Tips For Building Culture For Restaurant Owners & Managers With David Friedman (Ep 250)
 
The everyday and long-term success of your restaurant hinges greatly not just on hiring the most talented people but also on building the right culture. Jaime Oikle sits down with David Friedman, founder of CultureWise, to break down how to create the ideal restaurant culture and environment. He talks about the right way to cultivate positivity within your team by constantly showing that you care about them, not just as employees but living and breathing human beings. David also dispels some misconceptions about culture building and the right way to take care of red flags as soon as they appear.
Find out more at https://culturewise.com/.
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Tips For Building Culture For Restaurant Owners & Managers With David Friedman
Coming up on this episode, we have a great conversation about building your restaurant culture and how important and critical that can be. Joining me is David Friedman, CEO of CultureWise and Author of the book Culture by Design. You are guaranteed to find a handful of valuable nuggets from David that you can take and bring to your restaurant. Stay tuned.
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David Friedman And The Culture Building Process
Folks, welcome to the show. Where we bring you the tips, tools and techniques you need to make your restaurant more profitable and more successful. I’m your host, Jaime Oikle. I’ve got a great episode for you. I’ve got returning guest, David Friedman, CEO of CultureWise and author of Culture by Design, which I’m sure we’ll talk about and I believe the book, Fundamentally Different. David, it’s been some time since we’ve had you on. Let’s refresh folks of what you do and we will dig in from there. What do you got?
Jaime, great to be back with you. As a little refresher, my point of view and what I teach people all the time is that the culture in any organization, whether it be a restaurant, a sports team or any other business, that the culture in any group of people has an enormous influence in shaping how people do what they do. Take a restaurant and you take the same staff. You put them in a different restaurant that has a different culture and that staff will perform differently.
Understanding that, my point of view is that if I’m the leader or if I own a restaurant, if I could be more purposeful or systematic about creating the culture that I want that would lead to the highest performance of my staff. That would be a pretty smart thing to do. Yet, what’s so fascinating, at least to me, is how few organizations do. Whether it’s a restaurant or any other organization, most leaders allow their culture to happen by accident instead of purposely creating the culture they want and I teach people how to do that.
I’m glad you brought that up right away because I was curious about the culture forming process. Does it happen organically? What you’re saying is it should happen by design, is what I’m hearing. A lot of times, it’s not purposeful, so something just happens in the background and that becomes the culture. How can we think about it systematically?
Let me go back to your first part of that question because it’s important. If we’re not systematic. What happens if we’re not systematic? If it happens organically, here’s my experience. I suspect this would resonate with most of your audience. In any group of people, cultures form. When you put humans together, there’s going to be a culture. Even a group of friends of yours has a culture. Think about a group but guys or women, if you’re in the audience here. Maybe you’re in a church group with or either you play golf or go fishing. There’s a culture in that group. An unwritten set of rules about how these people get together and do the things that they do.
My experience and see if this matches your own, in every group of people, there are leaders who emerge. There’s always somebody who sets the tone. They’re the ones that are getting ready to go out to dinner and somebody says, “Where do you guys want to meet?” Somebody’s going to step up and say, “I got it. How about we go to Abby’s Bar and Grill at 6:30. Does that work for everybody?” Who said Abby’s Bar and Grill at 6:30? It was the leader. These leaders tend to have more influence over the norms that get established for how that group operates than anybody else.
The reason that I point this out is that I would tell you that in my experience, absent and intentional force on the part of the leader, going back to my comment earlier. If you’re not a leader purposely creating your culture, the exact same thing goes on in your company. The culture ends up getting mostly influenced or driven by the strongest personalities in the organization.
Those strongest personalities are not necessarily the designated managers, supervisors and leaders. They’re just people with strong personalities. If those people happen to be positive, enthusiastic and hardworking quality people. This will be great. Life’s going to be good, but what if they’re not? What if some of the stronger personalities happen to be cynical jerks with lousy attitudes?
