Leadership at LB and The ABs

Posted: 13/07/2010 9:57:42 a.m.

Managing the dining room or kitchen through any busy service at Logan Brown is a massive task. With high guest expectations and eight to ten team in each department to supervise it’s a huge responsibility and being such a human orientated process there is so much that can go wrong.

The thing is, most of the managers or supervisors have no formal training but, as is typical in our industry, kind of float to the top because of their good performance and the duration of their experience in the organisation. Leadership skills are just picked up by watching other bosses and following suit, whether he/she is a great example or not. We can get into trouble when managers have different standards or methods in their work or when they have different styles or abilities of leading compared to other managers. The team can get a bit frustrated and become less effective in their work, especially when the proverbial hits the fan in a busy service.

So to address this, our supervisors, the guys that actually run the services, got together to discover what traits make a great leader at Logan Brown and what kind of behaviours get the best results. We attacked the issue in two parts:

Part one was a sit down dinner with Conrad Smith, one of Wellingtons favourite All Blacks. It was very cool sharing with him how running a team of rugby players is so similar to a running a team of restaurant players.

The All Black forwards/our kitchen team, must give good service to the backs/our dining room team, to enable them thrill the spectators/our guests, in finishing off the play. If the forwards/the kitchen team have a bad day, it doesn`t matter how sharp the backs/dining room team are, we all will lose. And so on! The hard fact is that we, the ABs and LBs, share in common is that if either team let down their fans it is sure to be the talk of the town, such are the expectations and reputation we both have to live up to.

Hearing about leadership systems and teamwork from Conrad was very relevant to our group and set us up nicely for part two.

We used an off premise location, convened on a Sunday morning and invited Greg Norris from Clued Up (http://www.cluedup.co.nz) to facilitate the workshop. While the team were enthusiastic about contributing, they (myself included) were initially a bit twitchy when it came to publicly measuring their own leadership performance against the standards! Our worries were unfounded.

Through the process of building a picture of a great leader and defining admirable traits, we often found ourselves referring to the Logan Brown values, the foundation values that our business is built on; Genuine Hospitality, Consistency in Performance, Continuous Improvement, Full Communication and Working with Like Minded People. Building on these values we added the traits or skills that are needed to run a service such as; bringing passion, having courage under fire, taking ownership, showing empathy, anticipating issues, creating solutions, precise communication that’s honest.

Probably one of the most important aspects that came out was how important the leaders work as a team. It is such a tough job to manage a service with out having to compete against another manager. In a lot of restaurants there is a classic confrontation playing out every service between the kitchen team and the restaurant team and usually it’s the chef or the Maitre`d leading the charge!

These two leaders simply must work together as a unit if there is to be any chance of all the little aspects of a restaurant service playing out successfully and transpire into a great dining experience for our guests. Just as, Ritchie McCaw and Dan Carter needed to work as a unit, to win the mighty test match against the Spring Boks, last weekend.

Now we have a great one page document, outlining the key values to successful leadership at Logan Brown. We use it to measure our current leaders performance against and for training new leaders coming through the system.

So when you dine with us at Logan Brown you may, or may not observe the leaders at work, but for sure, if you are having a great experience it will because they are fired up and on form delivering these key leadership values.