The Demand

This week you run every domain decision with your leads, not over them, and you run the weekly team diagnostic naming whether the operation won or lost together — because if you keep deciding alone and treating the whole building as “the team,” you misapply leadership principles to teamwork groups and use them as guilt levers when a shift goes wrong.

The Work

  1. Identify one decision this week inside the kitchen manager’s domain and one inside the front lead’s domain. Bring each lead into the decision: consult their expertise, weigh it, make the final call with them in the room, not after the fact.
  2. Write down the difference in your building between the leadership team (you, kitchen manager, front lead — wins and losses bound together) and teamwork (server, cook, host — cooperating but with individual outcomes). Confirm you are not treating a server’s bad night as a leadership-team failure.
  3. Run the diagnostic question this week: on the win or loss this week, did we win or lose as a team, or did one leg win while another lost? Write the answer with specifics — which leg, which outcome.
  4. If a leg won and a leg lost, name the gap in writing: what decision or system would have bound the three of you to the same outcome, and put it in place before next week’s diagnostic.

By Friday, you have run one decision consultatively with each lead and completed the weekly team diagnostic in writing.