We’ve all had jerks in our organizations before. Those jerks will influence the people around them to be more like them. The reason that I try to point this out for people is if we understand the impact that the culture is going to have on every aspect of the performance of the organization, restaurant or any other organization. Why would I leave that to the whims of the strongest personality? It’s still important to take control over that and make the culture be what we want to be. That’s why this is so important.
Integrating The Right Values In The Restaurant Environment
Let’s go to the restaurant environment. Restauranters wear a lot of hats. They have not necessarily had a corporate background or business background. What are some tips for restaurant operators to be a leader and to imbibe some of these values into their leadership? What are some tactics that they can integrate easily into their restaurant? Maybe it’s a five-minute meeting twice a week. Maybe it’s you shutting down the restaurant on a Monday twice a year and doing stuff. What are some thoughts on that?
That's a good question, Jaime. The first thing I would say is, if you’re a restaurateur and you don’t have a strong business background. It doesn’t matter. It’s not about having a strong business background. Let go of any angst about, “I don't, I'm not schooled in any of that stuff.” I was a philosophy major in school and I used to say that when I ran my first business. The fact that I had no formal business training and no experience working anywhere other than my own company was one of the biggest advantages I had.
What I meant by that is it allowed me the flexibility and the freedom to do just stuff that made sense to me because I wasn’t saddled with these previous notions and how you’re supposed to do it in businesses. I’ll get more specific but the first thing I would say is, if you’re a restaurateur and you’re worried about, “I feel a little bit incapable or I feel unsure of my ability as a leader.” Forget all that stuff. Be you. The stuff that it takes to lead a group of people is not some rocket science. It’s just basic human dynamics.
If you are not purposely creating your culture, your team will be mostly influenced or driven by the strongest personalities within it.
If you care about your people, show them you care and you do the things that demonstrate that, and I’ll give you some suggestions. You start to create a great group of human beings. Forget business. If you were leading a sports team, you had a little league team and you’re the coach of the little league team. There are certain things you would do to show the team members that you care about them, they matter and you teach them certain ways of operating that would help our team to be more successful. You don’t have to have some fancy business degree to do that.
I would make this less complicated than some people might want to make it and say, “Being a leader is mostly about having a vision of what we’re trying to build and teaching people how to get there and coaching them along the way about the things that will lead to success.” That’s all leadership. Forget the fancy stuff.
How To Show People That You Care
I want to go back. You had some suggestions about how to show that you’re caring. Some folks need some prodding along those lines. What are some ideas you share with clients to say, “Do this. This will show people that you care about them, that you want them to be a part of your restaurant...”
I would say one of the biggest mistakes that leaders make and I was guilty of this early in my career, is thinking that, “If you just hire good people, they’ll do good work. You don’t have to tell them anything. Aren’t they just going to do their own thing and do the things you want?” I realized early on it’s not that simple. One, you have to teach people what you want and then you have to give them encouragement, acknowledgment and appreciation to show them that you appreciate that.
How do you do that? I’ll come back to how you define what you want because it’s so important in driving success as a leader and driving a culture. Let me just start with the appreciation part of that. When you see people doing things that are in alignment with how you want to see them do it, you acknowledge that. You take the time to say to them, “Jaime, I saw the way you took care of that guests. I appreciate the way you did that because you made them feel welcome, or Bob, I appreciate the way you cleared the extra table even though that wasn’t your job. You saw that it needed to be done and you stepped up and did whatever you saw needed to be done because that’s the stuff that matters around here.”
Part of it is just physically in person acknowledging the things you observe going on even if you think in your mind, “That’s just obvious stuff. Shouldn’t they be doing that anyway?” They should, but when you acknowledge them for doing it, they do it even more. Most normal human beings want to feel valued. They want to feel that somebody appreciates or notices what they do. The second thing I would say is, there is no substitute for handwritten notes for letting people know that you care about them and you value them.
