Getting Crushed By Crisis? Localize Control Now.
The pandemic has accelerated the adoption of a wide range of things. Working from home and video conferencing were things that used to happen occasionally, but for many of us, now they’re happening all day long. The ripple effect of these shifts has created a tremendous impact across multiple industries. The restaurant industry is one of the most fascinating examples of accelerating into the future.
Curbside pickup. Third party delivery. Sanitization stations. Mobile ordering. State-by-state restrictions. Ghost kitchens. PPE. Wait times. Parking access. New rush times. Team happiness. Capacity limits. Customer satisfaction. Quality control...and that’s all before lunch.
I was on Zoom with Justin Rosenberg, CEO and Founder of the fast-casual restaurant honeygrow who’s been leading his team through an astounding amount of change. I straight up asked how one person can lead through all of this change in such a compressed period of time...
“You don’t do it alone, you can’t. Our General Managers are the ones with the most important, toughest jobs in our organization. We empower our GMs to think like CEOs and business owners.”
- Justin Rosenberg, CEO & Founder honeygrow
Justin shared a critical insight: ceding control to optimize. He explained that crisis forces leaders to localize control because one person can’t keep up with every moving part. Instead, he used an ever-changing situation to maintain a lightweight centralized communications hub and encouraged his team to make decisions and go “figure it out.”
Take outdoor dining for example...
honeygrow has restaurants across the country, each responding to different COVID restrictions and timelines on a state-by-state level. How do you figure out how to serve your customers?
If you’re like Justin, you give authority to your leaders on the ground. You empower them to get creative and solve the problem, with boundaries of course. Maybe that’s investing time and money to get a local permit for outdoor dining...or maybe that’s being really bold and doing it without permission -- no matter what, if your people know what the edges are and are trusted to find a solution, they’ll power through and you’ll learn from them.
If you’re a leader getting crushed by a crisis, here’s how you can localize control like Justin:
- Create context. If you’re going to cede control to others, they need to know what’s the situation, what the goals are, and how much responsibility and authority they can execute.
- Define the edges. Set boundaries, but be prepared for them to be broken. I would much rather have my team do something that makes me uncomfortable, than to miss an opportunity out of fear of what I might say.
- Give permission to fail. Mistakes are good. Mistakes are only bad if you don’t learn anything from them. You have to provide support to your team if they stumble. You need to trust them to deliver and they need to trust you to have their back.
- Build a playbook. Maintain centralized communications, draw the best ideas and package those up to the rest of your organization. Not every team (or store, in Justin’s case) is going to be able to implement the best ideas based on various constraints (like state-by-state restrictions), but those who can will improve. That’s a crisis win.
One of the hardest things for any leader to learn is how to transfer ownership and to trust others to make decisions. It can feel uncomfortable to let go, but it’s the only way for growth -- crisis or not.
If you’d like to hear more about Justin’s experience leading the honeygrow team through uncertainty or how he’s built growth into everything he does, check out our podcast episode at: https://bit.ly/3pwffAm
Always a pleasure sir