The Parable of Tim Tool

In this blog, I want to build on the last one about how promoting someone who is not a solid manager wreaks havoc on your business.  This one involves the food service industry, which has one of the highest turnover rates of any industry, both private and public - overall, it's about 70%.  Some fast food chains like Burger King can experience a 210% turnover, which means in a year the entire staff quits and then the people hired to replace them quit as well.  Now, in their defense, food service often hires students who are going back to school or seasonal employees - but having to constantly train new employees can strain even the best manager.  If your manager is not well equipped to handle the constant transitions, then it's just a matter of time before things go down the crapper.

When I was in college, I worked at a corporate restaurant in Miami as a waitress.   Our General Manager (GM) was named Mr. P  – a guy from New Jersey, and he was the real deal.   He could curse a blue streak in the kitchen to get the cooks motivated - then go out into the dining room and kiss the grandmas with the same mouth.  He had a very blue sense of humor that the cooks, the waiters, and even the waitresses loved.  It was never demeaning – it was more – "Good God, did he just say that?  I was thinking it too!”  Thankfully, HR was never around to hear him.  He would work the line, cook, and wait tables if we got slammed.  It was never in a way that said you weren’t doing your job - he just knew if you were “In the Weeds” (restaurant slang for overwhelmingly busy), he needed to step in and help.  Mr. P was also a company man. He could play the corporate game and wanted to get promoted outside of the Miami store. 

Corporate restaurants run differently from mom and pop joints.  There are

pluses and minuses to that.  For instance, everything needs to be up to spec or specifications, which means that the food is consistent no matter who is cooking.  It's the same recipe and the same ingredients every time. The downside is that you don’t always get a choice in who you hire in management – you’re at the mercy of the area director who decides who will become an assistant manager and then eventually a manager.  When it was time to get another Assistant Manager, the powers that be decided to send Tim Tool – a British guy who had higher ambitions than just being an Assistant Manager.  He had sandy red hair and a recessed chin, brown beady eyes, always wore a tie, and was never caught sweating even if he was behind the cook’s line.  He had seniority because of his time at the other restaurants within the corporation, so if for some reason Mr. P got promoted, transferred, or died – he was literally one heartbeat from being the General Manager.  Mr. P and Tim's relationship was rocky from the start - you could tell the Englishman and the Jersey boy did not think much of each other, but the Area Director liked both of them, so they pretended to be best buds whenever he was around.  

About six months after Tim arrived, Mr. P got his wish and went to be the GM of the Passaic, NJ restaurant.  It was great for him to go back home as a hit, but bad news for us because Tim was a power-hungry, conniving son of a bitch who would stab his own mother in the back and then throw her under the bus.  We had little faith that this guy would pick up where Mr. P had left off.

So as Tim's first official act as GM, he made it clear he would take all the daytime management shifts.  The problem with day shifts was that they were quiet except for a short lunch rush, so he had no idea when the busy times were at night because he was never around.  As GM, he scheduled himself from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., Monday through Friday, and left the crappy shifts (the 4:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. night and weekend shifts) for his Assistant Managers.   He never allowed the waiters to try the specials during shift meetings to save money.  So if customers asked us how the specials were, we'd have to lie because we frankly had no idea how it tasted.  Mr. P let us taste everything - but Tim thought that we should buy the specials at full price if we wanted to try them.  He kept on saying it would help the bottom line. Did I forget to mention that the guy was a tool?

One time, Tim had to work a Sunday night shift because one of his Assistant Managers called in sick.  Sunday nights are usually dead after 8:00 p.m., but this one night they got a last-minute rush after Tim had let half the wait staff go for the night.  They got slammed and were profoundly in the weeds.  Tim could not handle the flow and shouted at everyone.   It was a genuine cluster cuss for lack of a better word.  The ticket times were about 60 minutes from order to food on the table, which is way over the maximum of 30 minutes, which is the general policy.  Tim was apologizing left and right and comping meals - he really hated comping meals.  A few days later, a woman wrote a letter complaining about how disorganized that Sunday night was.  Tim ordered a mandatory meeting for all servers and cooks on a Saturday night, which is generally the busiest restaurant night of the week.  I couldn't make it because I had specifically asked for that night off.  When I told Tim, he mentioned that I would get a demerit and it would go on my permanent record.  I feigned looking horrified at the fact that a demerit would probably keep me out of any really good job 20 years down the road and told him that there was no way I could be there because of a family commitment.  If he wanted to make the meeting in the afternoon, it would be a different story, but he insisted on keeping it at 7:00 p.m. because he had golf earlier in the day.  

