Restaurant Leadership 101: How to Earn Respect from Your Team

Have you ever felt like you aren’t in control of your own crew? Do you feel like you aren’t really the one calling the shots in the restaurant? If you feel like your employees walk all over you, it’s time to take back your store and command respect from your team and get back on track towards progress and growth. It may feel impossible, but it isn’t. Here’s how I was able to go from a weak manager to a strong leader.

I was probably a bit too young to be managing a restaurant when I started out. I was only 23 when I started out, and I had only been in the restaurant business for about 3 years. To make matters worse, I had very little support on how I needed to run a team. But after a few more runs at different restaurants, I was finally able to be someone who was able to take charge and lead a team to success. As a beginning manager, I often blamed my employees or situations for the failures of the store. I didn’t take ownership of my work and I hoped problems went away. I was afraid of losing employees or losing support if I stood my ground. Once I learned the following lessons, my job performance changed, and with it, my own peace of mind and happiness.

Taking ownership of your own work is a great way to really dive into the leadership role. When you take responsibility of everything that happens in your store, you are much more motivated to prevent bad things from happening and promote good things to happen. If you are able to see how you play a part in each individual thing that happens in the store, you will start to feel that responsibility and feel failures in the store as failures of your own. You don’t want to feel failure, so you avoid that through more focused and determined work. This gives you the motivation to pay attention to what needs to be done and do just that. It doesn’t help you to not address what needs to be addressed, whether it be cultural or systematic (I explain the difference in a previous post). Taking ownership of your work is the first step towards taking charge of your store. It’s your own decisions that make or break the store.

That being said, it’s important to know that you are the barrier from your store devolving into chaos. You are not a player in the store, you are the leader. You ought to act like one. Once you see that you are the key to the success in your store, you can begin to make a plan of how to use that strength towards making good happen for your restaurant. A maxim that I remember often is “what you choose to tolerate will only continue and often get worse”. When you repeat this to yourself, you can really see it in action and see how much power over the culture of your store you really have. When employees put their drinks on the prep table, you have a choice to either tolerate or correct bad behavior. Your employees will constantly push boundaries that you need to enforce. If you don’t establish and constantly re-establish those boundaries, you will not be able to have control over your crew. Do not tolerate what you do not like. You don’t need to be rude or even nag, but you must explain to your employees that you do not tolerate a lack of compliance with your standards.

You don’t need to fear your employees leaving because of how you call out the bad behavior. This was my fear as a manager which led to my ruin and terrible failure the first time I was a general manager. I was afraid the employees would quit and leave me so short staffed if I called out everything I didn’t like. It doesn’t make sense, does it? But I think we have all felt that way. Internally, we may think – If I tell this employee that he needs to stop clocking in late every day, they will get frustrated and quit, and I will be short-staffed.” What we fail to see is that we are only hurting ourselves. The better employees actually love standards, because they want an easy flow of the job just as much as you do. The only people who would be quitting due to your standards would be the employees you don’t want at the store anyway. In this way, being strict with standards and being intolerant of unwanted behavior is the exact way to create a well-run store.

You may feel like you are being an asshole by holding everyone to a difficult standard, but you are actually helping all yourself, your employees, and your company by doing so. I remember even an employee calling back to the store I once worked at to thank the boss who had high standards because the employee learned discipline that helped them later in their career. You are not an asshole, but you are not their friend. Another mistake I made when I was a young manager was to try to turn the store into a big party every day in the hopes that it would help people stay happy at work and work harder. It didn’t work. It never does. That sort of store attracts people who aren’t looking to work but are looking to have a party and earn a paycheck. That’s not the environment that you want to create. You want to create an environment of people want to both work hard and have fun. The balance of both is what you want. In fact, Amazon’s company motto is “Work Hard – Have fun – Make History”. You don’t need to be a jerk boss, but you are not there to be their friend. A restaurant is made of employees that need a leader who is willing to lead. You’re that person.

Your decisions as a leader carve the path for the whole store. As District Managers know, a whole store’s culture can change the second a store gets a new General Manager. That’s how much power a GM can have and how quickly they can enact change. Those GMs who are able to take ownership of their work, establish high standards, create boundaries with their employees, and develop a culture of excellence are the GMs who receive recognition and eventually get promoted to higher positions. These GMs are the ones who not only do the most work and get the best results but also have the most job satisfaction.

You will get out of this job what you put in. Invest yourself into your work, and your work will pay dividends for you. If you keep faith in the truth of this statement, you will soon be able to stop pulling your hair out and start truly enjoying your work.