Ken Burgin

Training: 5 Tough Challenges for Restaurant Managers

It’s not hard to become a supervisor or a manager – titles are often given out freely. Organising the roster, orders and bookings is straightforward, but higher level  leadership-management is not. Managers don’t just manage processes, they manage people: with their hopes, fears, and emotions. You really earn your management stripes when you handle situations where the right answer is also the hardest answer.

Training for managers is effective and interesting when it’s based on real-world scenarios –  they have to come up with the best solution when none of them are perfect.  This excellent article outlines 5 tough management challenges, each of which could have a hospitality application. Great for a management team discussion –  ask people to come up with real-world restaurant or bar examples that they’ve seen or experienced. Here are the 5:

  1. You know things you can’t share with employees.
  2. Balancing standards against financial considerations.
  3. Enforcing policies at the risk of losing a superstar
  4. The dreaded “He said, she said,” conflict.
  5. You have little that’s tangible to offer a talented employee.

Spend 15 minutes discussing a couple of these at the next meeting, before you get into sales figures and staffing. Learning and growing…

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