3 Lessons I Learned Serving Burgers & Fries

About 21 years ago I got my first real job at Islands Restaurant in Glendale, CA — first as a host, then as a server. Islands is a West Coast fast casual restaurant focused on burgers and drinks. Good food, reasonably priced — I still love going there.

Besides being a great high school job, Islands also taught me a lot of lessons about working, running a business and managing people — that I still use to this day. Here are some of those lessons.

Consistent processes drive consistent outcomes

At the time, all I saw was a set of annoying, bureaucratic processes. But since then, I’ve come to appreciate that Islands was actually a finely tuned machine focused on delivering a proven, high-quality product. There were standards for everything like:

• The preparation and presentation of the food. We had template pictures of the exact way to present the food, how the garnish should look and how the food is presented.
• The type of shirt you could wear. Employees were required to wear “Hawaiian/island shirts” that had to have at least 2 colors. We had to wear khaki shorts at least 2 inches above the knee. I once wore a green Hawaiian-looking shirt and my manager made me go home and change my shirt because it was two shades of green instead of 2+ different colors. I thought this was as silly as the required pieces of flair in Office Space, but it actually ensured that customers could easily spot employees and get quality customer service quickly.
• End of the day cleaning responsibilities (sidework). This was meticulously detailed in checklists, with a maker / checker style accountability system. Besides the daily cleaning, every day had its specific deep cleaning focus — it always got done on time and the right way.

People often think that processes like this slow people down — but to the contrary, it allows people to move faster, automatically using best practices for the parts of a business that require consistency.

The qualities of a strong manager are the same, regardless of the industry

Some of the earliest lessons I learned about people management come from observing the restaurant managers. The best ones had similar qualities as managers I’ve found throughout all the jobs I’ve had — across food service, consulting, media and technology. The best managers at Islands were always:

• Fair — They were careful not to let personal relationships dictate who got the best shifts and held everyone up to the same standards. The best managers didn’t automatically take the customers’ side, but came to the server’s defense when the customer was in the wrong.
• Great communicators — the best managers were direct and clear in their communications. There was no beating around the bush, just straight and direct about the issue at hand. The most effective communicators were never emotional, but focused about the particular work issue that was needed to be addressed.
• Empathetic — Restaurants, particularly in LA, tend to have a very diverse workforce. We had our fill of actors, screenwriters, students, professional servers in the mix. The best managers understood where everyone was coming from, what their objectives were for working at the restaurant and accommodating based on their situation. It’s easy to think the right thing is to treat everyone in every situation the exact same way, but oftentimes there is a subtlety to each situation where a little empathy goes a long way in creating an effective team.

There’s a lot more to being a good manager, but these were the most important management lessons and have always served me well.

Team dynamics are fragile and require care

Working at the restaurant really showed me how a team develops an organizational personality and mood. The mood swings of an organization are highly sensitive. This isn’t necessarily tied to overall employee satisfaction, a longer-term measurement, but the mood is more of a temporary emotional status that when left unchecked can affect the broader employee morale.

At the restaurant, mood shifters were things like getting a less than stellar health inspection, the firing of a popular employee, personality conflicts, etc. The best managers knew how to keep an eye on these mood shifters and not let them get out of hand. At times, they would resolve them 1-on-1 and other times, they would call an all-hands meeting to squash a rebellion. I could see how a simple disagreement between two employees could turn quickly into a contentious restaurant-wide distraction.

Any organization has its own set of dynamics and they’re always more sensitive than the people in charge tend to think — mostly because they have the most distance from the mood of the organization. The best leaders have their ways of getting a pulse of the mood and constantly calibrate to not let that mood become a bigger employee dissatisfaction issue.

I have a lot more lessons I learned at Islands that I will write about again, I could probably write a book. I’ll always be grateful for that first job and everything I learned from it. What first job lessons have stuck with you?

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p.s. If you either work or have worked at Islands, my favorite burger is still: HAW-IB-M-86-SC-TO-EZ-MO