One Goal, Eighty Employees
Why I Never Stopped Bagging Orders
For years, I ran a team of about 80 people across every shift a restaurant runs — mornings, mids, closes, weekends. And the whole time, I kept doing the actual work alongside them. I opened some mornings and closed some nights. I bagged orders and took them at the register. I breaded chicken and jumped in to make sandwiches when we were slammed. I made myself visible and available to the team.
It would have been easier, on paper, to stay in the office. I had plenty to do back there — payroll, scheduling, ordering, the paperwork that never actually ends. Staying at my desk would have looked like better time management. It wasn't better leadership.
Here's what I kept telling my team, because I meant it: we are one team. Not kitchen versus front counter. Not day shift versus night shift. One goal, eighty employees, and my job was to help every one of them reach it — which meant showing up in the actual work, not just managing it from a distance.
People don't follow a title. They follow someone who's actually in it with them. The first time I asked someone to come in at 3 a.m. for a catering order without ever having done it myself, I'd have lost something I couldn't get back with a paycheck.
If the first factor of leadership was making myself visible, then the second was making success visible. I've learned that misery, for most people at work, isn't about the workload — it's about irrelevance and immeasurement. When nobody can see whether they're winning, effort turns into just showing up. So we measured things. We set real numbers — a sales goal, a customer experience score — and made sure every person on that team could see where we stood against it. Not to hover over people. To give them a reason to want to win, not just comply.
Neither of those things — showing up in the work, making the goal visible — costs anything. They just cost you the comfort of managing from a distance.
Where in your business are you leading from a title right now instead of from the floor? What would change if you showed up there this week?
Circa…2014?
