It’s a lot easier to cut your grass with a riding mower than with scissors.
And achieving success shows up in every KPI you can think of when your managers truly lead and coach.
Together, management, leadership, and coaching are a combo meal – where you have to pick all three – yet, at a lot of companies, leadership and coaching skills turn out to be unimpressive.
Find the Missing Piece
In such organizations, people may run good shifts (the easiest skills to find in today’s labor market) but they struggle to benefit from great leadership and coaching skills.
Over the past few years, with so many people leaving our industry, we have hired and promoted a lot of people we used to call unqualified.
It’s such a pressing issue that my Restaurant Owners Success Club members chose it as the main focus of their monthly members-only virtual meeting coming up next week on December 11.
You must increase the level of leadership and coaching in your management ranks.
Four Pillars of a Successful Program
If you lack one or more of the following, it’s time to pivot.
- Model leadership and coaching. Identify whether the people in your organization – who you want to awaken to leadership and coaching – experience being led or coached. It’s only when leaders exemplify leadership and coaching in all supervisory relationships that improvement sticks. When I coach a company president, CEO, vice president, or operations director, I know that they mirror what they see me do with their reports.
- Have a plan for everyone. You must have a written improvement plan for each person. I always install weekly, monthly, and quarterly accountability checks to see if coaches make progress. I can think of a few NFL teams that might want to incorporate this technique.
- Acknowledge growth. The public part of the accountability piece works well for me and my clients. You must acknowledge growth publicly, so people know what they have mastered and what comes next for them.
- Inspire people to care or move on. Some managers just want to manage, put in their 45-50 hours, and run successful shifts. That will eventually be a dead end. You can carry some people for a while, but just don’t put a lot of energy into people who don’t show the desire to upgrade.
If the fact that you are paying management more than ever makes you feel like you ordered a high-end bottle of wine and it tasted like it came in a box, the only way to build those much-needed leadership and coaching skills is to reach a new level of training, education, and development.
This path leads to increased revenue, profit, guest count, and employee retention. Take it.