101: Coach More, Fix Less: How Restaurant Leaders Build Strong Teams

Want fewer fires, stronger managers, and a calmer shift without losing speed? We dig into the simple coaching moves that turn constant problem-solving into shared ownership. Hospitality leader and author Jason E. Brooks joins us to unpack three deceptively small skills—asking better questions, listening with intent, and giving feedback that actually lands in a roaring kitchen—and shows how they scale across multiple locations.

We explore:  

• choosing to coach instead of fix

• building trust to stop 2 a.m. calls

• listening that lowers defenses and reveals context

• giving feedback that lands in a loud kitchen

Go to irfbook.com right now and grab your copy
Head to christinmarvin.com/contact for a complimentary coaching session and let's talk about what's possible for your restaurant group
Find Jason’s books on Amazon or at jasonebrooks.com

P.S. Ready to take your restaurant to the next level? Here are 3 ways I can support you:

1. One-on-One Coaching - Work directly with me to tackle your biggest leadership challenges and scale your operations with confidence. Learn more at christinmarvin.com
2. Multi-Unit Mastery Book - Get the complete Independent Restaurant Framework that's helped countless owners build thriving multi-location brands. Grab your copy at https://www.IRFbook.com
3. Group Coaching & Leadership Workshops - Join other passionate restaurant leaders in transformative group sessions designed to elevate your entire team. Details at christinmarvin.com

Podcast Production: https://www.lconnorvoice.com/

Chapters

• 0:08 Problem Solver Or Coach
• 1:30 Who We Help And How We Scale
• 3:21 Jason’s Newsletter And The Pause
• 5:27 Questions That Teach Thinking
• 8:04 Trust, 2 A.M. Calls, And Systems
• 10:53 One-On-Ones That Lower The Noise
• 13:43 Listening As A Superpower
• 17:09 Better Field Visits Through Questions
• 21:06 Escaping The Super GM Trap
• 24:05 Feedback That Lands In A Loud Kitchen
• 27:02 Designing A Culture Of Feedback
• 29:01 Every Team Needs Coaching: The Book
• 32:02 Coaching Beyond Crisis And Sports Parallels

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:08

Are you a problem solver for your team, or are you a coach for your team? Today we're going to answer that question on the podcast. I'm joined by Jason E. Brooks, speaker, two-time author, creator of Coach Up, and host of the Leadership Table Podcast. Jason has been in the hospitality space for many, many years. And today we talk about three key coaching skills that will help every leader in the restaurant business be successful. Listening, asking powerful questions, and giving feedback. Jason also offers up an incredible new resource for all of you at the end of this episode. So stay tuned and join us for the full length of the episode today. I love these tools because you can start using them immediately during your next service. Hope you enjoy. If you are an independent restaurant owner managing multiple locations, you know the chaos that comes with growth. Inconsistent execution across your restaurants. Managers who won't take ownership. Constantly answering questions your team should already know the answers to. You're stuck in your current role when you want to be playing a bigger strategic role as you scale. You don't have the right leaders in place or you keep losing them. And you're not sure how to find great people and actually keep them around. We work with passionate independent restaurant owners who found success with their first few locations and are ready to scale strategically. Our clients aren't looking to just survive expansion. They want to thrive through it. They're committed to developing strong leaders and creating exceptional guest experiences. Through the independent restaurant framework that we teach in multi-unit mastery, we coach independent restaurant groups to move from chaos to confidence by focusing on three pillars people, process, and profit. You can grab a gifted copy of the book at irfbook.com. On this show, we bring you real coaching conversations, leadership strategies, and the frameworks that you need to lead like a CEO instead of operating like a worn-out manager. And here's the thing: coaching has changed our clients' businesses and can change yours too. If you've never experienced what it's like to have someone in your corner who actually gets the restaurant world, we'd love to connect. We offer one-on-one and group coaching. Head to kristenmarvin.com slash contact for a complimentary coaching session and let's talk about what's possible for your restaurant group. Jason, welcome back. So happy to have you for the second time. You and I have been able to stay connected on our journey together, growing our businesses and publishing books and all the things. So we're going to talk about your second book today. Congratulations on that. But you you popped up in my inbox this morning and offered something that I didn't know I needed. And that's always a welcome invitation. So I've I've I have one of those days that I um kick constantly kick myself forward and where I've overscheduled myself a little bit. And I know better than that. And I know I'm more productive when I slow down and I give myself some time. And you wrote a newsletter about coaching and taking time to slow down and not jump in and provide the answer, but to ask some questions. Will you give us a little bit of context around that newsletter?

