By Ella de Beer of Electric Mayonnaise

Canadian Sociologist Dr. Peter created the Peter Principle with a twist on the old adage that “the cream rises to the top” by stating that “the cream rises until it sours.” In other words, excellent employee performance tends to be promoted to the point where the employee’s performance is no longer excellent, or even satisfactory, and so many managers find themselves out of their depth in their roles.

Hospitality is particularly prone to the phenomenon of what is sometimes called ‘over-promotion’ and whilst we throw the word ‘staff shortages’ around a lot, anyone who places an advert on one of the mass job sites knows that it is not so much a case of staff shortages but of skills shortages. We sometimes receive hundreds of applications which take ages to sift through, but less than a handful of those applicants have any experience or relevant skills. Why is this, and what can we do about it?

It is no wonder that we hold on tight to those with skill or those we have invested time and energy in training. Promotions are offered based on loyalty, an existing personal relationship, technical skill (rather than management skill) or simply length of tenure.

In the early 90’s we celebrated how we could make hospitality jobs less technical through modern technology and equipment, which allowed us to recruit from a bigger pool of less skilled people.  By the noughties, with a buoyant economy (for the first 7 or 8 years), and a welcomed influx of people from the EU, often with professional hospitality backgrounds, finding skilled and experienced people at every level was easy and the hospitality industry was cruising.

However, the last 8 years have been a Brexit buttercream with a sprinkling of the ‘C’ word, followed by a dusting of inflationary squeeze. Unsurprisingly, our industry has become entrenched in a grinding war of scrabbling around stealing team members from other businesses in an ever-evaporating pool. This means we’re often attracting the most short-term transactional applicants, who’ll jump ship for the slimmest financial marginal gain, repeatedly.

So we hold on to what we have as tightly as we can.

Promoting beyond experience can be bad for teams that thrive under good leadership and strong direction. It’s also unhelpful for any aspiring managers within the team, who need good management modelled to them in order to develop.

We’ve found the biggest managerial skills gap to come from BOH – we have some very talented chefs who perhaps just haven’t been shown nor experienced good management in the same way the front of house teams have. They can also struggle more to access training which tends to be directed towards FOH teams, but we try to make sure we’re not overlooking.

Beyond this, repercussions can be felt in the wider team, with workplace culture damaged through poor communication, inability to manage conflict, poorly delivered feedback, lack of development etc. Fundamentally, this can potentially damage the company bottom line. It can also be detrimental to the overpromoted individual, who probably has a sense that they’re not measuring up to their new role, and can feel anxious and unsupported, yet unwilling to admit that they can’t cope. They might be working excessively hard but not smart.

So how do we stop over-promotion? We believe that it’s not about promoting the wrong people, it’s about ensuring that those people are ready. This is especially crucial in a diminishing talent pool, when we can’t afford to wait for a perfect person to come along. In short, we still promote those people – but with the right systems in place, we can ensure it’s never over-promoting.

1. Evaluate Your Team – Danny Meyer had an excellent system called 51 percenters where they evaluate (and hire) employees based on 5 core skills: Optimism, Intelligence (an insatiable curiosity to learn), Work ethic, Empathy & Self awareness.
2. Use a skills matrix – get a complete and overarching picture of the continual professional development needs of your team and your existing internal training resources.
3. Be Ahead of the Game – always work towards building a stable base and improving skills, start now, don’t wait for someone to come to you with an ultimatum.
4. Write Development Plans and Objectives for Your Whole Team – do this with each person so you understand the whole individual, highlighting strengths, weaknesses and areas where they need to improve.
5. Give the feedback – this is so important, people need to hear how they are doing and understand that you are giving them the feedback because you are setting them up to succeed (Self-awareness).
6. Praise and Highlight Model Behaviours, Skills & Habits – this is best done during briefings. Get newer team members to shadow those who exhibit better behaviours, and create mentors in your business so it doesn’t all fall on your shoulders.
7. Create a Learning Environment – share videos, recommended reading, hold workshops, briefings and debriefings and ensure it is a safe place to make mistakes and learn.
8. Move everyone up the Ladder – work to expand the team’s overall skill-set by encouraging a wider range of skills when hiring. Take this into account when writing job descriptions and write the description 75% for the job, and 25% based around the desirable management behaviours for the person you want in the role.
9. Hire better – don’t assume that they have the skills you need just because of their last role (especially if it was within a restaurant you admire). Ask questions, dig a little, ask for examples and get them to really demonstrate their understanding, and use your job descriptions to measure against their experience.

Finally, remember that everyone in the industry is pretty much in the same boat and this is very much a period in time when we need to collectively rebuild the talent pool. It is going to be hard work. In the words of Richard Branson ‘train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough so they don’t want to’. The first part echoes the loudest for our industry.

Electric Mayonnaise is a skills based training company. We use industry expertise to design courses and workshops to suit every need, from coaching managers to honing craft skills and building effective teams. Our social enterprise ‘Into Hospitality’ brings sustainable employment to hard-to-reach communities.