Applauding the Wrong Thing: The High Cost of Hero Culture in Restaurants

Every time I keynote or run a workshop, I stay for the recognition part of the event. The awards, the promotions, the moment somebody gets called up in front of everybody they work with. I’ve sat through dozens of these, and I clap as loud as anybody in the room, because I know what it took that person to get up there.

But somewhere along the way I started listening to the words instead of just clapping along to them. And the words are almost always the same.

The person we were celebrating was always at the location. They were always on call. They always picked up the phone. They were the first one in and the last one out. They worked harder and were more dedicated than anybody else on the team.

Everybody stands. Everybody claps. I clap too, because those are real sacrifices and that person earned the moment.

Then I started watching the room instead of the stage. That’s where it got uncomfortable.

The Two Thoughts Running Through the Room

While that manager is up there holding the plaque, there are two very specific thoughts running through the people watching, and I’ve had enough managers tell me about them afterward that I know I’m not guessing.

The first one comes from the manager who’s already stretched thin. There’s no way they work harder than I do. There’s no way they’re at that location more than I am. So what am I missing here? Am I just not being seen?

The second one is worse. It comes from the manager who’s trying to hold some kind of line between work and home. How much more do I have to give up to be next? What am I trading for it? Which of my kid’s games, which dinners, which Sundays? Is that actually what it costs here?

Neither one of those is inspiring. Both of them are quiet. Nobody raises a hand and says it out loud. But they walk out of that ballroom inside somebody’s head, and they sit there for months.

We spent 90 seconds celebrating somebody, and in those same 90 seconds we told everybody else in that room exactly what the price of admission is.

What We’re Actually Rewarding

Take the honest read on what a lot of those awards measure. We’re rewarding attendance, we’re rewarding availability, and we’re rewarding somebody’s willingness to hand their personal boundaries over to the operation. Those are real contributions and I’m not minimizing them, because I’ve been that guy and so have you.

But that’s not the same thing as leadership, and it’s damn sure not the same thing as coaching.

But think about what we’re actually saying out loud when we read those qualities off a card. If a manager is always at the location, the team was never developed well enough to run without them. If a manager is always on call, nobody ever built the systems to protect their off hours. If a manager was first in and last out, nobody else on that team was ever trusted with an open or a close.

That’s not a leadership story. That’s a fragility story, and we’re handing out plaques for it.

What It Costs the Person on Stage

There’s another layer to this that nobody says out loud, and I know it because I’ve been the one holding the plaque.

Years back I was on the edge of leaving a brand for these exact reasons. I was traveling the country nonstop. I’d built the training systems for the new hires coming in at my level, and then I mentored them. I said yes to every special project that came across my desk. Always available, always there. And I was done.

So I’d started interviewing somewhere else.

That brand had its annual event that year, the kind you don’t miss. And I’m standing out in the hallway on my phone with a recruiter, working out the schedule for my third round of interviews. My boss is in the doorway of the conference room waving me in. I can see him. I know I need to go. I hold up a finger and keep talking, because that call mattered more to me right then than whatever was happening in that room.

I hung up. I walked in. I stood in the back next to my boss.

Three minutes later they called my name for consultant of the year.

I walked up on that stage straight out of a conversation about leaving. The whole room was clapping for the exact behavior that was pushing me out the door, and not one person in there knew it. Including the man standing right next to me.

That’s what we keep missing. An award like that can’t tell you whether the person is staying, because it’s measuring the one thing that looks identical whether somebody is thriving or already gone. How much of themselves they’re pouring in.

I’ve talked to plenty of managers since then after the room cleared out. Behind a closed door, a good number of them will tell you they aren’t sure how much longer they can hold it. They’re proud and they’re worn out at the same time, and now there’s a new weight on them, because we just stood up in front of everybody they respect and called the price they paid the right price.

What the Team Learns

The rest of the room learns something too, and it sticks around a lot longer than the applause does.

They learn that ambition here has a shape, and the shape is sacrifice. They learn the fastest way to get noticed runs straight through their personal life. And they learn that the people who protect their time, who build teams that don’t need them, who go home for dinner and actually mean it, are not the ones getting called up.

Some of your best future leaders are going to decide right there in that seat that this isn’t a game they want to play. They won’t tell you. They’ll just stop raising their hand. And two years from now you’ll be in a bench strength review asking why nobody’s ready, and nobody in that meeting traces it back to the night everybody stood up and clapped.

What We Should Be Celebrating Instead

I’m not saying stop recognizing people. I’m saying get a lot clearer about what you’re recognizing, because whatever you read off that card is what you’re ordering more of.

A while back I was planning a leadership workshop with a multi-unit leader at a Midwest QSR group. I told him I wanted to open the day by recognizing what his field team had pulled off the year before. He liked the idea, but what he said next stuck with me. He told me a lot of what his people accomplish goes unnoticed, and then he admitted that even he didn’t always know what those accomplishments were.

So we didn’t guess at it. We went back into the prior year’s numbers and built the categories off what the business already measured. Transactions. Labor. Bonus attainment. Speed of service. Task execution. Turnover. Six categories, every one tied to a number anybody on that team could go look up.

The plaques turned out to be the smallest part of it. For everybody in that room who didn’t win anything, those six categories spelled out exactly how they’d know whether they were tracking toward winning next year. That’s the whole job of a recognition program. It isn’t a thank you. It’s a map.

So here’s what goes on the map.

The manager whose store ran clean through their vacation, and say out loud that it ran clean because of how they prepared the team before they left.

The leader who moved three people into promotable roles this year. That’s not the soft award. Your bench is the only reason you get to open anything else.

The operator who pulled turnover down through coaching instead of pressure. Retention sits downstream of behavior every single time, so reward the behavior and the number follows.

And the manager who took their day off. All of it. Phone down, nobody called them, and the store still hit its numbers because they built something that holds up without them standing in it.

That last one is the hardest one to put on a stage. It doesn’t look heroic, it looks quiet, and quiet doesn’t get a standing ovation. But it’s the only version of this that scales, and I’d take one of those managers over five of the other kind.

The Room Follows the Applause

I’ve done more than 10,000 field visits across more than 20 brands, and if there’s one thing I’d put money on, it’s this. Every award you hand out is a training session. Keep applauding the manager who never leaves and you’ll keep growing managers who never leave, and you’ll keep losing the ones who would have been great if the job hadn’t asked them to disappear out of their own lives to get your attention.

Next time you’re sitting in that audience, don’t just listen for the name. Listen to the qualities they read off before the name. Then ask yourself whether you want five more people doing exactly that.

Because the room is listening a whole lot closer than we think.

Coaching Question for the Week

What are the last three people you recognized publicly, and what did that applause quietly teach everybody else in the room?

Jason E. Brooks is the founder of Every Leader, the Multi-Unit Field Leadership System, built from more than 30 years in hospitality and more than 10,000 field visits. He rose from dishwasher to general manager, director of operations and franchise business consultant across more than 20 brands, including six of the top 100 U.S. restaurant chains. He writes the Coaching Connection column for FSR and is the author of Every Leader Needs Followers, Every Team Needs Coaching, Coaching Operating Standards and The 48 Laws of Coaching. Learn more at www.everyleader.coach.

Editor’s note: This article is part of The Coaching Connection, a column series from restaurant expert Jason E. Brooks. Check out the others below:

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