Are restaurant managers hiding in plain sight? (Audio Podcast)

Mark Dickinson is a globally-renowned restaurant expert, public speaker, author and now founder and MD at Done.fyi. In this exclusive Favouritetable podcast he talks to Mark Ferguson about the challenges and opportunities facing hospitality managers. Listen to the full podcast below.

Mark Ferguson: Tell me a about your background working with restaurants? 

Mark Dickinson: I began in restaurants 45 years ago. My first job was washing glasses and I became a manager at 19 in a hotel in Eastbourne, UK. 

From there I travelled to Glenn Eagles in Scotland, and then went to China, followed by Africa and Thailand, where I had the privilege of being a director of food and beverage operations in Bangkok.  

I then worked for the Tokyo American Club, and I've since been in the Middle East with some further stints in Asia. 

Q: ‘Managers hiding in plain sight’ – what are we talking about here in a restaurant context? 

So managers hiding in plain sight are people who are not dedicated to a love of excellence in customer service, so they get a job where they grow up within a restaurant, and their first objective is to protect themselves in that role.  

They're not going to rock-the-boat, they're not going to do anything amazing or spectacularly exciting to drive the business forward or elevate customer experiences.  

What they do is what is expected of them, and they won’t speak beyond the boundaries of what is going to disturb or upset the management team above them.  

This means you end up with restaurant managers who have grown up through the rank and file and just exist to please their managers.  

Q: You’ve said a big problem in UK restaurants are ‘useless’ managers? 

When I say managers are hiding in plain sight, I mean they come to work and do their job. 

But if you sit them down and say ‘when did you last personally set up a training session where you share what you've learned with your team with the objective of making things better?’ they say ‘oh no, I don't have time for that, I'm so busy!’ 

This is where things start falling down and this is what I call a manager hiding in plain sight or being ‘useless.’  

They’re the manager because they have the highest skill level and the greatest opportunity to influence the customer experience, but what are they busy with? Purchasing, meetings or cost controls. 

None of these things influence our customers’ experience. If we can get managers focused on taking care of the guests and personally influencing their Journey, the other things will take care of themselves. This is what I mean when I say ‘useless managers.’ 

Q: What are the solutions? 

I’m currently working with around 70-80 restaurants on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. We're in and out of these restaurants and it’s noticeable that the best managers are entirely available to speak with you and their guests.  

The worst managers are always busy and don’t have time to be effective, simply because they're so tied up in their own importance, instead of understanding that if I can give you a task and you can do it, be accountable and come back to me and deliver, you're going to get inspired because of the value you’re adding. 

This makes better managers who start to do things right and are able to move away from micromanagement and towards empowerment.  

Q: What does the future hold for the sector? 

Those who fall into the trap of saying: ‘I can't cope, I can't do this, I can't deliver, I'm too busy, it's not my fault, it's something to do with the environment I’m in – there are perhaps people above them in the chain somewhere causing this, or is it all down to the manager? 

Language is a predictor of behaviour and if you create a limiting belief in your head that says ‘I can't,’ then you won’t be able to perform effectively.  

Most people will bear a lot of pain and the tolerance level for handling nonsense is very high in the hospitality sector.  

However, we've all met these overbearing, dictatorial managers who have god-like opinions of themselves, and the hospitality industry is still scattered with some of these relics from the 80s who have grown-up in a pyramidal, hierarchical organisation where ‘god says - therefore you do.’ 

But we live in 2024 now where it's a world of wonders, where I'm empowered and I am aware! 

We exist in an empowering environment where we're going to trust and depend on our teams. So standards must be agreed upon from the COO down to the frontline, and this should be supported by beautifully organisation.  

I'm a big fan of communication in business and there's a huge difference between saying to yourself ‘the problem is,’ as opposed to ‘the solution is,’ because those kinds of mindsets can make a huge difference in how you tackle a challenge. 

Achieving 100% happy customers, 100% of the time, and 100% happy employees, 100% of the time, is the restaurateur’s first responsibility. The second is profit. If you focus on profit you don't waste your time in conversations about cost. 

Then you can concentrate on building up your people to sell even more.