Did you ever hear the phrase “A stitch in time saves time”? This is so true
in the food services industry. Managing a restaurant can be a very fast paced,
stressful job. There are many systems that you must train and oversee and your
day is based on customer flow. So it is difficult to schedule your time
effectively so accomplish tasks. Even managers with the best time planning
skills can find themselves working long hours, running out of time and
lamenting over unfinished to-do lists on a daily basis.
And then we have to facing several things that we never expected before.
This is how I've been learning these couple months.... Do you walk out of the restaurant at night feeling guilty that you did not
get everything accomplished that you planned to? Or do you carry briefcase
stuffed with paperwork that you plan to do when you get home? And then take it
back to work the next day planning to get it done there? Or are you so
tired most days that you don't even have the energy to try to get everything
accomplished? Or do you ever forget to do things your boss has asked you to do?
Isn't all conditions above sound familiar for most of us. Yeah we
all do, cause we work in food services. Then i realize a thing
that i’m overcoming these couple weeks. Well, to be successful, even to just
maintain our sanity, we have develop routines on a daily, weekly and monthly
basis to get everything accomplished. The first thing i usually do is ask
myself to create a monthly planner. I take out a calender and start plugging in
everything i do in a month only to run out of hours and days to get these
tasks accomplished So the first epiphany we come to is that the
manager CAN’T do everything themselves. He/She just a human being. He/she have
a limit. Then i find things sometime we as a manager get wrong:
The manager can control the restaurant better if they just do
everything themselves.
Don’t get me wrong, you will always be responsible for every task in your
restaurant and will certainly be held accountable for the results but training
your team to do the actual tasks and then giving the final approval will save
your time. You need to review every report and create action plans to improve
the reports but someone else can gather and organize the reports.
The assistants won’t do it as good as i do.
No, they won’t, not at first but as a manager, your job is to develop your
team. Train them to do a task expecting that the first few times it will not be
perfect and you will need to coach them. Coaching them to do the plans to
improve the reports but someone else can gather and organize the
reports.
I don’t have a time to teach them.
Who will do it when you are on vacation? Who will do all the works for your
day off. Everyday you are in the outlet to teach your assistant how
to run every aspect of the business so when you do take a day off, they can
handle everything without calling you.
Teaching them means that i am less valuable.
Whose says, it’s totally wrong. Developing your team will not only make
your life much easier, it will also show that you are a strong manager with the
skills to be counted.
As for me, a successful manager is the one who turn a chaos into
order. Have a very good weekend everyone.
0 comments:
Post a Comment