3/14/2013–I feel like I’m at a fork in the road.
I want to spend my time each day advancing toward something. To do that, I need to have an idea of where the path is leading. I’m probably still closest to RDT, though I go back and forth about if it aligns with what I want to do. In order for me to know what I want to do, I have to pin down what I think is (will be) valuable to me. The short list:
– Frequent interaction with new people. I would love to be able to work with different people on different projects frequently. It makes me a more effective communicator and forces me to learn my own strengths to be effective.
– Frequent new challenges. This would also help me learn my strengths quickly, but would also teach me my weaknesses, I don’t get board with long-term projects, but I really enjoy the initial stages of analyzing a situation and identifying the sources of struggle and evaluating potential action.
– Responsibility to monitor implementation of change. I get a lot of pleasure seeing new ideas come to fruition. Additionally, I think a commonly overlooked element of this process is adjusting the new behaviors soon after you see them in action. There’s a fine line here between knowing what to review frequently vs what to allow time for evaluation. The former would include shelf lives of new food, interview questions, and the time of day O3s are most effective. The latter would be new sources of talent and changes to the training program.
I envision this all being somehow related to restaurants, but not necessarily “in” the restaurant. I think I want to move from shift execution to change implementation. Looks like the next book I read will be Kotter’s “Heart of Change”.
10/26/2017 review: Reading this I realize how amazingly fortunate I am to have experienced working in restaurants and the corporate business world. These two environments are drastically different from each other. When I wrote this entry, I had not yet developed any idea of what’s important beyond the workplace, thus I didn’t consider how work should be designed to support the life you want to live. The three things I identified are certainly part of any management-level role in all but the smallest of companies where you work with the same people every day. At least, now that I realize I can influence what my role is, I can intentionally design work to include these elements. Also, even though I said, “I envision this all being somehow related to restaurants”, I wouldn’t say it was because of some internal need to be in restaurants–I think it was at this time simply all I knew. Whether or not I do have that internal bug for food-service is another story…