Wednesday, April 10, 2019
Celebrating Failure
This topic is easy for me because I am currently the store manager of a restaurant. As a manager, especially one higher up the line, we are taught (and forced) to accept, learn from and eventually celebrate our failures. The reason being is that failure teaches us lessons and how, hopefully, not to repeat our mistakes.
One thing I have failed at big this semester is my time management. This is vague so I will speak about it in regards to having important one on one conversations with my managers/employees. There were a couple times when I knew there was some drama or something going on that was hindering the store from operating at optimal performance. I naively tried to let things play out hoping that these people or issues would turn themselves around. It became clear quite quickly that this was not the case. I have had small issues turn into big ones in the blink of an eye. I learned that I need to nip things in the butt immediately so that they do not grow into habits and then problems.
For example, my store is 24 hours. The overnight employees are constantly late and/or call out of work for unacceptable reasons and I neglected to take matters into my own hands and instead let the overnight mangers deal with the situation. Well, they were afraid of losing people because no one wants to work overnights right now and so nothing was done at all to reprimand said employees. Fast forward a couple months later and we are having major staffing issues on the overnights and have had to close the restaurant a couple times because I was sleeping and did not answer my phone to solve the problem for them.
However, I am now not afraid to reprimand overnight employees and those managers and stopping this culture that has risen right before my eyes. I now see how minor allowances turn into problems. I have suspended one employee and two mangers for not following protocol about these situations and so far it seems everyone is now taking me seriously and realizing what is expected of them. I have several new hires starting in the next three weeks and I am determined to set a good example and retain them this time!
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I enjoyed reading your stories of your failures as a manager. I have witnessed several experiences similar to yours at the hospital I previously worked at with staff not wanting to work nights and leaving the day shift obligated to work the day and night shift. I did it once and it was brutal, but I remember how the managers were at that time and I could see them experiencing failure to not have enough staff. They learned from it and always had back up people for future circumstances. I completely agree that failure is a great learning tactic for people struggling with failure and it helps grow to be better next time in any circumstance.
ReplyDeleteOof, managerial work I do not envy. I worked as a cook/cashier at a gas station and I definitely didn't want the job that the managers had, simply because I don't see myself at the kind of person able to make calls that regard other people's time and availability. It's tough shit in a tough world, but we all just tough it out through failure.
ReplyDeleteI find it amusing that the failure you described is related to people missing work. Having worked at a restaurant for a relatively short time, I'm familiar with managers hounding employees to cover shifts. I understand the reasoning behind it, but sadly (and maybe this does or doesn't apply to the place you work), the reason that many employees don't like their jobs (and don't mind missing work) is poor management (though maybe not your own). I've seen some ridiculous turn over rates in the restaurant industry, and I've also seen some very low ones. More often than not, it seems that a good manager can make a difference between whether someone is actually willing to come to work.
ReplyDeleteAs a side note, I appreciated your comment on my post about failure, but I think you may have missed the point. We can disagree on rejection being failure or not, but the point of my post was that I did embrace (and gain) from what happened.