By Jacob Wilson, Contributor
Humans are complex creatures. Shaped by our environment, beliefs and values, and affected by circumstances, we are a blend of different driving forces that push and inspire us to make certain decisions in life, including the ones related to our careers. If you find your restaurant is struggling to find, recognize, hire, let alone retain employees who are driven by more than money, you’re not alone. The whole business world is facing the same issue one way or another.
Alas, the prevalence of the problem doesn’t make it any easier to solve. The solution differs from one business to another. It’s as malleable as the people whose motivators drive their employment decisions. Now, the growing need for employees who thrive on achievement as opposed to alternative motives is based on the simple fact that modern brands need to ensure stable hiring practices for the sake of overall business stability. Hiring the right people with the right motives means better retention rates, stronger brand ambassadors inside your restaurant, and consistency in your brand’s presentation both online and offline.
The challenge of finding such employees in managerial positions becomes all the greater, due to the scope of responsibility in leadership roles. As varied as the tactics to find them can be, there are certain golden rules that are common for all industries seeking to fill these positions. Here are a few to keep in mind.
Make Sure Money is Not an Issue
Achievement can become a restaurant manager’s priority only after you’ve made sure that their financial stability is in no way at risk. As long as their wellbeing, professional progress, and their quality of life are affected by a mediocre or subpar salary, rest assured that no achievement whatsoever can compensate for that discrepancy. A leadership role is one based on many challenges and responsibilities, and ensuring optimal compensation is the first step towards eliminating money as a key driver of your manager’s actions.
Simply put, managers primarily driven by achievement are often created and inspired -- not hired. You might already have a perfect candidate under your very nose and one that has been loyal to your business for years. However, their pursuit of a more stable income has prevented them to take actions that would lead to better results in your restaurant. Give them this fundamental prerequisite, and their motives will change as well.
Refine Your Restaurant’s Hiring Methods
On a different note, hiring restaurant managers driven by achievement is a complex process, one that can be very difficult to orchestrate when you’re hiring for a brand-new position. You’re bringing in someone to run a portion of your business, and their motives need to be the same as your own and that of your existing team. To make sure their employees come from trustworthy sources, many businesses often look to digital platforms that connect employees with employers around the country.
Local companies post refined, specific ads in order to fill their managerial jobs and get in front of the best candidates as fast as possible. That way, the elimination process can be shorter and more effective, since you can refine your search through digital resources and only conduct interviews with the candidates who pass the first phase with flying colors. You can tailor your posts to emphasize your need for previous achievements and for resumes that can showcase skills and talents that match your needs.
Select in Favor of Achievement
After you’ve done your employee research and chosen a handful of potential candidates to interview, you need to refine your interview to reflect the drive of achievement as well. Choose questions that target your candidate’s contribution in previous managerial positions and how they’ve achieved them. You can delve deeper into the same subject matter based on their answers, and you’ll easily spot rehearsed answers that lack the details every achievement-driven manager can pinpoint.
Present them with problems to solve on the spot, hypothetical situations common for your workplace, so that you can see their problem-solving patterns, which are often good indicators of your potential manager’s priorities in any given crisis. These simple situations might not put enough pressure for your ambitious candidates to fully disclose all of their weaknesses, but you’ll at the very least get a glimpse of their motives through how they solve issues from your workplace.
Recognize Your Restaurant’s Employee Contribution
What do you emphasize the most when you have team meetings? Do you celebrate monetary wins, expansions into new markets, or do you remember to name the people who have made it all happen, together with their specific contributions?
Your company culture should be based on celebrating individual as well as team achievements if you want to inspire achievement-based motives to propel your employees forward. Ongoing recognition is one of those essential steps you can take to create achievement-driven managers under your own roof and spot them as they develop in each of your departments. Use those moments of recognition to groom them for achievement-driven success.
Finally, if you add incentives attached to achievement, not to mere titles and hierarchy, you’ll give all of your employees all the more reason to aspire to achieve more, not just earn more. Be a restaurant that rewards achievements that benefit the entire team, not the business that rewards internal competitiveness.
It takes time to groom, find, and integrate achievement-driven employees into any restaurant, and that is especially relevant for managers who will lead your teams and your business. Make sure to keep these simple, but profound tips in mind the next time you’re about to fill a leadership role, and you’ll increase your chances to find your perfect match.
About the Author
Jacob Wilson is a business consultant, and an organizational psychologist, based in Brisbane. Passionate about marketing, social networks, and business in general. In his spare time, he writes a lot about new business strategies and digital marketing for Bizzmark blog.
