Knowing When to Lead

Sunday morning a friend and I went for breakfast at a somewhat high-end western chain restaurant in Bangkok. I had always found the food and the service to be very good, and wanted my friend to see what I had been talking about. Unfortunately, the experience left a lot to be desired, and much of the problem came down to leadership.

While the food was fine (once we got it), the service was incredibly poor. They showed up with my friend’s breakfast, then a few minutes later came out with our drinks, getting mine right but his wrong. My breakfast arrived 10 minutes later but they brought the wrong thing, so they had to go back and start over. It took another 20 minutes, and me speaking to two people, before my friend finally got his drink, and by now we were finishing up our meals.

The restaurant was very busy during this period, and the whole setup seemed very disorganized. Throughout all of this, we never had a dedicated server, but instead had different people bringing things. No one ever followed up to see if we were getting our orders. The duty manager was helping out the team by clearing tables. When I spoke with her about the problems as we were leaving, she was apologetic, but blamed it on being busy.

If this seems like a minor episode, that’s because it is. With people starving in the world, getting breakfast late is a pretty small thing to worry about. At the same time, businesses only survive if they have customers, and if they regularly turn in poor performance during their busiest times, they lose a lot of those customers. So, it’s important to have good leadership that addresses those minor issues, because it’s too late once they become major issues.

To that end, let me suggest a few things:

It’s good to step in and help your team, but not when they need a leader. When tables need to be cleared, then everyone — from duty manager down to the most junior employee — needs to step in. A good leader does what needs to be done, regardless of their position. Having said that, when the restaurant is falling apart, it’s time for a manager to stop bussing tables and instead step up to manage the situation. It may be more comfortable to simply do the lesser tasks, but the primary role of a leader is to lead people to do their jobs, not to do their jobs for them.

Be prepared for the busy times. If you know things will get busy, especially at predictable times, you need to be ready for that, not use it as an excuse. Just as stores in the US hire extra help during the Christmas holidays, a restaurant that is always busy on Sunday mornings needs to have the staff and the procedures to handle that. I have a similar lack of patience with airline gate agents who have trouble organizing the boarding process; you do this multiple times each day, so shouldn’t you have it figured out? When you know you need to be prepared for something, you have no excuse for not being prepared.

It’s important to get things right when it’s busy. By getting our orders wrong, the staff made extra work for themselves during their busiest time. As a result, they were even busier than they needed to be, and that affected other customers. Mistakes have a snowball effect, and the last thing you need when you are already busy is to create even more work for yourself, in addition to wasting the money on work that now needs to be thrown out.

Make sure your team follows through, especially when there are problems. Your customers will be unhappy with mistakes, but you can make up for it by fixing those mistakes quickly. When a Starbucks barista makes a mistake on a drink, the replacement drink goes to the head of the line, and they fix it immediately. Most people understand that mistakes happen, but what they don’t understand is when the people who made them don’t seem to care. Make sure your team is prepared to step up and fix things quickly. In the case of a restaurant, it might be better to have waitstaff assigned to specific tables, so when a mistake happens there is someone who will take responsibility for fixing it and follow up to make sure everything is ok. When no one is responsible, it’s hard to get things fixed, and customer frustration multiples.

A lot of leadership comes down to timing. You need to know when to step in and provide direction, and when to stay back and let your employees figure out the best way to work. You need to know when your busy times are coming and how you need to work differently then as opposed to the slack times. When you have the same busy period on a regular basis, you need to be prepared for that rather than using it as an excuse. This is true in any industry, but especially in a setting where your customers judge you as much on your service as they do on your product. Knowing when to lead can be as important as knowing how to lead.