Transforming Transactional Leadership

Our rooftop pool and restaurant is a multi-million operation that has significantly bolstered our food and beverage revenue. My favorite co-worker, the assistant director of food and beverage always likes to say how, from the outside looking in, the restaurant appears to be operating perfect, we bring in at least $30,000 every day and have many repeat costumers; however, from the inside looking out, we are on the brink of collapsing. From a costumers standpoint, you can obviously tell that there are some bad apples, some servers with negative attitudes, miscommunications with the kitchen, food and drinks being delayed, however, they might see those issues as a one-of about the restaurant and not a huge issue. We are a luxury brand and cannot afford to have careless mistakes being made.

For months they had one woman running the show at rooftop, the general manager of the restaurant. The rooftop staff wore her down bad, as I was informed. She tried her best to contain the staff but they walked over her, called her a b**** and eventually got her fired. Now we have Mason, our assistant food and beverage director filling in for a general manager, 3 regular managers, 1 supervisor and a new assistant general manager of the restaurant. Even though we are staffed now on our management side, it appears the disease has only spread more. By disease I mean the state of the staff members up there. They were used to doing as they pleased and getting away with it. While our new management team has been hunkering down on this behavioral issue, they’ve only been treating symptoms of the disease as Mason likes to explain it. They’re used to transactional leadership at the moment. This is because when you have one woman using all her energy day in and day out to manage this multi-million operation, the staff members took advantage of when she was weak and used it to get what they wanted. “Work a double today because someone called out?” “Ok, well give me the weekend off then,” “Oh it’s our busiest time of the week? I don’t care, if you want me to do what you want, then you give me what I want.” Interactions betweens leaders and team members should never be like that. A team member shouldn’t be able to bargain with a leader into getting what they want at the expense of the larger operation.

Now with 6 leaders up there, they are attempting to turn the old system of transactional leadership into transformational leadership. When there was one manager up there, she did not have time to run tables, interact with guests as much as maybe she would have liked to. Now, our managers are being audited along with our staff members. The upper level management is trying to instill in the managers that they must be touching every table, letting the guests know they are being served by the best, correct any concerns they may have, and overall just make them fee welcomed. If the staff members see management doing their part, then they will eventually lead by example because they will understand that that is the correct way to interact with guests and the correct way to carry out their jobs. This is what the immediate goal is, to turn the old ways of giving the staff members what they want in order to receive positive outcomes on the management side (transactional leadership) to having the leaders lead by example and do such a great job that staff members will want to follow their examples simply because of their natural will to do so and because respect they have for their leaders (transformational leadership).