Have you heard the old cliché: "People don’t quit a bad job, they quit a bad boss?"
There has never been a more important time for managers, to reflect on how they are as bosses, managers and leaders to create a positive environment and build a committed team.
In the recruitment crisis most sectors are facing today, it's more important than ever to remember the old adage:
People don’t quit a bad job. They quit a bad manager.
So how do you become the best boss you can be so that your team stick with you through thick and thin?
Personal and business success goes hand-in-hand with confidence. Confidence is the foundation of leadership - it’s the fuel that drives us forward. Leaders are role models - so their confidence is contagious, and unfortunately, so is lack of confidence. Here are my tips to build your confidence as a leader.
One of the most challenging things about becoming a manager is building the confidence to give effective feedback to your team. Delivering positive or negative feedback can feel daunting, you might not want to come across as soft and gushing or worry that the receiver won’t like you or that giving feedback may be pointless and unhelpful. But giving feedback is crucial to keeping your team on track, boosting quality and performance, to avoiding or repeating mistakes. So here are my tips on giving feedback.
Every sector I speak to at the moment from hospitality to tech, is finding it harder to recruit than ever before. So as a manager, how do you build a happy, committed and successful team who will stick with you through thick and thin? The short answer is, it’s not just about paying them more!
Inspiring words from Dame Karen Jones, chair of both the Hawksmoor and Mowgli restaurant chains. At the Propel Hospitality Talent and Training Conference she spoke about how Hospitality is the lynch pin of society. We realised how much we missed it during lock down and that the holy grail of hospitality is: The power of the moment of human connection that keeps your customers coming back again and again.
Asma Khan, owner of Darjeeling Express and star of Netflix’s Chef’s Table, has written widely about her experience of starting her restaurant. She says she believed it would never be possible to run a business in a world that she described as "an all white, all male club." She said, if she had a daughter, she would seriously discourage her from a career in hospitality, where kitchens are all too often "a toxic testosterone-fuelled environment."
This last point obviously resonated strongly for me after my then 17-year old daughter announced that she wanted to be a chef. We talked seriously about what a tough career choice that was, especially for woman. We talked about how life as a chef almost completely incompatible with being a mother and how the majority of kitchens remain a very male and macho environment. Needless to say, like all good teenagers, she listened to my advice and chose to ignore me!
At the Propel Hospitality Talent and Training Conference in London on Tuesday 3 October, Asma Khan moved me to tears as she spoke, as she has done before when talking about her incredible work establishing a cafe in a refugee camp in northern Iraq employing traumatised Yazidi women.
This time she spoke about how she still feels like an outsider in the world of hospitality, but she’s learned to see it as an advantage. She talked about how food not only has the power to bring us together, but is also a cause of division. She said in India “Food is main way people are divided” by religion and caste. At her restaurant Khan employs women from all backgrounds, religions and ages and abilities. Everyone is welcome and everyone is equal “We put our religion and our caste at the door, we celebrate every festival. We are a team.
Asma Khan believes that you strengthen your team by having a diverse team and urged all businesses build a diverse workplace.
Hiring a diverse team is key to inspiring the next generation in hospitality.
Her advice:
Understand you are a team
Be empathetic and let people know that they matter
Offer flexible work and reduce the hours
Darjeeling Express is a model of what a diverse workplace can be.
However, the reality of diversity in the hospitality sector is different as demonstrated by Be Inclusive Hospitality's 2023 Inside Hospitality Report , a comprehensive account of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in hospitality through a race lens and whic includes 3,120 views and experiences captured encompass all backgrounds, genders, ages, jobs, and lengths of service.
The report says 1 in 3 respondents report personal experiences of discrimination at work and that only 16% of hospitality workers believe it’s an inclusive and diverse industry.
I was honoured to host a crucial discussion in The Restaurant Show with:
Lorraine Copes Be Inclusive Hospitality award-winning social entrepreneur, hospitality consultant and life coach. Lorraine has two decades as an executive director for brands including Gordon Ramsay Restaurants and Corbin & King, but felt compelled to form Be Inclusive Hospitality CIC in 2020 due to the consistent lack of representation of people of colour in positions of influence and the supply chain. This social enterprise now holds the prime position of igniting much-needed conversations and delivering initiatives to advance change within the hospitality, food, and drink sectors.
Mecca Ibrahim co-founder of Women In The Food Industry, a Community Interest Company for conversation, insight, stories, resources & community support as women in food face obstacles of inequality & inclusion.
Chris Todd Head of Talent JKS Restaurants a former chef who now oversees all recruitment and talent initiatives across JKS’s portfolio of 22 restaurants including Trishna, Gymkhana, Kitchen Table, Sabor and Lyle’s; Hoppers, BAO, Brigadiers.
We agreed that more needs to be done to change the perception of working in Hospitality. The sector has improved but we need to blow our own trumpet more to shout over the stereotypes portrayed in TV shows like Boiling Point and The Bear. Education is key. We need to get young children interested in food and hospitality and work with parents, schools and colleges to show it’s an amazing career for life, not just a stop-gap.
Who Wants to Work in Hospitality? An important debate held at the 25th Abergavenny Food Festival in September to explore how we change the perception of careers in hospitality.
Chaired by Polly Robinson, Hospitality Leadership Coach with Chef Jeremy Lee, Quo Vadis; Restaurateur Pervin Todiwalla of Cafe Spice Namaste; Anthony Murphy of The Beefy Boys and UKHospitality.
I’ve long been a fan of the podcast Hospitality Mavericks, so I was really excited to be asked by its host Michael Tingsager, to join him to chat about my work as an executive coach and running leadership development programmes.
We talk about the difference between leadership and management, how to build a strong, happy and engaged team, changing expectations of work life and just some of the challenges facing business leaders today.
I also share my own story of how I moved from hospitality and food & drink branding and communications to become a business coach, and how I build healthy routines and lots of exercise to look after myself.
You can listen to the podcast on all the usual podcast channels from Spotify, Apple, Google, Amazon and below on YouTube.
I highly recommend all the podcasts on Hospitality Mavericks!
Find them all here: Hospitality Mavericks >
