5 Management Issues You Should Know About

I just read an interesting white paper entitled "Five Critical Management Derailers: Symptoms and Remedies," authored by HR consultancy Profiles International. The paper is not industry specific, so I thought that you might benefit from it, too.

The paper identifies several common management-related issues that that are prevalent in all industries and details concrete and constructive ways to address them. The five issues are:

• poor interpersonal and communication skills;
• inadequate leadership skills;
• resistance to change;
• inability to deliver expected results;
• and inability to see beyond their functional silo.

Over the next few weeks, I will give you my take on these five areas and how they exhibit themselves in the foodservice business. At the top of the paper’s list is poor interpersonal and communication skills, so I’ll start there.

Frankly, if this were not on the top of the list, I would have had some doubts about the rest of the document. Many managers, at unit-level and above, get promoted because they (or more accurately, their unit) performed well in terms of sales and profits. A high percentage do not have the communication skills needed to succeed at their new level.

I think I can easily count on one hand the number of managerial training programs I have seen that place the proper emphasis on how to communicate to associates, let alone to guests. In too many instances, the level of communication is, “Do what I think, not what I say.” This is relevant even at the executive levels.

Once I was meeting with the CEO, CFO and COO of a small QSR chain, and the CEO wanted me to taste everything on the menu, so he gave what he thought was the appropriate order. For 20 minutes, nothing appeared, and then came the onslaught of food. The unit manager thought the CEO wanted one order of everything on the menu for each of us!  o major damage done, and the next 20 or so customers had the option of free food, but it does illustrate how easy it is to miscommunicate. 

So, how well does your training program deal with communication skills? My guess is that there is a lot of room for improvement.

For the next post, I’ll talk about leadership skills …