A note, I sometimes say, is the gift that keeps on giving. I could say to you, “Jaime, I appreciate the way you did that,” and it lasts for a moment. You don’t get to show your wife that or you don’t get to look at it again later because it was an instant moment that disappeared. If I write a handwritten note to you and I either deliver it to you or send it to your home, even better. You get a note at home that says, Jaime, I’ve been noticing how hard you’ve been working lately. I appreciate the way you’re doing this, this and that. You’re making a big difference in our restaurant.”
I guarantee you’re showing that to your wife and to your kids and your posting up on your refrigerator. You’re going to read it again later. You’re going to look at it again a year from now and two years from now. That’s what I call the gift that keeps on giving because one handwritten note says to people, “I stopped and thought about you from a moment. In my busy day, I stopped and I’m focused on you.” Again, as a written thing, they can show it to others and they can keep rereading it.
We’re not always in the habit of doing those things. If you think about just like any other habit that we want to be in, one of the reasons we don’t write notes sometimes is because we don’t have any note cards. Buy some notecards and have them around. If you have them around, you’re more likely the write one. Another simple thing that I did early in my career, this was an area that I was not particularly good at but I wanted to get better at.
For most of my life, I’m a pretty organized guy and I use an electronic task management system to organize everything I need to do. The system that I used as a way of setting up repeating tasks, things that come up every Tuesday or every third Friday. It cycles like that. Many years ago, I created two repeating tasks from myself and these would come up every three days. One of them said, do a written acknowledgement. The second one said, do a personal acknowledgment.
What it forced me to do is to at least every three days, because it would come up in my calendar, go out and talk to somebody and say, “I appreciate the way you’re doing this,” or to handwrite a note to somebody, “That was a fantastic job.” Do that every three days over a period of years and it starts to form a habit. You just get better at tuning into the opportunities that are all around us to acknowledge and appreciate people. Simple stuff. That’s a leader.
I wrote down the word simple because that is so easy to do and yet, what you said was 100% accurate, especially in this world. We don’t get notes. We don’t get letters of any meaning. Everything in the mail is junk. Not too much stuff is handed to us. Taking something that’s tangible is very meaningful. You’re exactly right, it’s going to end up in the fridge. Your folks are going to see it and you’re going to see it again. I like the fact that you talked about having it in your calendar because you might do this a couple times and you might do a few and say, “I did great.” If you did that once a week for 52 weeks, you’ve touched a lot of people.
One of my favorite books and probably a lot of your audience members may have read this, James Clear’s, Atomic Habits. I love that book. He talks about how you get good at things, you create habits. It’s not about just being disciplined or trying to remember stuff. You build habits for yourself. Use calendars or other tools to build a habit that, “This is what I do regularly.” Not just once in a while, if I can remember to do it. It’s not that complicated.
Get better at doing things by creating habits.
Since you’re talking about it. We’ll make sure everybody knows this is a great book, Atomic Habits by James Clear. You should absolutely read it. It’s fantastic book. I highly recommend it. It’s got a great newsletter as well that goes out on Thursday.
Building The Restaurant Culture You Want
If you do stuff consistently, it becomes a habit. It becomes the way we do things, and the same is true, to go back to your question earlier about, how do you build the culture as a leader that you want in a restaurant? How do you be more systematic about it? In my books and my workshops, I teach a framework that I call the eighth step framework for the eight different steps that it takes to systematically create a culture.
There are two of those eight steps that are the biggest drivers of success and they’re as simple as the things we’ve been talking about. Those two things are, number one, how do we define what is the culture we want in this restaurant? If you can’t tell me, what is the culture you’re trying to build. How are you going to go about building it? That’s obvious and yet, most organizations either don’t do this at all or do a lousy job at it.
Almost everybody has the typical vision and mission values on their website. It looks nice and it isn’t particularly useful at all. I teach people to define the culture in terms of the specific behaviors that you say as a leader. These are the things I want people to do. A value is typically an abstract concept of behaviors and actions. It’s something you see people do. To give you an example to help people understand what I’m saying. Some of the behaviors that I teach in my company are things like honor and commitments. That’s something you do.
