How to Improve Decision Making Skills in Hospitality
Jul 12, 2024
Photo of Alison Arth & Kimberly Belle, captured by Julia Ngo of Eloquent Co.
A significant source of drama within teams is rooted in decision making. That drama can look like personal or organizational stuckness, a sense of apathy amongst team members, anger or frustration between leaders, burnout, confusion, and pervasive exhaustion.
The roots of these results tend to include:
- Failure to recognize that there’s a decision that needs to be made
- Avoidance and delays created by indecisiveness
- Missing valuable opportunities for collaboration
- Under-communication before, during, and after the decision making process
- Lack of clarity about how any particular decision will be made
- Unclear understanding about who is empowered to contribute to the decision making process, and…
- What the boundaries of that power are.
Conscious leaders approach decision making directly and intentionally to minimize drama by setting clear expectations.
In this article, we’ll cover:
- The most most powerful way to improve ease & clarity around decision making
- Types of decisions hospitality leaders regularly need to make
- Why it’s valuable to clarify decision making rights
- 5 steps to improve trust in your organization using our free, downloadable Decision Making Framework
No one way of making decisions is fundamentally better than another, and we believe that the most powerful leaders make choices based on their values, and use a mutually understood and communicated framework that supports shared understanding of how choices will be made.
Understanding the Value of Decision Making Skills in Hospitality
Every decision made (or avoided) within an organization is an opportunity to build or diminish trust within your team.
Too many of us ignore or hold off on making decisions, believing that we are avoiding making a “wrong” or “bad” decision, while accumulating more decision debt.
But the truth is, not making a decision consciously is making a decision unconsciously.
Whether you acknowledge it or not, every time you fail to make a decision you are implicitly deciding to continue creating your current results.
A team that habitually kicks the can down the road on decisions can feel like a ship out to sea with no captain at the wheel.
In team environments, the conscious or unconscious avoidance of making decisions creates stagnation and a sense of instability that can quietly chip away at trust over time, while also acting as a silent roadblock to growth.
The Most Powerful Way to Increase Efficiency in Decision Making
At Salt & Roe, we love to ask our clients where they see themselves and their businesses in one year, two years, five years, or 25 years. If they can’t answer the question, it’s because they haven’t made a decision about where they are going.
They usually answer by saying, “I have no idea where my life and my business will take me.”
They think this is a valid answer, as if their circumstances are taking them somewhere without their permission.
When you don’t make intentional choices about where you’re going in business or in life, it makes smaller, day-to-day decisions paralyzingly difficult because you lack a clear vision to align them with. This can lead you, often unknowingly, to avoid making choices.
Alternatively, you might dive in and make decisions authoritatively that end up being counterproductive because they lack a clear, intentional, grounding vision that creates a felt sense of continuity and power.
It’s hard to get decisions “right” and feel confident in your choices if they aren’t anchored to a thoughtful vision.
We believe that one of the most essential and foundational sets of decisions any business owner and leadership team can make are Statements of Intent, which include naming your:
- Values: What do you believe in?
- Purpose: Why do you exist?
- Vision: Where do you want to go?
- Mission: How are you going to get there?
- Concept: What’s our elevator pitch?
These statements become singular decisions that make a thousand others when you put them to work in your business.
If your organization lacks this internal compass, we encourage you to download our free workbook for crafting Statements of Intent for Hospitality Leaders & their Businesses.
Solidifying these statements will unlock a level of clarity and ease with all types of common decisions that face hospitality leaders, like the ones listed below.
Types of Decisions Hospitality Leaders Make
|
Decision Type |
Example |
|
Revenue & expense budgeting |
My team needs clear, measurable goals to work towards. What does an achievable and ambitious annual budget for my business look like next year? |
|
Determining what leadership roles you should have on your org chart |
My Director of Sales & Marketing is asking me to hire an additional Sales Manager. Should I make the investment in an additional salary in our sales department right now? |
|
Choosing who to hire for a particular role |
A few people have interviewed a potential new GM for the restaurant and we don’t have a clear consensus about whether this is the right person to move forward with. Should I hire them? |
|
Deciding when to fire an employee |
Our Sous Chef has been with the company for years, and they started really strong. In the past year, they’ve had a mostly negative impact on team culture. They’re a good person, I’ve seen them do good work, it’s so hard to hire right now, but they’re also damaging team morale. Should I fire them? |
|
Making changes to hours of operation |
I’m certain it would be a profitable decision to open on Tuesdays, but I don’t think my team is going to be happy about it. Should I do it anyway? |
|
Making changes to food, beverage, retail, and service menus |
Our guests have gotten so attached to a handful of our menu items that it feels really scary to take them off the menu even though me and my team are ready to get rid of them and use our creativity to come up with new bestsellers. Do we keep them for our guests even though we’re sick of making this stuff? |
|
Marketing & event opportunities |
We have an opportunity to do a summer pop-up at one of our city’s most popular art museums. It sounds fun, creative, and could be a good revenue opportunity, but it also might be distracting. Should we go for it? |
|
Team compensation |
Our FOH team wants to bring tipping back, our BOH team doesn’t, and local laws about service charges on guest checks seem to be in flux. What should I do? |
|
Changes in service style & structure |
Offering table service is aligned with the experience I want to offer and our guests appreciate it, but staffing and labor costs are so tough right now that I worry we can’t sustain it. Should we move to a QR code model? |
|
Changes in internal systems (POS, payroll, scheduling, etc.) |
I think there are better POS systems out there for the business we have now, which includes so much more takeout than it did before 2020. I also know those systems are more expensive and will be a pain in the ass to implement. Is it worth it to make the change? |
Why is it Valuable to Clarify Decision Making Rights?
