Who’s Best Able to Manage Your Changing Workplace? Your Managers

Restaurants manage and deal with change daily – from menu changes to bringing on new employees.  There’s also the constant struggle to ensure your labor meets the demands of your guests. And now, it turns out, restaurants – along with businesses across industries – must confront changes in the workplace itself. “While the world’s workplace has been going through extraordinary historical change, the practice of management has fallen behind how people work, live, and want to experience their lives,” say Gallup’s CEO, Jim Clifton, and chief workplace scientist, Jim Harter, in their book It’s the Manager.

The one factor restaurants and other businesses consistently undervalue, or overlook, is the primary importance of front-line managers in steering employees through change. Clifton and Harter note that Gallup finds 70 percent of a team’s engagement is determined solely by the manager.  

I’d add that there is no more important place that a manager plays a…