Practice blameless problem solving. Get clear expectations. Be a fanatic about response time. Look ahead and anticipate. Share information. These are things people do. I define my company’s culture by referencing a list of behaviors and I give these behaviors a name. It’s just my own name I made up. I call them fundamentals because they’re fundamental success. If we do these fundamental things consistently, we’re going to be an incredible company. As a restaurateur, you could do the exact same thing.
What are the behaviors that you say, “If I could get my entire staff to consistently do these kinds of things, we would be an amazing organization?” Go back to my comment that I said that, so often we assume if I hire good people, they’ll magically do all the right stuff. Which is such a ridiculous notion. You have to teach them. You have to explain, “This is the way we want to do things.”
If you don’t teach them, they’re not going to do it. The first step in building a high-performing organization and high-performing culture, is to define with a lot more clarity what the behaviors are and what things that you say as a leader, “I know if I could get everybody in my restaurant to do these kinds of things consistently, we would just be so much better than every other restaurant in the area.”
We got to find those, then what we have to do is to teach those things. We can teach them in a systematic way by using, I call them rituals. What we do and what I would suggest in a restaurant you do is you could take one of those behaviors each week and focus on it all week long through a series of rituals. All week long, we focus on the first one and next week, we focus on the second one. Next, on the third one. If we do that over and over again, those behaviors start to become internalized.
You mentioned before, Jaime, that many restaurants will have a daily huddle or something at the beginning of a shift. It’s a pretty typical thing. You could take your daily huddle in each of your areas of the restaurant and this week, every day, when you start your huddle. You spend three minutes talking about this week’s behavior or fundamentals, I call it.
If you did that all week long, that would give you a lot of chances that don't take any extra time because you’re just leveraging the huddle you already have. No new time. Take the huddle you already have. Add three minutes in it and talk about this week’s behavior. If you did that all week and have a lot of chances to teach, the next week, number two and the next week, three. If you did that over and over again, you’re now teaching these behaviors with consistency.
Misconceptions And Red Flags In Culture Building
I love it. Use that time and bring it in. You don’t have to break this out and have a two-hour meeting to get culture started or to re-energize it. You could start with three minute sessions daily. This may go a couple directions. What are misconceptions about culture or some red flags that cultures are heading down the wrong path?
Those are two different questions. The misconception I would say is people think of culture as a squishy soft like, “It’s the feeling you get around here.” Versus singing it as a hardcore business process. To me, it’s a business process like sales operations, finance, marketing or any other business process. As long as we call it all this with the feeling stuff, it’s hard to know what to do about it. It’s just the behaviors of how people do things around here.
As soon as we see culture through a behavior lens, we can do something about that. People have been teaching and coaching behavior change for literally thousands of years. This isn’t some new concept. As soon as you see culture is behavior, we now can do something instead of seeing it as a swiftly squishy, amorphous, nebulous thing. With regard to your question, Jaime. The biggest red flags would be disengagement. It’s when you see people that look like they don’t care.
Driving a culture is about defining what you want to teach and teaching it consistently.
Certainly, if you see absenteeism. People aren’t showing up. Why are they not showing up? It’s because they don’t care. They don’t feel appreciated, recognized, and a sense of connection to what we’re trying to do in this restaurant. If I were comparing two restaurants and one of them, you walk in and people seem excited, happy, and greet people in a friendly way. They seem like they are genuinely welcoming me and wanting me to have a good experience. There’s probably a lot of good stuff happening in their culture.
If I walk into a restaurant and the hostess and one of the busboys are talking to each other when I walk in. They don’t even look at me and they look like I’m an inconvenience that now they have to seat me. That would be a pretty good indication that I got a group of people don’t care much and aren’t connecting what we’re trying to the experience that we’re trying to create. Again, the mistake people think is, if I just hire good people, they’ll just magically do all the right stuff. We have to teach them these things.
