The average unhappy customer will tell approximately 13 people about a bad experience. Doing my part, I have to say that Moe’s Southwestern Grill in Burlington, Vermont was a disgusting mess. There was food on the floor. All the tables were dirty (actual pools of liquid on them) and the staff seemed put out when I gave them some feedback (“Could someone wipe down one of the booths? They are disgusting.”)
Of course, as I sat eating my burrito (OK burrito) and drinking my Vermont Otter Creek Beer (good beer) I naturally looked at the disaster around me as a management problem. What could cause a restaurant to allow itself to become so dirty? So much of business leadership is debugging, and this was a case that seriously needed some debugging.
The initial response to these cases is to blame the employees. Kids today! But that would be an incorrect assessment. Given the pervasive filth, I came to the conclusion that this was a leadership problem, not an employee problem. The employees were friendly and energetic (at least until I complained) and it seemed that they would do whatever was expected of them. One of them picked up a broom after my complaint and started sweeping food off the floor. They would follow a leader who demanded cleanliness.
In my headline, I said it was time to replace the leader. Why was that? Because I think that the leader in this case must not even see the filth. To be fair, I’m not so good at seeing things like this either. I walked in and ordered food before I noticed the mess. If I were more sensitive to cleanliness myself I would never have made it past the first step.
However, the leader of a restaurant needs to be sensitive to the problem. I think the employees in this place would keep it immaculate if they knew that their boss could walk in at any moment and give them Hell, or worse, make them see the place through a customer’s eyes. A really good leader would have included cleanliness in a mission statement, and have a way of measuring it.
So, in this case, my debugging says that the restaurant needs a new leader who has an eye towards cleanliness as well as profitability.
