, every day.

I won’t go deep into accountability here, but I do have another video/tip on the how to hold managers accountable. The short answer is you make them answerable to their responsibilities. Once you’ve properly trained them, and they’ve demonstrated through their training that they understand what is expected of them and how to do it, they are responsible for executing. If they don’t execute, they face consequences. Accountability is a defining part of your leadership and the success of your systems because now nobody can bury you in excuses. They’ve already demonstrated they can do it. Now they have to do it, or you know they don’t belong in your restaurant.

Next, imagine there's one more plus symbol right after that fraction. It’s on your and it’s taking action. If you want to put these systems in place, if you want all the parts of The Restaurant Prosperity Formula to work, it means you must start taking action today.

Key to all of this is understanding you're never going to cross the finish line. There's not going to be one day where we high five and say, “Well, we're done.” You're never going to stop working towards improving. This journey is ongoing. You can never take your eye off the ball, or you will end up starting from the beginning all over again.

If you want to get the most out of your management team, follow the restaurant prosperity formula. Take action today.

If you would like to learn how to own a restaurant that doesn't depend on you being in it to be successful, watch this free video course that teaches you three key principles to running a successful restaurant. If you're ready right now to make some serious changes in your restaurant, you can also book a 60-minute call with me where we talk about your challenges and figure out exactly what is holding you back from having a restaurant that doesn’t depend on you being in it to be successful. 

Be sure to visit my YouTube channel for more helpful restaurant management video tips.