“Games are won on the floor, championships are won in the locker room.” –Michael Jordan, five-time NBA World Champion with the Chicago Bulls
by Jim Sullivan 5 Minute Read
Given the stress, strain and hardship that the recent coronavirus pandemic put on the restaurant business, it makes sense that we take advantage of this reset opportunity to make our teams better and stronger and more engaged. This article shares 10 ways to improve your crew through training.
Restaurants are ecosystems. Every team member’s success will be affected by the people, process and environment surrounding them. And the best General Managers (GMs) know that the way to shape strong ecosystems that attracts both talent and traffic is by becoming a Developmentally-Dedicated Organization (DDO).
DDOs tend to have lower turnover, stronger talent,
bigger profits and more loyal customers.
A hallmark of the DDO is retooling the traditional manager-employee
relationship from a transactional nature to a transformational one. You do that by teaching everyone something
new every shift, aligning new skillsets to career paths, and using scoreboards
and scorecards—like Digital Badges–to show skill mastery and learning
progress. We recently polled 161
high-performing GMs for a large QSR chain on their coaching, training and
development processes. Here’s a snapshot of the best-practices we gleaned from
our research:
Excellence is a learned behavior. Consider an athlete’s “muscle memory” as a metaphor for training excellence. For instance, a professional baseball player takes dozens or hundreds of practice swings before every game, repeating key behaviors like “hips open, shoulders square, eyes on the ball.” Through perfect practice, their muscles eventually memorize the movement sequence, and the response becomes automatic during the game. The same is true for unit managers who train their crew every day via the pre-shift meeting and coach each team member into position, through the position and out of the position each shift. Eventually the crew’s “muscle memory” is primed with an excellence reflex, executing the “little” things correctly and consistently. This strategy of attaining habitual consistency by concentrating on the fundamentals daily is the cornerstone of any effective training regime and curriculum. It’s not what you know, but what you do with what you know.
Know the greatest enemy of training outside the classroom. It’s habit. Don’t expect significant behavior change as the result of just one training session or meeting. Research shows that it can take as many as 66 consecutive days of different behavior to change a habit. Meetings and speeches and handouts don’t change things, people change things. And people don’t change “things” until they change their way of doing things. Use the meeting/training session to detail the behavior change, use daily coaching to effect the change. Now work on the new behaviors every day for the next two months with your managers. We don’t think ourselves into a new way of acting, we act ourselves into a new way of thinking.
The Three-to-One Ratio. For every specific objective you want to accomplish training-wise, attach three different activities which can help the learner execute on and accomplish that objective. For example, if you want to educate your assistant managers on Financials 101, choose three different ways to educate them, perhaps by studying spreadsheets, physically doing inventory together, plus a written quiz. Remember: one training objective, three learning activities to support it.
The Rule of Three. When it comes to retention, ad agencies, film directors, coaches and marksmen have long known the power of stringing trio of phrases together to maximize recall. Consider: “Reduce, re-use, recycle,” “The few, the proud, the Marines,” “Lights! Camera! Action”!, “Ready! Aim! Fire”!, or “On your Mark! Get Set! Go”! It works for remembering key training points too. When you’re looking for a memorable catch phrase or memory peg for your training or coaching session, think three (i.e. Serve-Sell-Succeed, Think-Plan-Execute).
Spaced repetition is the mother of all learning. Teach key concepts repeatedly, but with enough space in between to allow for reflection, understanding, guided practice, and application. What would make you a better tennis player if you’d never played before? One five-hour lesson, or five one-hour lessons spread over five weeks with time to practice in between? Mandatory Pre-Shift Meetings are the linchpin to this best practice.
Always teach WHY before how. 99% of manager-to-crew training fails because we first tell our team what to do and how to do it, often completely ignoring the most important step: why to do it. For instance, teach servers how low the profit on the dollar is (why) before you teach them what and how to sell.
Think KFD. Plan every presentation by first asking yourself: What does the audience need to know? The F stands for how do we want them to feel as a result of what you’re teaching? Excited? Motivated? Confident? Dissatisfied with their current behavior? The D stands for what do we want them to do? Always link learning to action. What specific actions do we want them to take? Learning has not taken place until behavior has changed. What they do as a result of what you say is much more important than what you “told” them. Use the KFD principle for every training session, voice mail, letter and e-mail, and you’ll see better retention, more productive managers and even MCIYP: more cash in your pockets.
Always train learners FIRST on what causes the most frustration day in and day out. When you’re deciding what’s most important to teach your team, prioritize the options based on what they struggle most with day in and day out. You won’t have much success teaching servers to sell if they find it too difficult to input orders in your POS for instance.
Practice, practice, practice. The fundamental skills of coaching aren’t hard to understand, they’re just hard to do. The key is not to practice on your managers and employees. Practice coaching and training skills with your fellow GMs, mentors or trainers.
Make it fun. What we learn with enjoyment we rarely forget.
Know the 3 performance problem areas.
Managers or hourly crew will not perform to expectations or standards for one
of three reasons. They either: 1) Don’t
Know, 2) Can’t Do, or 3) Don’t Care.If they don’t know how to do
something, that’s a training issue, and it’s the MULs responsibility to try and
coach them through it. If they can’t do
it, that’s usually indicative of a lack of resources; and that’s also the MULs
responsibility to identify and provide the tools they need to fix it. If they know how and can do, but don’t care,
my experience is that apathy is difficult to reverse. If not caring is chronic
behavior on the manager’s part, I suggest you cut your losses and give them a
job at the competition.
This is hardly definitive list of creative training techniques, but it’s a start. When you teach, you learn twice.
Jim Sullivan is the author of two books (Multiunit Leadership and Fundamentals) that have sold over 350,000 copies worldwide. He speaks at foodservice conferences on Leadership, Execution, and Team-Building. You can learn more at Sullivision.com or join his 400,00+ Social Media followers at LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitter @Sullivision.