This is a little naive, but I will hear leaders say, “You shouldn’t have to tell people things like that. Shouldn’t it be obvious that when somebody walks in the restaurant, you should make eye contact, greet them in a friendly way and use their name if you know it and make them feel welcome.” That would be pretty obvious but it isn’t obvious to everybody. If you don’t teach people, this is what we do here then you’re just hoping that you have to go get lucky and find the right people.
To me, driving a culture is about teaching. It's defining what you want to teach and teaching consistently. When I see the red flags, I see people look disengaged, uninterested and unwelcoming. They’re not going the extra mile to do the little things that would make a difference. Those are the indications that I got the wrong culture here. If I got the wrong culture, it’s my fault as a leader. It’s not the people’s fault. It’s my fault.
Hiring And Onboarding The Right People
Let’s go to that piece where you talked about people and finding people. What about hiring an onboarding? It’s a critical time that first day or that first week to ingratiate people into the operation and get them started in such a positive way. It’s a big missed opportunity for a lot of folks. How do you talk about that piece?
It’s so critical, Jaime, and you’re right. It’s a missed opportunity by so many. It’s so hard to find people now. Often, we just feel so thankful that we got one on the hook. They’re starting. Great. We’re just glad we got one that we don’t want to think about the rest and/or. Often, we’re in such a hurry because we’re short staffed and we finally found somebody who could play that role. We just want to get them to work as quickly as we can and we don’t spend the time to, there’s a word I use, integrate them into the organization.
Integration is the word that I use for what some organizations call orientation or onboarding. It’s how we bring in those new people and get them started. Those early days have an outside influence on their impression. I get hired by a restaurant. I came in and I’m in my first couple of days. That first day or two or three is more important than any other day in my career there. This is where I’m picking up the messages about how we do things around here and what’s important around here.
God forbid, if you as a leader, don’t purposely teach and integrate people into what you want to teach them. Remember my comments about the strongest personalities. What’s going to happen is, I come into that restaurant and I’m going to quickly figure out who the stronger personalities are. It’s that waiter over there who seems like a jerk, but everybody counts to him. He says, “Don’t listen to Jaime. This is how we do things around here.” I want to fit in, so I guess that’s how you do it here. I’ll follow the lead of whoever the strongest personalities are.
Again, God forbid, that stronger personality happens to be a jerk. It’s going to influence the people around them. We don’t want to leave that to chance. We want to make sure from day one we are teaching people what we want to teach them. When we talk about teaching them what we want to teach them, the most important things to teach them are the cultural elements. I got to believe that so many times when somebody comes in, let’s use this restaurant example.
I hire a host or a hostess. The question is, I need to now teach them their job. Am I teaching them how we organize the seating in the restaurant and where to assign people so that there’s an even distribution of people? Am I teaching them that you’re the first impression people get when they walk in this restaurant? I want you to do everything you can to make them feel so welcome, happy and glad that they showed here because your job is to create a great first impression. Your job is not figuring out where they should be seated. Your job is to create the first impression and so often, we teach people the logistical mechanical aspects of their job instead of what their job is really about, which is creating an experience for people.
The Right Way To Track Culture
I want to stay where you were but I’m curious about the questions someone might ask that says, “What is a way to measure culture? How can I track culture or is there an ROI to culture?” How should someone think about the change from, let’s say where we are, to an intentional focus or to where we are months from now. Any thoughts along those lines?
It’s a question as you might imagine, Jaime, I get asked often about the ROI. The first thing I would say is, it is difficult to measure in a direct way because if your restaurant grows by 20% or 30% in the next year, was it because you’ve became more intentional about your culture or you changed your menu or you did some new advertising or you got rid of jerk who work there? It’s probably all of those things. You can’t isolate the variables to only this.
