Leadership Development: The Incidental Leader Problem
The Incidental Leader: You Can Renovate a Bar in Four Days. You Can’t Renovate a Leader.
I have watched my fair share of Bar Rescue over the years.
If you’ve seen the show, you know the basic premise. Jon Taffer walks into a struggling bar and, within minutes, discovers enough operational problems to make any hospitality professional reach for something stronger than the house Chardonnay. Food quality is questionable. Drinks are inconsistent. There are few systems for employees to follow. Managers aren’t managing. Owners are overwhelmed, frustrated or, occasionally, doing such a spectacular job of contributing to the problem that you wonder who exactly called for help.
Taffer confronts what isn’t working. Standards are reset. Systems change. Employees are trained. The bar is renovated and, a few days later, the doors reopen to something that looks remarkably different from the business we saw at the beginning of the episode.
I’ve always been fascinated by what happens next.
Not the next morning, when the equipment is shiny, the systems are fresh, and everyone is still running on the adrenaline of the transformation. I mean three months later, on a Saturday night when someone calls in sick, the kitchen is buried, the POS system freezes, and Table 12 has just discovered that “medium rare” is apparently open to interpretation.
After more than four decades in hospitality, including years stepping into struggling hotels and food-service operations as a fixer, I learned that changing an operation and changing the people who lead it are two very different things.
You can renovate a bar in four days. You can’t renovate a leader in four days.
I know because I was one of those leaders.
I Got the Keys. Apparently, That Made Me a Leader.
I was 18 years old when someone decided I was ready to become a supervisor. To be fair, there were reasons. I was good at my job. I was dependable. I worked hard. I took responsibility and stepped up when something needed to be done. These are all good qualities in an employee and, apparently, when combined in sufficient quantities, they cause management to hand you keys.
What I don’t remember receiving was any meaningful instruction on how to lead another human being.
Nobody sat me down and explained how to set expectations, coach someone who was struggling, deal with conflict, delegate responsibility or hold someone accountable without becoming Attila the Supervisor. I didn’t know how to motivate someone who didn’t happen to think like me. I certainly didn’t understand the difference between managing a task and leading a person.
I had been good at doing the job. Suddenly, I was responsible for helping other people be good at theirs.
Those are very different skills.
The troubling part is that my experience wasn’t unusual. As my career progressed, I started meeting versions of 18-year-old Marc everywhere. Eventually, I came to think of us as incidental leaders.
An incidental leader is someone who arrives in leadership because of what they were good at before becoming a leader. The great server becomes the restaurant supervisor. The reliable front-desk agent becomes the front-office manager. The cook who knows every station becomes the kitchen manager. Sometimes it’s simply the employee who steps forward while everyone else suddenly becomes fascinated by their shoes.
We teach them the mechanics. Here is how you make the schedule. Here is how you approve a refund. Here is how you close the building. Here is the password you must never write down, conveniently written on this sticky note.
As for leading people? They’ll figure it out.
Except many don’t.
Instead, they figure out how to survive.
The manager who doesn’t know how to delegate does everything herself because it’s quicker if I just do it. The manager who fears conflict lets bad behaviour continue. Another becomes controlling. Another screams because the manager who trained him screamed, so apparently volume is a leadership competency.
Then there’s the manager who wants everyone to like her. She avoids accountability so nobody gets upset, until the good employees get upset because nobody is dealing with the employee who isn’t pulling their weight.
We should know better than this by now.
These are not new problems. We have spent decades promoting good employees into jobs that require a different set of skills, giving them little leadership development and then questioning their attitude when they struggle.
That’s not just their failure.
That’s ours.
Your Customer Doesn’t See the Leadership Problem
Years later, when I began stepping into struggling hospitality operations, nobody called me and said, “Marc, we have an incidental-leadership problem.”
They said things like, “Marc, I don’t know what’s happening. We’re doing what we’ve been doing for 20 years, but our occupancy is down and there’s a new hotel opening down the street.”
