Question: if your restaurant was falling apart, should you fire your employees or your managers?

Back in 1982, one of the GM plants closed and Toyota ended up purchasing the plant. They were ramping up production in the US and wanted to bring all their production facilities over.  The Executive level managers at GM basically said, hey – we’re glad you’re buying this plant and best of luck to you, but whatever you do, don’t hire back any of the employees.  The management team, however, was amazing and you should hire them.

If you know anything about Toyota, they’re a pretty progressive company and have developed systems and procedures known as KAIZEN.  (Seriously, Google it, it’s a genius manufacturing theory that applies to anything).

Toyota interviewed all of the employees and managers.  They hired all the old employees back, but none of the managers.  The plant, by the way, went on to be one of their best performing plants in the world.

HOW DOES IT APPLY TO MY RESTAURANT?

It’s easy to jump to conclusions and blame employees when things go wrong but a lot of times it’s the systems and procedures that are the problem whether they’re either not in place or they’re not being used properly when developing staff.

If you don’t have upper management in line where they are creating and managing systems while developing staff.

If you’re a restaurant manager, here’s the good news for you.  Stop writing off your employees as “bad employees”.  I have a bunch of links below that you can go back and watch on earning employee respect and employee training.

You have a lot of control over these employees than you think you do so start adopting a mindset of changing SYSTEMS instead of blaming employees.