Your team isn't the problem

When an owner tells me their team is the problem, it rarely is. Poor performance is almost always a leadership gap wearing a staffing costume: standards that were never written down, training by "watch me and pick it up", and a team left to set its own tone. That is uncomfortable to hear, and it is also good news, because leadership is within your control. Write the standards down, explain why they matter, give people real responsibility, and notice when they get it right.

A week of watching

A few years ago I walked into a venue in East London with a good reputation, a solid concept, and a queue round the corner on Saturday mornings. Before I had hung up my coat, the owner was listing his complaints. His team was slow, disengaged, and had no pride. He had shouted, he had pleaded, and he was thinking about starting again from scratch.

I spent the next week watching. I sat in on the morning briefings, stood in a corner through the lunchtime rush, and read the rotas and the thin training records. Most of all, I talked to the team when the owner was not there.

By the end of the week, the picture was different. They were capable, exhausted people trying to do their jobs in a vacuum. The problem was not their will. It was that they had nothing solid to hold on to.

The quiet kind of failure

Leadership failure in independent hospitality is rarely the shouting chef from television. It is quieter. It is an absence of clarity: standards never written down, so never enforced; new starters guessing; old hands making up their own rules.

When the owner does not set the tone, the team sets it for itself. In almost every struggling venue I have known, there is a ringleader, often the longest-serving person, who knows the menu better than the owner. Without a clear structure above them, they become the manager in all but name. They decide which shortcuts are acceptable, who gets the good shifts, and how much effort is enough.

The tone they set is rarely the one the owner wanted, and it takes root slowly, through a hundred small moments when a standard slipped and nobody said anything. The good people, the ones who want to do a professional job, get tired of it and leave. Those who remain have either stopped caring, or like things as they are.

Why a training day will not fix it

When owners realise something is wrong, they often book a training session: how to sell more wine, how to serve a table properly. Training matters, but dropped into a broken culture, it is like planting seeds in concrete. It lands, and nothing grows.

First, people need a reason to care. Tell a commis chef that plates must be hot, and it is a task. Explain that a cold plate spoils the dish and the guest does not come back, and it becomes a standard they hold themselves.

Then they need real responsibility. The usual answer to a disengaged team is to watch them more closely. The opposite usually works better. Give someone ownership of the coffee, or of looking after new starters, and they almost always rise to it. People shrink when they feel watched. They grow when they feel trusted.

The structure that holds a team

Pep talks fade. Structure lasts. Three things make the difference:

• Written standards. Call them procedures if you like; they are simply the answers to "how do we do things here?" Without them, every shift is a roll of the dice. With them, people can use their judgement without fear of getting the basics wrong.
• Feedback people can see. Staff want to know how they are doing. Without a short, regular one-to-one, they assume the worst or stop caring. In most struggling venues I see, the ratio of correction to recognition is upside down. If the only time you talk to your team is when something has gone wrong, do not be surprised when they stop wanting to talk to you.
• A layer of management that does not depend on you. If the business only runs at its best when you are in the room, you do not have a business. You have a very demanding job.

This matters even more if you want a second site. You were the culture at the first one, there every day holding the line. If your standards live only in your head, they will not travel. Build them into the first site before you sign for the second.

The team was waiting

The teams I have helped turn round were, almost without exception, relieved when the changes began. They were not lazy or incompetent. They wanted the service to go well and the guests to be happy, and they wanted to be part of something professional. They were waiting for someone to lead.

If you think your team is your biggest problem, look first at what you have given them to work with. The team was rarely the problem; the structure was. Fix the structure, and the team follows.

If you would like someone to watch the room as I did in East London, and tell you honestly what they see, that is where a Hospitality Health Check begins.