123: What Behavior are You Tolerating, and at What Cost?

Let's talk about the restaurant owner.

What are you tolerating in yourself? Some of the owners that we have had coffees with, done workshops with, done one-on-one coaching with, or just had conversations with are Some of them love to continue to show up and complain about their team, to point out what's wrong with managers, struggling managers or problem employees, instead of focusing on what's going right.

The challenge that we potentially pose to every single owner operator that does this is we challenge them to look at these complaints as a trigger for a conversation that they haven't yet had but need to with this employee.

Here's a harder question though.

What are you doing? What are you not doing that's setting the tone for everyone on your leadership team or your hourly team? What behavior are you tolerating in yourself that they are noticing every single time you walk in to service? I'll give you an example.

We had an owner in our group coaching cohort that has been stepping back into day-to-day shifts.

Because she lost a leader.

Covering an open spot here, taking back a task that she delegated six months ago because she feels like it's the fastest fix.

Short term, it works, right? Long term, it trains her team that she'll always catch what's falling so they don't have to step up and help out.

Now, this is dangerous because it also, we've been working for 12 months with this owner to work towards her vision of stepping out of day-to-day operations.

And at the drop of a hat, she made a split emotional decision to jump right back in instead of looking at the entire team, figuring out who could step up, how to delegate those tasks, or put some strategy behind how to find someone else to come in and take that job back on long-term.

So here's what happened when she stepped back out of that position.

The standards dropped slowly, not all at once.

One operator described it as your expectations start to drop and it's a cancer to the rest of the staff, right? The bad behavior that you tolerate becomes your culture.

That's not about one bad hire.

That's a leadership behavior that's setting the tone for the entire team.

Tolerating something because it's convenient is still tolerating.

Keeping someone around because they know the schedule or because losing them would be a scheduling headache is a decision and it has a cost.

And I bring this up because this owner said she recognized that she held on to this toxic leader way too long because of how much institutional knowledge they had.

What she was surprised and delighted to learn, though, was that as soon as she made that really tough decision to get rid of that person, she uncovered all this other institutional knowledge that was available to all the other employees.

And collectively, they were much stronger than that leader.

And because she had removed that component, that person from creating such a culture, a toxic culture, it created more open communication, trust, vulnerability, respect, and a willingness for people to raise their hand and step up and say, I'll help out when needed.

So here's a challenge for you restaurant owners that are listening to this.

If your team had to name one behavior you're personally tolerating in yourself, would they say it to your face or would they say it in the meeting after you leave? If you're not sure what this is, I would challenge you to go ask your teams.

The feedback can be absolutely powerful.