Asda Case

...

My example goes back to when I worked as a server in a restaurant. The restaurant performed well, but did not perform to capacity and/or to the potential of the location in comparison to surrounding restaurants. Chef took this as a personal blow to his food and decided one day to close down the restaurant and overhaul the cuisine with out telling anyone, including staff. Employees that relied on the job were now out of work and what little regular clientele the restaurant had were now finding other places to satisfy their needs for a restaurant and bar. Two weeks later, the restaurant emerges as a different style of food. Nothing improves and this eventually leads to the shut down of the restaurant.

After learning what I have thus far in this course and more specifically, reading Heifetz and Laurie’s article and principles in addressing adaptive changes, I realize that this challenge for the restaurant was treated like a technical challenge when it was indeed an adaptive challenge. What would the outcome have been if chef decided to take a step back and use the principles outlined in Heifetz and Laurie’s article to face the challenges of his new restaurant?

Chef’s first step would have been to identify the challenge. Upon talking to patrons, employees and management, chef could have realized that the overall restaurant structure and cross-functional roles were quite dysfunctional. Management was not interested and/or supportive, training protocols were absent, food was inconsistent and service was lacking. The challenge was that the restaurant is not performing up to standard and careful experimentation would have had to be conducted to identify new solutions.

With experimentation comes distress and with distress comes a need for regulation of that distress. For instance, chef realized that employees and management were not committed to the new values of the restaurant. If that were the case, he would have had to fire individuals and hire those that have the values matching those of the restaurant. This would have caused a great deal of distress, however, the reasoning is important to the success of the restaurant. Additionally, if service were important in the newly identified values, a good way to regulate distress from this change would be to have a pre-meal meeting with all staff before restaurant openings. This would have educated staff on food, drinks and specials, therefore allowing them to describe and sell the food more accurately.

Maintaining a disciplined action would have been important among the different functional teams that existed in the restaurant. This would allow everyone to be unified in the vision of the restaurant which management should communicate. Furthermore, by giving each person a sense of purpose, they all could have taken ownership in the restaurant and did a better job across functional teams. For example, if the kitchen staff cares more about perfection of food to the point where it takes a long time to get food out, this could have hindered the performance of the restaurant. It would have been important that teams work together to assess each other’s needs and the best outcome for the restaurant.

The next step would have been giving the work back to the people. After recruiting, unifying and educating staff, chef would then be able to give the work back to the people. This is indeed where the restaurant could start to build up clientele. By giving the work back to the people, the restaurant could empower the staff to make the restaurant into a successful restaurant. These people are the frontline workers that have the ability to make a difference directly to the customer, which would have likely led to a positive outcome.

Lastly, by protecting leadership from below, it would allow staff to be innovative and, therefore, the restaurant more dynamic for future direction. Furthermore, it would allow management to uncover opportunities for business that they may not have originally knew of. This is of course extremely important in the current organizational environment.

In conclusion, Heifetz and Laurie have come up with reliable principles that are key in tackling adaptive challenges. Using these interdependent principles has given me a new outlook on how to tackle a problem with a simple, quick and painless solution.

I would like to mention that this class has been extremely helpful in my work place over the past 5 weeks. There are a number of changes taking place throughout the structure of the institute as well as department and my perspective has been helpful in developing a plan for the future thanks to this class.

References:

i. Asda case

ii. Heifetz, R., Laurie, Donald. (2003). Learning to lead: Real leaders say, “I don’t have the answer.”. Ivey Business Journal

iii. Bauer, T., & Erdogan, B. (2015). Organizational Behavior (1.1st ed.). Flat World Education