Reports tell you what happened last week. A walk through the kitchen tells you what is happening right now. In a property with many outlets running around the clock, that difference is the gap between catching a problem and reading about it in a guest review.
At Red Rock Resort in Las Vegas, Chef Bryan Dillon oversaw 17 food operations and 22 kitchens, with a back-of-house staff of about 1,860 people. The routine that kept that operation under control was not a software system. It was a walk.
Start at the farthest point
Bryan’s day started the same way. He grabbed a cup of coffee, turned on his computer, and then left it. He went to the farthest point of the building, the pool, and worked his way back: the pool, the Sandbar kitchen and dining area, then the theaters, and on through every square foot of food and beverage territory.
Starting at the edge matters. The outlets farthest from the main office are the ones that get visited least, and the ones where standards slip first. Walking them first, every day, tells every team that no outlet is out of sight.
Open every door
A walk is only useful if it is thorough. Bryan opened every refrigerator, every oven and every hot box. He was checking four things:
- Clean. Equipment, shelves and floors ready for service.
- Organized. Product stored where it belongs, so any cook can find it.
- Labeled. Every container marked with what it is.
- Dated. Every container marked with when it was made or opened.
Along the way he took a visual count of inventory. After enough walks, he could smell product starting to go bad in a cooler before he opened the door. That kind of knowledge only comes from repetition.
The value of the walk is not that the leader finds every problem. It is that teams start to fix problems before the walk reaches them. When cooks know the cooler doors will be opened every morning, the coolers stay in order.
Know the operation better than anyone
Bryan’s view is simple: it is the leader’s job to know every detail of the operation. Not to do every job, but to understand each one well enough to support the people doing it. The more he knew about every part of the property, the more he could help the people working in it, because he understood a little about their world.
That is also why he values experience outside the kitchen. On a casino build, he was involved in purchasing far beyond food and beverage, and an early job as an office boy running blueprints taught him to read plans. Knowing how the building works makes it easier to solve problems in it.
Take the time to do people reviews right
A daily walk keeps standards in place. People keep them in place over years. At Red Rock, Bryan was responsible for about 85 performance appraisals for managers and chefs, twice a year. He made it a practice never to do more than two at one time, so that every review got real attention and none became a rubber stamp.
In a large operation it is tempting to batch reviews and move on. The cost of doing them badly is high: good managers feel unseen, and weak ones never get the feedback they need.
Work with the team you have
Bryan has walked into many existing operations through openings, acquisitions and conversions with Interstate Hotels, Starwood and Station Casinos. Early on he learned that a new leader can go one of two ways: replace everyone and start fresh, or work with the people already there.
He found that working with the existing team is almost always better. They know why things are done a certain way. They know what has been tried. And the industry already has a hard enough time attracting people to work in it.
He also learned that problems on the line are often problems the leader created. A dishwasher who is not using hot water may not have the tools he needs. Before blaming the person, check whether they have what it takes to do the job. If they do not, get it for them, and if it cannot happen right away, find a way. Teams trust leaders who have been where they are and who show up with the tools.
How to start your own daily walk
- Set a fixed time and route. Same time every day, starting at the outlet farthest from your office.
- Open everything. Every walk-in, reach-in, oven and hot box. Check clean, organized, labeled and dated.
- Write it down. Keep a short list of what you find and who owns each fix.
- Follow up the next day. The walk only works if the problems from yesterday are gone today.
- Talk to people. Ask each station what is getting in their way. Then remove it.
Bryan still misses those morning walks. They are also the starting point for the operational assessments he does for clients today. See how he approaches operational excellence and staff training and development, or schedule a consultation.