Career Lessons from Restaurant Repair Shows | Career Angles
By Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter
If you watch any show involving a celebrity chef walking into a restaurant and doing a makeover, they all have a pretty predictable formula.
The restaurant isn’t doing well.
The food is awful but the owners think it is great. 
The decor has degraded.
The servers are frustrated.
The celebrity chef walks in looks around complains about everything he sees and tastes and then brings in a renovation team to work on the appearance of the restaurant and the quality and taste of the food.
Often, there are hardheaded owners or chefs that believe they know better.
By the end of the show, usually, they realize they don’t.
Often, your biggest challenge is going to be with management and leadership who believes everything is fine. No one has told the Emperor they are not wearing any clothes.
Sometimes, like on these cooking shows, an intervention is necessary.
Sometimes, in real life where intervention occurs, the person with power immediately rejects what you’re being told and the people who intervene are now at risk.
Years ago, during the beginning of the Great Recession, I was consulting to a search firm when it became obvious that this was going to be a bad recession. The owner and his senior manager were spending a lot of time behind closed doors. That’s usually a sign that people are trying to figure something out and trying to hide it from the staff.
I knocked on the door, asked if I could sit down and consolidated all the worries and concerns into a simple decision.
“You can close the doors or reduce costs,” I said. “Reducing costs means consolidating on a single floor. I don’t know if it’s worth it to you. If it is, you need to act quickly because time is not going to be your friend. If it isn’t, act quickly and put yourself and everyone out of their misery.”
Being frozen in place and hoping something changes usually doesn’t work. Bold action does.
The celebrity chefs take decisive action that inert owners and/or cooks are unable or unwilling to do.
There are no guarantees that your major change will result in success anymore than it does with the restaurants on the shows.
But staying still and being paralyzed with fear and indecision, with no one to help you yields predictable results.
Be great!
Ⓒ The Big Game Hunter, Inc., Asheville, NC 2020
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ABOUT JEFF ALTMAN, THE BIG GAME HUNTER
Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter is a coach who worked as a recruiter for what seems like one hundred years. He is hired to provide No BS Career Advice globally. That can involve job search, hiring staff, management, leadership, career transition and advice about resolving workplace issues. Schedule a discovery call at my website, www.TheBigGameHunter.us
He is the host of “No BS Job Search Advice Radio,” the #1 podcast in iTunes for job search with over 2500 episodes.
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