When I arrived, I could see the signs. Food quality was inconsistent. Rooms weren’t being cleaned properly. Check-in was taking too long. Customer complaints were increasing. Turnover was high. Morale was somewhere in the basement, presumably looking for a shovel.
At first glance, these looked like separate problems. Fix the food. Fix housekeeping. Fix the front desk. Fix the service.
But as I dug into those operations, I kept coming back to the same question:
How are the leaders leading?
The customer doesn’t see the leadership problem.
A hotel guest doesn’t know that the housekeeping supervisor has avoided a difficult conversation with an employee for six months. The guest knows there is hair in the bathtub.
The diner doesn’t know that the restaurant manager hasn’t set clear expectations. The diner knows the steak arrived cold.
The exhausted traveller at reception doesn’t know that the front-office manager has never learned how to coach poor performance. They know check-in took 25 minutes and nobody seemed particularly concerned.
And the customer certainly doesn’t know that employees have learned to keep problems to themselves because bringing bad news to the manager gets them blamed for the problem.
They simply know nobody fixed it.
That’s why I have come to believe that bad leadership leaks. It leaks into the kitchen, housekeeping, the sales floor, the call centre and the front desk. Eventually, it finds its way into every touchpoint along the customer journey.
We like to put leadership, operations, employee experience and customer experience into separate boxes.
Customers have the irritating habit of experiencing all of them at once.
You Can’t Laminate Your Way Out of This
When those customer problems appear, we usually attack the symptom.
Customer complaints are up? Hold customer-service training.
Food quality is down? Rewrite the kitchen checklist.
Housekeeping scores are slipping? Add another inspection form.
Employees aren’t following procedures? Send a memo reminding everyone that procedures should, in fact, be followed. That one follows the memo that all memos should be read.
None of those things is wrong. Standards, systems and training matter. But somewhere along the way, businesses developed a touching faith in the power of lamination.
A new checklist cannot coach an employee.
A procedure cannot have a difficult conversation.
A training manual cannot notice that a good employee is becoming frustrated because a poor performer is never held accountable.
Someone has to lead.
And that is where many fixes start to fall apart.
Imagine a restaurant manager who has spent five years avoiding conflict. On Monday, she attends a workshop and learns a terrific process for difficult conversations. There are slides. There is a workbook. There may even be muffins.
By Friday, she understands what she’s supposed to do.
Then Saturday night arrives.
She is understaffed. Two employees are arguing. The kitchen is backed up. Customers are complaining and one employee’s behaviour is making everything worse.
What does she reach for?
The process she learned five days ago or the behaviour she has practised for five years?
This is the part of leadership development we keep underestimating. Knowing isn’t doing. Leadership behaviours have to be practised until they become the behaviours we can depend on when things go wrong.
A difficult conversation becomes easier because you’ve had difficult conversations. Delegating becomes easier because you’ve learned that giving someone responsibility does not cause civilization to collapse. Coaching becomes more natural because you’ve practised coaching instead of jumping in and fixing everything yourself.
A crisis doesn’t create leadership capability. It reveals the leadership habits that were already there.
That’s why the real test of a turnaround isn’t opening night.
It’s the hundredth night.
The consultant is gone. Nobody is filming. The novelty has worn off. Three things have gone wrong at once.
Does the manager communicate, prioritize and delegate? Do they coach, make decisions and hold people accountable? Or does everyone return to screaming, blaming, avoiding and trying to do everything themselves?
The new procedure may still be hanging proudly on the wall.
The old leadership behaviour may be running the business.
You Cannot Motivate Your Way Out of a Capability Gap
Jon Taffer speaking to franchise operators about restaurant management
A recent Fast Casual article highlighted five lessons from a presentation Jon Taffer gave to franchise operators. His message included the need to move faster, eliminate excuses, focus on customer reactions, drive revenue and hire people with the personalities to create great experiences.
