The restaurant manager job description is as follows:
- Hiring new employees
- Ensuring all staff complies with company policy
- Training the team to follow the restaurant procedures
- Maintaining safety and food quality standards
- Keeping customers happy and handling complaints
- Organizing schedules
- Coordinating daily restaurant management operations
- Regularly review product quality and research new vendors
- Appraise staff performance and provide feedback to improve productivity
- Keeping track of employees’ hours (time management)
- Recording payroll data
- Ordering food, linens, gloves, and other supplies while staying within budget limitations (cost control)
- Promote the brand in the local community through word-of-mouth and restaurant events
Restaurant Manager Skills
To be successful with such a job description, the restaurant manager needs a lot of skills. Here we will discuss what are those skills and how to obtain them:
1. Communication skills
- a large part of the managers’ job is to communicate with guests, employees, and business associates. Therefore, communication skills are crucial for you. However, excellent communication doesn’t always mean speaking to someone; sometimes, listening is more important. According to research conducted by the International Conference on Arts, Behavioral Sciences and Economics Issues:
Good communication gives the feeling of belonging and a sense of partnership with employees working in the organization. When employees feel they have been heard and can communicate with their supervisors at any time, they feel more a part of a group and are more motivated to work.
- Clear communication is critical in restaurants, where the pace is quick and the stress levels run high.
2. Leadership skills
- strong leadership skills will help you foster a friendly, team-oriented environment. Your team will be able to achieve its goals, and you will reduce the turnover significantly. But what are those leadership skills that everyone is talking about?
- Empathy
- Patience
- Decisiveness
- Problem-solving
- Ability to listen
- Ability to explain
- Integrity
- Mentoring
- Reliability
- Dependability
- Positive attitude
- Great self-control
- Risk-taking
- Flexibility
- Creativity
- Team building
- Ability to inspire
- Ability to learn fast
- Ability to work hard
As you see, it is not easy to be a true leader. Most people have seen the results of both effective and ineffective leaders on the job. Good restaurant managers increase employee engagement, support a positive environment, and help remove obstacles for their team. Good leadership is also contagious, inspiring colleagues to apply positive leadership traits in their own work.
We will discuss later some of those skills in detail and explain how to develop them if you don’t have them.
3. Attention to details
- From budgeting, scheduling, and reservations to restaurant settings, a restaurant manager needs to keep track of many minor but important details. Stay organized and delegate tasks to your employees so you get help. It is easy to get overwhelmed and stop paying attention, stop caring.
4. Conflict managements
The restaurant is a high-stress environment, and you will deal with problems daily. Therefore, it is crucial to keep a cool head, listen to both sides, and negotiate a fair solution. But solving problems among staff and customers is just part of the job. You will also be called upon to solve snafus like supply or food shortages, last-minute employee callouts, or (heaven forbid) emergency medical situations.
Restaurant managers must be able to think on their feet and take the right action to solve the problem quickly.
As we mentioned above, a restaurant manager needs to possess a lot of different skills to be successful. So let’s discuss in detail some of the leadership skills we think are the most important for you:
Decisiveness: Effective leaders are those who can make decisions quickly with the information they have. Effective decision-making comes with time and experience. As you become more familiar with your specific industry, you’ll be able to make decisions faster, even when you don’t have all of the necessary information. Decisiveness is a valuable leadership skill because it can help move projects along faster and improve efficiency.
- Effective decisiveness requires research, evaluation, problem-solving, and goal-setting, often with a quick turnaround. Decision-makers should be able to pull from their own experience with similar tasks, evaluate what might work best, make the decision and be confident in taking responsibility for the result. Skills related to being a strong leader through decisiveness include problem-solving and initiative.
Positive attitude: It’s also important for restaurant managers to keep a positive outlook on the job. In his book, The Positive Leader, former Microsoft Europe Chairman Jan Mühlfeit emphasizes the power of positive psychology in motivating a team:
“Positive psychology is not plastering a cheesy smile on your face and making half-attempts to look on the bright side and be nice to people in the office. Instead, it’s about fostering a mindset and workplace culture. That’s proven to fuel greater success and achievement.”
Simply put, an optimistic, supportive boss grooms happy, engaged workers. And happy workers are the foundation for business success.
Mühlfeit cites several studies that illustrate the effects of a positive attitude on a business’s overall success, including a 2014 study by researchers at the University of Warwick in the UK. They discovered a 12 percent spike in productivity with happy workers and a 10 percent lag in unhappy ones.
Focusing on the positive, particularly during stressful moments (typical in restaurants), will help inspire and motivate happy staff, reduce turnover, and add to your restaurant’s bottom line.
Integrity: integrity is often seen as just truthfulness or honesty, but in many cases, it also means having and standing by a set of strong values. Integrity in the workplace often means making ethical choices and helping the company maintain a positive image. All businesses seek to hire workers who have a strong sense of integrity.
Having a person of integrity as a leader not only encourages the most truthful and fair practice and outcome; it also sets a strong and positive example to your team. A leader with integrity also shows the following skills: diplomacy, ethics, reliability, professionalism, confidentiality, and honesty.
Dependability: being a dependable leader means that people can trust and rely on you. A dependable person follows through on plans and keeps promises. The strong relationships built by such a leader create a resilient team that can work through difficulties. Being trustworthy means meeting deadlines, being straightforward, coming through on obligations. Then, when you can’t meet a promise or a goal, communicating this early on and having a backup plan.
Ability to teach and mentor: one skill that differentiates leadership from many other competencies is teaching and mentoring. Effectively teaching colleagues or direct reports to grow in their careers helps organizations scale. Often, this skill requires that leaders think less about themselves and more about how to make their team as a whole successful.
How to develop your leadership skills
You can practice good leadership skills in any role, at any level. For example, showing up on time to meetings and turning in work on schedule shows dependability. Offering support and coaching to less experienced colleagues is also an example of leadership. If it seems like a good fit for you, you might consider seeking out leadership roles to develop and practice your leadership skills.
-Find a mentor or a leader you can learn from: the best way to learn is by studying under those you admire most. Find the leaders in your restaurant and learn from them. This could be some of your colleagues, a supervisor, or a manager. If possible, ask a leader you respect to mentor you on a weekly or monthly basis. They can help you set goals toward becoming a better leader by developing skills and using them.
–Find resources or books on leadership. A self-study on leadership may help you get a better understanding of how to develop your leadership skills.
–Attend leadership training courses
If you are looking for a restaurant manager’s job or any job in the Hospitality Industry, check the latest jobs on Waiters Network
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