That feeling of dread when a lead cook and prep cook walk out on the same day, a Friday before a busy weekend. One is a keyholder, which presents it’s own challenges as we have to get the locksmith out to re-key and ensure that all openers have access for the next day. I have a firefighter mindset still, obviously, because my first thought was “I’ll go in and cook myself”
Lucky for me my husband James is a natural leader and operates at a higher level of leadership in these areas than I do. His first question is always “Who can I have help me with this?” This is and example of a strong sense of intuition. James instinctively knows that all of us are smarter than one of us. If I were to peek into his mind the questions he is asking are most likely:
Who is the best person to take this on?
What other options are there?
Who can we transfer from another store to fill in for the weekend?
James shows his ability to see more before and reminded me that we have resources at our other locations, and we called out kitchen manager from another location out for support. The mindset of “we don’t have enough people” can be changed to a question- or multiple questions. Who can help me? What am I missing? How can I best support my team?
I work on expanding my mind and using my creativity to find the answer(s) to the problem at hand. I know that leadership is a process, and that every shift even slightly in direction may not have immediate results, but if you take the trajectory of that shift out over time, you will end up in a totally different universe.