The circle of life. It’s not just an all-time great Disney song, it applies to all facets of the world we live in. Yes, even the restaurant industry. Hosts become servers, servers become bartenders, bartenders become managers. In the back of the house, today’s dishwasher are tomorrow’s sous chef. That sous chef could go on to take over the kitchen some day and train his own replacements. And the cosmic ballet goes on.
Advancing your existing employees is not only more cost-efficient than external hiring, it improves staff morale and encourages team cohesiveness. When employees see their peers ascend to managerial positions, it raises their own aspirations. You’ll see better work ethic and a desire for self-improvement even from workers you may not have expected it from.
A rising tide lifts all boats, as they say.
You Already Have the Right Employees for Upward Growth
This upward mobility doesn’t just happen overnight, of course. Mentoring and education are vital secondary functions of your restaurant’s leadership. It’s a cyclical process, but there are often failures and missteps that can set you back. Investing time and energy on an employee that jumps ship to another restaurant can be incredibly frustrating. Your first step is identifying the potential candidates who not only want to grow but want to do it for you.
Of course, you need to dedicate time and resources to training your entire staff. Likely, you already know there are certain players whose potentials are already outpacing their positions. That grill cook that reorganizes the Cambros in the walk-in on their own; the host that recognizes and identifies special occasions among the guests, letting you know who may need some VIP treatment; the server that hops on service bar when the bartenders are in the weeds. Those are the building blocks of your restaurant’s future.
With so much of a front-of-house manager’s time spent dealing with guests, a natural ease in customer service is an easy predictor of who can or cannot take the reins of the restaurant. This isn’t to say that every manager has to be an extroverted, charismatic people-pleaser, but if someone can’t eat the occasional shit sandwich with a smile on their face at the host stand, then their ceiling isn’t going to be much higher than that.
When it comes to interacting with diners—especially upset ones—you need to know when to give and when to take. Make sure your customer ends the night in a better mood than they started it. Not everybody has that skill set, and it’s something incredibly difficult to teach. Plain and simple, you either have it or you don’t.
Training Up the Front of the House
From a more tangible standpoint, there are roughly 8 million different tasks in the dining room that you can teach your team. Room resets, banquet orders, inventory, maintenance, scheduling, the list is seemingly endless, but you—the manager—already knew that, didn’t you? In fact, the hardest parts may be deciding what knowledge to impart first and not to overwhelm your charges.
Starting with important—but not life or death—tasks, such as side-work scheduling or writing drink specs, can give them a brief glimpse into the constant whirlwind of your daily responsibilities. Train a select few how to open and close the restaurant in case of emergencies. If you show that trust and belief in your staff, they can show you their best selves.
Don’t Forget to Look for Leadership in the Kitchen
In the back of the house, working across multiple stations can be a necessity, so learning and training is already deeply ingrained in your line crew. The flexibility that a well-rounded line cook offers you allows you to exercise greater control over labor costs, kitchen chemistry, and menu creativity. That last little nugget can be your foot in the door with a prospective rank climber.
The biggest telltale sign that a cook wants to be a chef is how eagerly they respond to a project. Coming to one of your line cooks with a request to help put together a special can be a test of sorts. You can tell immediately by how much thought and effort gets put into the special if this is someone who wants to move up.
If that answer is yes, then you can start introducing them to the non-cooking aspects of what it means to be a chef. On the business side: invoice reconciliation, entering inventory, and ordering are tasks that are crucial to the operation of a successful kitchen and can be taught rather easily to your mentees.
Learning more in the context of the kitchen also rounds out their skill sets. Expediting a dinner service, either from inside the line or the pass is one of the greatest ways to show them how the restaurant functions outside of their own individual ecosystem on sauté or grill. When you truly look at the big picture and see the flow of orders coming in and out of the kitchen, you realize how much you depend on the hosts, servers, bartender, runners, bussers, and dishwashers in a way you cannot grasp in the muscle-memory fueled craze of your station.
That sense of co-operation and shared goals is what truly makes a restaurant staff a team. Once their eyes are opened to that greater good, you’ll know if you have a captain of the ship or just another set of oars.
