Page 25 - foodservice magazine April 2019
P. 25

MANAGEMENT
25
“You don’t have to be smart to be a good manager, but you do have to be disciplined. You can get away with all sorts of bizarre communication and goalpost-shifting when you have a small team and you deal with them directly, but when you sit at the top of a sizeable pyramid, this will prove very costly.”
supervise a small team and get good results, but if you try to supervise a large brigade without standardised recipes and procedures, you’ll end up in trouble.
We get two distinctly different results when we restructure businesses – if the business owner takes advice on board and follows through with it, we get a very rapid turnaround in the business. If the owner chooses to
leave everything up to their subordinates to make the necessary changes, we still get
a result, but it can take a lot longer and will end up costing more than it should.
The fact that many business owners in the hospitality industry are artistic in nature creates
an added problem when we restructure their businesses. Non- linear thought processes may have been their main strength when they were hands-on, but it can be a curse when they have to work through others.
In contrast, I think in a straight line: beginning, middle, end, and we can have difficulty turning artistic business owners into disciplined managers. What’s easy and logical to me
is sometimes hell to them.
Yet they often don’t have a choice – they’ve usually come
to us because their business
has grown to the point where,
if they don’t gain control of it, they’re in real trouble.
In a previous issue of foodservice, I wrote about turning creative chefs into effective kitchen managers. It’s the same situation, often with the same results – if they can’t change their behaviour, they eventually burn out from the sheer effort of keeping it all together.
We’ve had to learn to be very persistent, very understanding and very assertive to get results. The hardest thing is to convince them that they have to pair with a logical thinker and share power if they want to survive. I don’t mean they have to take on a partner or sell shares in their business, but they do have to consciously recruit a balance into their team and listen to the voices of reason, while driving the whole thing. That responsibility
can’t be delegated.


































































































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