Refill the Glasses: Strategy Lessons from Restaurant Operators

I learned a lot of things about management and strategy by spending time with restaurant operators over the last few years. One of the more interesting was this: If you want guests to feel cared for, tell your servers to refill the glasses. 

Why does this work? Usually when guests don’t feel cared for, it's because they needed something - the check, a drink, ketchup - but the server wasn’t around. The server, on the other hand, often doesn’t want to hover over, rush or needlessly bother the guests. Asking the server to refill the drinks gives them a valid reason to visit the table. The result is two-fold: drinks are kept full and the guest has multiple opportunities to ask for whatever they need. The guests don’t feel forgotten. They aren’t distracted from their meal trying to get the server’s attention. And when there is a problem, the server has the opportunity to fix it in a timely manner. 

There are a number of valuable lessons to be learned here about creating and activating a strategy in a large organization: 

• Have a vision of what you are trying to accomplish: In the restaurant scenario above, this takes the form of wanting to make sure your guests feel cared for. In strategy, this is often described as “mission” or “purpose.” Without clarity of purpose, you end up with transactional relationships, haphazard inconsistency and, often, employees working at odds with the mission. 
• Make sure employees understand goals and priorities: The restaurant server needs to know if the priority is getting people out the door quickly or getting them to stay longer and order dessert. It’s not enough to just have a goal, it needs to be communicated to everyone. This is equally true for employees at their desks in offices. Employees have to make hundreds of tiny decisions every day. They make better, more aligned decisions if they understand what the organization is trying to accomplish. 
• Embrace feedback and continuous improvement: The whole idea of getting the server back to the table frequently is to allow them to constantly reassess the situation. It also gives the guest an opportunity to provide feedback in real time, when issues can still be fixed. At the enterprise level, such continuous feedback mechanisms are essential to understanding the impacts of an ever-changing macroeconomic, industry, competitive and internal landscape in real time. 
• Train and reinforce adaptability: Specific key behaviors, like refilling glasses, give employees simple “rules of engagement” that prompt them to do the more complex tasks of monitoring and adapting to situations that can’t be predicted. Reinforcing the right well-chosen behaviors elevates employees and allows them to get ahead of problems. 

Everyday, restaurant managers have to 1) plan for the ideal and then 2) adjust as reality takes over. Identifying a key behavior, like “refilling the glasses,” helps them get more eyes and ears involved in detecting issues. 

The same is true for activating strategy at the corporate level. Strategists must identify an ideal direction to take and then set conditions so the organization moves in the right direction while adapting to changing conditions. Creating a habit of “refilling the glasses” among a broad group of employees - i.e. continuously checking in on the business by reviewing dashboards, asking key questions and following disciplined business review cadences - can help ensure that the organization stays on track.

If you are interested in talking more about how to ensure strategy gets activated and executed, visit www.proprioceptive.io or shoot me a note at jeff.sigel@proprioceptive.io.