There is a lot there that resonates with me. Businesses need urgency. Leaders need accountability. Managers need to understand what customers are actually experiencing rather than assuming that because everything looks fine from the office, everything must be tickety-boo on the other side of the door.
Anyone who has watched Bar Rescue has also seen Taffer’s frustration when owners and managers don’t appear to take control of what is happening around them.
I’ve felt that frustration myself. But it raises a question we should be asking:
What if they don’t know how?
What if we are demanding ownership from someone who has never learned to delegate? What if we expect accountability from a manager who has never been taught how to hold someone else accountable? What if nobody has shown them how to coach, conduct a difficult conversation, build trust or tell the difference between a people problem, a process problem and a training problem?
Telling that manager to step up might provide motivation.
It doesn’t provide capability.
You cannot motivate your way out of a capability gap.
And we should know this.
The skills that earn someone a promotion are often not the skills they need after the promotion. A great server creates a great experience for her tables. A great restaurant leader creates the conditions for an entire team to deliver great experiences. A strong employee solves problems. A strong leader develops people who can solve problems without waiting for the boss.
We call it a promotion, but in many ways it is a change of profession.
Yet we still move someone’s name one box higher on the organizational chart and expect the transformation to happen naturally.
Then, when it doesn’t, we wonder what’s wrong with them.
Perhaps we should spend a little more time wondering what’s wrong with the way we’re developing them.
Leadership Development Is Part of the Operation
Managers don’t get a free pass. A lack of training isn’t permission to bully employees, ignore standards, avoid responsibility or mistreat customers. Leaders are responsible for their behaviour.
But organizations have responsibilities too.
If we promote someone into leadership, we have an obligation to help them learn how to lead. That means more than teaching them to make a schedule, complete a report, use the POS system or lock the building without setting off the alarm and meeting the local police department.
We need to develop their ability to set expectations, coach performance, recognize good work, address poor behaviour, delegate, resolve conflict, make decisions and build trust.
Then we need to let them practise.
Let them try. Let them make mistakes. Give them feedback. Coach them. Then let them try again.
Because leadership development isn’t an orientation module.
It is part of the operation.
Forty Years Later, I Still Meet That 18-Year-Old
More than four decades after I was handed my first supervisory role, I have a lot more sympathy for that 18-year-old than I once did.
He didn’t know what he didn’t know.
In the years that followed, I managed hotels, owned restaurants, led food-service operations and walked into businesses that were struggling. Again and again, I met versions of him: good people, hard-working people and people willing to step up when someone needed to step up.
They had the title. They had the keys. They had the accountability.
What they often hadn’t been given was the leadership development they needed to succeed.
And the consequences didn’t stay in the manager’s office. They showed up in turnover, toxic behaviour and inconsistent standards. Eventually, they showed up in food quality, room quality, cleanliness, check-in and service.
They reached the customer.
That is why, when an organization tells me it has a customer-experience problem, I don’t automatically start with the customer anymore.
Sometimes you need to walk upstream.
Look at the systems. Look at the expectations. Look at the behaviours being rewarded or tolerated. Most importantly, look at the people responsible for leading the people who deliver the experience.
We have spent enough years promoting people first and developing them later—if we develop them at all.
We should know better by now.
You can replace the equipment, rewrite the procedures, retrain the employees and renovate the building.
But when the next crisis hits, the sustainability of those improvements will depend on something much harder to renovate.
The leader.
And if we want that leader to behave differently when everything goes wrong, we can’t wait until everything goes wrong to tell them to lead.
We have to teach them how.
Marc Haine
Marc is a service expert and a master of experiences. He's also an author, speaker, facilitator and coach. He will help your teams ignite their passions, enable your leaders to recentre their focus, and drive continuous improvement through connected and engaged employees. This will allow you to realize your competitive advantage with a connected purpose and consistency of customer experience across your brand. He will dare your people to cultivate a generous attitude and lead with love and kindness first.