I later found out that he reamed the entire wait and cook staff out while there was a nearly full restaurant that fell behind again because of his bad decision-making.   Because the meeting took everyone off the floor for 20 minutes, the dining room completely fell apart - babies were crying, hungry, cranky kids, angry diners who couldn't find their waiters because they were in the meeting. People were walking out.  The waiters and cooks who were off that night but came for the meeting had to jump behind the line for about an hour to help the dining room catch up.  Still, Tim seemed oblivious to the fact that he was creating the problems with food times and service.  He yelled at the group for not taking care of the customers and left shortly after the meeting to go to a movie with his wife.  

Eventually, Tim's style of management started to wear on the Assistant Managers, who had had enough.  They were tired of working all hours and Tim taking credit for their promotional ideas that included ways to get people to come out to the annual St. Patrick's Day celebration.  The Assistant Managers started to transfer out or quit to take jobs at other restaurants.   We were in a constant state of flux, and it was one big screw up after another, which was never Tim's fault.  He somehow had the Area Director convinced that all the people leaving was his way of "cleaning house," although none of those problems existed when Mr. P was the GM.

So spring starts to roll around and it's time to plan the annual St. Patrick's Day celebration, which helps constitute about 25% of that quarter's sales for just that one day - it's huge.  You rent tents, have activities for the kids like a petting zoo, green beer fountains, a DJ- you name it.   Unfortunately for Tim, all the Assistant Managers who had the contacts and the to-do lists on how to put together an awesome St. Patrick's Day had left.  Since Tim had taken credit for their work, it was assumed that he could pull it off himself.   Those of us who had done some of the organizing tried to pitch in but Tim was determined to do it all himself so he could get all the credit.   He didn't have a media plan to promote it and didn't buy ad space early enough.  He depended on the fact that the past customers would come back, forgetting that other restaurants also had huge events planned for St. Pat's.  So the big day arrived and the Area

Director came by to check things out. There were no live radio remotes because Tim had hired a wedding DJ rather than one from a Miami radio station.   The green beer fountain cost a fortune, but the beer looked more like a green frothy slime than an Irish adult beverage. We had a few rushes here and there, but it was not jam-packed like the years before.  The waiters didn't pull in the money they were used to and worse, rather than making 25% of the profits in that quarter - that St. Pat's Day actually LOST money.  When the Area Manager later asked the staff if they had helped plan the event, we all smiled and said it that all the credit went to Tim.   We expected him to be fired but they kept him on for whatever reason.  He had a hard time living it down and started to fire people he considered a threat - like me for not attending those spur-of-the-moment staff berating meetings on my off days with less than two hours' notice. 

My roommate Darcy continued to work there, and I wondered when Tim was going to get his comeuppance - it had been six months since St. Pat's and still nothing had happened.  I had moved on to another job as a business temp and was glad to not work late nights and weekends. I heard more horror stories from Darcy and was glad that I didn't work there anymore. I wondered what happened to the corporate gods of vengeance to help put this guy in his place.  The staff had turned over by 80%, and the ones who were left felt pretty demoralized.   The atmosphere there was not fun, and business was dropping.  When was this asshole going to get his ass handed to him?  

Then Darcy came home with some amazing news. The Area Director had decided to demote Tim back to an Assistant Manager and transfer him to - wait for it - the Passaic, NJ store with Mr. P.  All this just four months after Tim had closed on his lovely house in Ft. Lauderdale, which was on the water.  Karma had outdone itself - Tim was going to work with a guy he despised and exposed to brutal Northern winters rather than the 70-degree Decembers we had in South Florida.  

So the moral of this parable is that lying sacks of crap survive only for so long by taking credit for other people's work, not taking responsibility for their own mistakes, and ruining morale.  While that behavior might be tolerated if they can still put up impressive sales numbers, eventually people will see through it.  It might take weeks, months, or even years.  But as anyone who has ever worked in the restaurant business can tell you, some bottom lines should never be crossed.