There is a simple test for your effectiveness as a leader. Walk into your restaurant unannounced and pay attention to what happens.

Do people come toward you or away from you? Do cast members find reasons to be near the area you are in, or reasons to be somewhere else? When you walk the stage, do your people stand a little taller — or do they tense up?

When a cast member sees a leader walking through the door, they think one of two things: here comes the problem, or here comes the solution. There is no third option. Every time you walk in, your cast has already decided which one you are — based on every interaction that came before this one. You are either the person who makes their shift harder or the person who makes it better. The leader who thinks they are neutral is wrong. You are never neutral. You are always one or the other.

If no one wants to see you coming, that is not a scheduling problem or a culture problem or a communications problem. It is a leadership problem. It means the people you lead have concluded, based on evidence, that your presence makes their work harder, not better. That you show up to find fault, not to support. That the safest posture when you are in the building is to stay out of your way.

Leaders who are avoided are not leading. They are managing by fear, by distance, or by indifference — and all three produce the same result: a cast that does the minimum required and nothing more, because nobody wants to do more for someone who doesn't notice when they do.

Be the kind of leader people are glad to see. Not because you are soft or because you overlook problems — but because when you show up, people know the shift is going to be better for it. That you see the work. That you recognize the effort. That your presence means something good is about to happen, not something bad.

If no one wants to see you coming, start there.

Self-assessment has a ceiling. The leaders who most need to change are the least likely to see it accurately in themselves — that's not a character flaw, it's how blind spots work. Don't rely solely on your own answer to this question. Build a mechanism for honest feedback — an anonymous prompt to your team, a structured conversation with an outside Coach, something that grounds your self-perception in actual data. The question is the right question. Make sure the answer you're working from is real.