Kevin Burns Blog

Eat in your favorite restaurant and what you don’t see is all of the conditions and laws that the restaurant must comply with before they get a permit to handle food. Restaurants get regular visits from the Food Safety and Health Inspector. Most restaurants do a pretty good job of not only meeting the bare minimum of the Health Code but in actually surpassing it. Well, the good ones do. There are others that need much more encouragement. In his book, Front of the House: Restaurant Manners, Misbehaviors & Secrets, author Jeff Benjamin presented a key strategy for helping his restaurants to become successful. That strategy is to get every staff member, from front-of-house, to servers, to kitchen staff, to dishwashers, to buy-in to the mission of creating an exceptional experience that makes customers want to come back often. If any member of the staff does not buy-in, it jeopardizes the success of the restaurant. A restaurant isn’t just about food safety, or health guidelines. It’s about how they use those guidelines and protocols to deliver an exceptional experience for the customer. But you want to know how this relates to your safety program. Read on and watch the video below...

Have you ever noticed that no matter how many times you’ve felt that you’re out of gas, out of patience, out of energy, that when someone you care about needs your help, you suddenly have the energy? Bob Dylan said it best. “Just when you feel you have nothing left to give; you find out you were wrong.” After the toughest days or toughest circumstances, when someone who matters needs you, you find the strength to keep going. You give it one more try. You lend one more hand. You make a difference one more time. Because you always have something left to give especially when someone needs your help. The people you care about matter. The important people in your life deserve your best and you never want to disappoint them. So, you keep going, even when it hurts., Even when you’re tired. Even when you just want to rest.

When rules become more important. I read an article recently that offered this bit of wisdom: have you ever noticed that the less money you earn in your job, the more rules there are to follow? It seems that the higher up you go in an organization and the more money you earn, the fewer rules that seem to apply. A CEO appears to have to fewer rules to follow than a front-line employee.

When the information doesn't sink in Do you ever find yourself wondering what more you have to say to get your crews to consistently do safety right? Well, the answer might be easier than you think. Say less.

Focus on building an elite team to beat complacency. Let’s talk about a surefire way to make you far more effective as a leader and to reduce the chance of complacency sneaking in. Focus down. When you focus down, you concern yourself with only your team’s needs. Focus down is not a derogatory term meant to imply your team are beneath you. Focus down means “head down” and focus on the people who need you. Leaders who focus down concern themselves with only their team and making sure their team gets the leader’s full attention. Does it matter to your front-line crew that the long-time manager in Accounting doesn't seem terribly motivated for safety? Or that the new VP of Marketing doesn't seem to share your passion for safety? No, it doesn't. Because to concern yourself with the people outside of your purview, your areas of responsibility, means you are not focused on your team. You are allowing yourself to be distracted.

To perform at the highest levels of safety starts with a shift in mindset. How well does your crew work as a team? Let’s think about the context of that question in relation to safety. There isn’t a safety person or supervisor that doesn’t believe deep down that their crew could be working a little better as a team in safety. The key here, is in your willingness to do something about it. If you want your crew to be more effective in how they come together and look out for each other, then there is one thing you, as their leader, need to get them to do.

Provide a clear and concise vision of where your crew is headed. What's your vision for safety? And don't say "no one gets hurt." That's not a vision - it is a hope strategy - fingers crossed that no one actually does get hurt. Face it, if you're a supervisor, foreman, manager or executive, you're in a leadership role. You're in charge. That means the responsibility for the performance and safety of the team is yours. As a leader, there is one thing you need to get right, and it will solve problems in so many other areas: you need to provide your people with a clear vision and direction. You need to tell them where you're headed. Every member of your team wants to know where the team is going.

You may cover the check-boxes but you need to ensure employees are going to give safety their attention and focus. Is yours a check-box safety culture? Or a check-in safety culture? What’s the difference? A check-box safety culture is just what the name implies. You go through the checklists and check off the items that you have completed.

Have you fallen into the trap of making statements instead of asking questions? Selling safety to crews can seem overwhelming. Getting your people to see and understand what you see and understand can be frustrating, especially when you don’t achieve the success you think you should have.