Having said that, it’s just so logical and obvious that if I get my staff to do the things that I know lead to success, that if I get them operating in a way that I know leads to success. It’s not a big leap of faith to think, “This had a big impact.” Some of the things that you will see when you get serious about culture is you’re going to see more success in recruiting and hiring the best people because they want to come work at your restaurant. You’re going to see lower turnover.
We often teach people the logistical and mechanical aspects of their jobs. In reality, working on a job is about creating an experience for people.
Think about the cost of turnover. The pure economics of having to hire, train and replace somebody and the inefficiencies that come from somebody who’s not well trained, versus the efficiencies that come from somebody who’s been there for six years and is well trained. There’s a huge economic impact there. You’re going to see better retention of your best people. You’re going to see more referrals to the restaurant because people are going to have a great experience because of the way your people are treating people.
You’re going to see more upselling of menu items because you’re teaching them the kinds of experience and the kinds of things to do. You’re going to end up generating greater revenue. All those things will end up happening. You’ll have better customer service and so more references. You’ll have more five-star reviews because your culture is different and your cultures are driven by your people. All of those things will happen.
The fact that you can’t put a specific number on it, doesn’t mean those things aren’t happening. There’s a quote that I read many years ago about measuring. It’s one of my favorite quotes. It was attributable to Albert Einstein. I don’t know if you said it or not, but the quote is, “Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts.”
I think there’s a lot of wisdom to that. You’ll hear people say, “If you can’t measure, it’s not real.” Give me a break. There’s lots of things that are very real and I can’t fix a number on it. That doesn’t mean it’s not important. I have a general bias to wanting to measure things where we can but I don’t have an obsession like, “If you can’t put a number on it, it's not real.” We know that stuff has an impact.
David’s Book, Podcast And Other Recommendations
The stuff you highlighted is so big, especially in the restaurant industry. Turnover, recruiting and all those things are such a big piece. We talked about Atomic Habits. Any other books you love? Do you want to share any other recommendations?
Culture by Design has two editions. My first book was called Fundamentally Different. It was about our original fundamentals. People get a lot of value from that. Culture by Design is the how-to manual. I wrote that book as, this is how you do it and there’s both a first and a second edition. The second edition is the one that I added to that information about virtual workforces, which is less relevant than restaurants. The second edition has everything that’s in the first, plus more.
There’s a great book called Winning Behavior. That’s by two guys, Terry Bacon and David Pugh that talks about how in a commoditized world. The companies that win in a commoditized world, they win not because of what they’re offering but because of their people. Ultimately, it’s the people that make all the difference and the behavior of the people. There’s so many of them. Atomic Habits is one of my very favorites.
Have you read the book written by the Netflix guy?
I’ve read their stuff online but I haven’t read the book.
No Rules Rules. Not maybe in the wheelhouse of restaurants but just the way they opened up their culture to be dramatically transparent had a lot of lessons I felt in that one. If you haven’t read that one, I recommend it to you, David and other readers. That’s a good book. Share your show. I see you do it regularly. I see you on social quite a bit. Talk about that.
My podcast is called Culture Architects. We call it that because we interview people who have been purposeful and systematic about architecting or creating the culture they want instead of leaving it to chance. Wherever you get podcasts, if you go to Culture Architects, you can hear my show there. My website is CultureWise.com, so you can learn a lot more about what we do there. Again, my books are in all forms audio if you like listening to books. You can get them on Audible or on Amazon and any other form, too.
Get In Touch With David
The website’s great. It has a lot of information. I saw you do speaking. You guys obviously do consulting. A lot of great stuff. David, that was a good run through. David Friedman of CultureWise. You can find them at CultureWise.com. There’s all the socials that they have as well as a link to all the books and David’s personal site and some other stuff. For more great restaurant marketing, service, people and tech tips, stay tuned to us. In the meantime, if you could do a big favor, like the episode, share it where you are and comment on it, please. All that stuff is very helpful. Give it a rate or review. We will see you next time. Thanks, David.
My pleasure great to be with you.