If the number one pain point we see in organizations around decision making is a lack of clear intentions with which to align daily decisions, then a close second is a lack of clarity around who is responsible for what in the decision making process.
When it comes to hiring a new leader, for example:
- Who is entitled to be a part of the interview process?
- Is one person in charge of collecting input from the others and making a final decision, or is it your intention to hire only if there’s consensus amongst all involved?
- To what extent, if any, do you want to collect feedback from hourly employees?
- What’s your plan for communicating what’s going on with your team before, during, and after the interview and hiring process?
These are the types of questions that might not even be on your radar, and yet, you’re consciously or unconsciously making decisions about them all the time.
When you ask these questions in advance and arrive at clear, purposeful answers to them that align with your values, purpose, and vision, you stand to:
- Increase trust with your team
- Create greater efficiency in decision making
- Invite a higher level of commitment & buy-in from team members across your org chart
- Get better results on the other side of making a decision
Read on for practical guidance on clarifying decision making rights within your business.
5 Steps to Improve Decision Making Skills in Your Hospitality Business
At Salt & Roe, we’ve experimented with countless ways of approaching the decision making process and like most aspects of leadership, there isn’t one “right” way of doing it, especially given the unique business pain points of the restaurant industry.
We offer the below step-by-step process for getting clear about what the decision you're facing is, who the right folks are to be in the conversation with you, and what each leader’s role in the process should be. This framework is based on what’s generated the best results for us over the years, and we hope it gives you a starting point for upleving your team’s efficacy and clarity around this essential business process.
Step 1: Identify that there is a decision to be made and clearly name what it is.
Don’t get stuck in the hamster wheel of having meeting after meeting and conversation after conversation without anyone asking “Are we going to make a decision about this subject, and if so, who is going to make the decision?” Powerful leaders call out if there’s a decision to be made, and what it is. If there is not a decision to be made, create a clear agreement with your team to shelve the conversation. If you determine that there is a decision to be made, go to step 2.
Step 2: Consider who should be involved in the decision making process and how much time you have to deliberate.
Some helpful questions to support you in thinking through possibilities include:
- How much time do I have?
- How important is the issue?
- Who will be most impacted by the final decision?
- What are the trade-offs of having more vs. less buy-in from my team around this particular issue?
- Who has the information and expertise needed to support me in getting to a choice that will serve us best?
- How will this choice impact our vision for growth?
Step 3: Name the different roles involved in decision making within your organization and clarify boundaries around how each role is empowered to communicate in the process.
For the sake of ease and consistency, we recommend making choices about decision making roles and what each of them means just once. For each new decision, you’ll only need to make choices about which leaders will be invited in which roles. Communicate the boundaries of these roles openly with your team so everyone is clear about how they’re empowered to participate and what the limits of that power are. We like to use the decision making roles, listed from highest level of power and influence to the lowest, in this free Decision Making Framework tool and encourage you to adopt what serves you and leave what doesn’t from our model.
Step 4: Proactively communicate in advance of decisions, during them, and after the process is completed to build trust within your team and increase buy-in and energy around implementing change.
It can be easy to shy away from proactive communication around decisions. It takes time, it can bring up questions, dialogue, and preemptive pushback from team members, and can altogether feel easier to skip. We relate to that, and we also know that choosing not to communicate proactively can often lead to painful trade offs during and after implementation. Using 1:1 leadership meetings, manager meetings, pre-shift, and email to keep your team informed is up-front work that will save you time and energy down the road.
Step 5: Take time to evaluate the results of your decisions.
This is the magic wand of improving both the decision making process and the quality of the decisions you’re making! Once you’ve implemented something new, dedicate time to measure what’s working and not working on the other side.
Leave Indecisiveness Behind
Each of us is deciding where our life and our business is taking us—
on purpose or accidentally—
one moment and decision at a time.
If you don’t decide to change your current reality, nothing will magically shift. If you don’t decide to recommit to the current life and business you have right now, you will live from a place of default that won’t feel as powerful as it could.
Who do you want to be?
What do you want to do?
Where you want to go?
What is the specific growth you want to see in your life, your business, and your team?
Decide, decide, decide.
And if you don’t like where that decision leads you, simply decide again.
The power of decision making doesn’t come from getting it “right”, it comes from knowing why you’re making the choice you’re making and liking those reasons, and from believing in the process you’re using to make the many choices in front of you.
Here are 3 ways we can support you to get out of decision debt and build the type of decision making skills that create a life and a business you feel proud of:
- $0 Investment: Download our guide to writing Statements of Intent for Hospitality Leaders & their Businesses. This workbook explains what Statements of Intent are and how to use them, and includes a series of worksheets that will walk you through the process of creating yours, as well as a set of sample statements to inspire and direct your writing.
- $0 Investment: Our Decision Making Framework tool walks you through a system for clarifying decision making rights within your organization, and offers a step-by-step worksheet to support you in mapping out your approach to specific decisions you’re facing in your business.
- Learn about Salt & Roe’s coaching for hospitality leaders and apply to work with us to receive private, one-on-one support to craft a clear vision for your leadership life, and take action on the decisions to move toward it.
You got this, and we got you.
Behind you,
