Leadership Leverage

Drawing upon what moderator Chris Muller hailed as "350 years of leadership in European foodservice", the stellar CEO panel at the 10th Foodservice Summit probed several critical management issues including relationships between corporate staff and chain creators, customer research and the challenges of healthy eating.
 

Taking up the theme of "cross-generational leadership in good times and bad", this year's CEO panel discussion touched upon the human dynamics of running restaurant groups, both the encouragement of staff to perform better and also the potential for constant friction between corporate people and the entrepreneurs who helped create the business. "Sometimes it's positive, and we try to be as positive as possible," commented Spanish chain veteran Steven Winegar of Restauravia. But corporate people often took a relatively inflexible, 90 degree approach and the attitude that ‘you don't get fired for saying no'.
 
Entrepreneurs had a less rigid mentality. You had to work with both if you wanted to avoid trouble, Winegar concluded. Recalling a mistake  concerning the location of a new concept, he concluded that people had to take risks and, indeed, that was when you learned most. Invoking the importance of leadership, Kevin Todd of UK pub-restaurant giant Mitchells & Butler felt that employees needed a working environment where the vision was clear and helped them grow the courage to make decisions. "I have worked in pubs where policies changed every day and you got frightened for your life to make a decision," he observed. People needed to be instilled with the values and vision of where the business was going while management, for its part, needed to continue attracting and developing good people.
 
They also needed to be mindful of every opportunity - including the celebration of successes, however minor - to increase employee courage and confidence. How do you harness the creative energy of young recruits? Edward Mohr, in charge of foodservice at Sweden's world-beating home goods retailer, felt that people fresh from university were good at analysing things and in pointing things out, but they could be less sure of themselves when it came to initiating action. "It's very import -ant to give them the encouragement to take the next step," he said. At the same time, management needed to appreciate that they did not have the solution for everything. They needed to encourage young staff and boost their confidence so that the company could "utilise their smartness". Morten Solberg Nilsen of SSP Norway, part of the giant SSP worldwide travel catering business, felt that discipline was important to successful, balanced management. "But I would hope that within this equilibrium there is some kind of discomfort." That helped underpin the need to change and step-by-step improvements in standards. Customer research Switching to front-of-house issues, moderator Chris Muller, professor at Rosen College of Hospitality Management at the University of Central Florida, questioned participants about matching customer expectations, especially those of the more change-averse people who wanted their restaurant to be "just like it always used to be."
 
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