SPEAKER_02: 4:22

It's very true. Uh first, thank you for having me on the show, Kristen. It's always great whenever we get to interact in person, on stage, or even across the network. But um the coaching drop. The the uh coaching drop is a weekly newsletter that I put out, and uh I try to keep it short and sweet. There's three versions to it. You have the uh free version and then two more tiers. The other two tiers gains you access to some customized uh w one-on-ones and some group coaching as well. Um, but in the free tier, there is always a coaching tip of the week. That's how every single newsletter starts off. This week's coaching tip is uh uh pause and wait to give the answer and and uh more so ask a question first. The reason why is that we within the hospitality industry, we are taught like Will Gadera and the bear says every second counts. So we're doing our damnedest to shorten time, fall time, get to the end result. But what we do whenever we do that is that we actually rob our people of development here and rob them of being able to uh learn how to pivot on their feet and understand the bigger picture of what's going on. It's a very true fact that we learn more and we learn better whenever we can speak back what we're thinking. But if we as the teacher, we as the coach, we as the manager is the one doing all of the speaking, our team is doing none of the learning. It's kind of like reading a book and then you catch some of it. But when you tell back that book, when you paint in words what you're seeing, you then begin to piece together pieces of that book differently than what your mind comprehended because your voice added to that next layer. So the actual newsletter goes into uh pause, don't give the answer first, ask a question. And it's giving the opportunity to the person that you're coaching to be able to get a deeper understanding into what's going on versus just getting a very short answer.

SPEAKER_00: 7:05

Yeah, and what are two of those questions that you include in the newsletter that are important to ask?

SPEAKER_02: 7:11

Ah, one of them is um, and please forgive me for misquoting it, but what one of them is um what do you picture is going on right now? Um, and and then the uh second is what they expect the outcome to be. And that paints two very clear things. They get to see what's in reality is currently happening, and then what should the outcome be. Their mind automatically starts mapping that step, that just journey from where it currently is to where it needs to be. But the more we just give an answer, again, it cuts short that journey.

SPEAKER_00: 8:00

Yeah, absolutely. Um, it's such a powerful way to develop their strategic thinking skills. Like you said, in an aid in development, um, I talk to a lot of restaurant owners that have the common complaint that my team texts me constantly. I can't, my team won't leave me alone. It's hard for me to do my job because I've got all these distractions coming at me. And so I love diving in with them and saying, give me an example. What this person reached out to you about, oh, the dishwasher had a leak. Okay, what was your response to that? And and in that moment, we can identify are you training them that you're the problem solver, or are you training them to think on their feet and make their own decisions? And and that usually those moments are really, really powerful moments of insight. Um, but it takes a long time to learn that behavior. And and I'm curious, when when did you first learn that skill? Was it in your career, post-career as an operator?

SPEAKER_02: 9:00

I I'd say it was in my career, and it was when I shifted into a true director of operations and being over um three very distinct markets. And one was the uh Raleigh Durham market, the other one was the DC market and the Atlanta market. Three very distinct markets. And what I found was every time that I would walk in, I would get verbal throw-up all in my face. And they would dispute about everything that was going on. Uh yes, of course, I was um having meetings and and uh and being in communication with my GMs and my managing partners, but I wasn't actually building trust. And I find that half the time that we get those what I like to call stupid 2 a.m. phone calls. That phone call, like Jason, we are out of toilet paper. And it's like, what? Call me at 2 a.m. tell me that you're out of toilet paper. Um, most of the time that they don't make a decision is because they think we don't trust them well enough or know them well enough for them to make a decision without being judged. They they feel we don't know them well enough for them to make a decision without being judged.

SPEAKER_00: 10:43

Yeah. Here's the thing 80% of restaurants fail because they don't have the systems, not because they have bad food or service. If you're ready to stop being the bottleneck in your own business and start building something that can actually scale profitably, I want you to put multi-unit mastery, my new book, directly in your hands for free. Go to irfbook.com right now and grab your copy. When you do, you're going to get access to some additional tools that are not available anywhere else. This is about building a legacy, not just another location. Stop putting it off and go get your book. Again, that's irfbook.com.

unknown: 11:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 11:33

So I found that what I needed to do was actually create time and create space to get to know them individually. Yes, I had lots of ways to dump information on them. I had a group text, a group email, a group everything. I was forwarding the emails from my VP of ops to them so they knew what was coming down the pipeline. I was dumping all kinds of information onto them. But I wasn't making any time to get to know them individually for them to dump on me. So every time I walked into a market or into a building, it was all over. Once I started creating that individual space to start asking questions versus dumping info, I found that they were actually now when I walked into markets and into buildings, they were actually just taking time to show me a round because they always knew that every Wednesday at three o'clock for 45 minutes or 30 minutes, they were going to have my undivided attention for them to tell me exactly what was going on in their world and to help build that trust.

SPEAKER_00: 12:55

I love it. There's such an important distinction here that's coming up for me about being the problem solver and being the coach. When you're in day-to-day service and your role is constantly the problem solver, there's a lot of chaos that's just continuing to happen around you. Like you said, you're training your team that all they need to do is just quickly come to you, get the answer to a problem, and then go find another problem and just rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. The distinction here is that when you start to coach and you start to ask those questions, you force everything to slow down and to be more intentional. And that really calms a lot of the chaos in the day-to-day operations and helps everyone be a lot more thoughtful about what they're going to do next and why, right? Which is such a powerful tool. I love that you, you know, asking the question is such an important first step, but then you also lean into another coaching skill that I just think is magical, maybe one of the most important is listening, right? You ask the question and then you shut up and you just wait and you create that space and you listen. Right. And and and allowing your employee, again, like you were saying, to just speak out loud what the solution is will help them understand the way that they are thinking about the problem and the solution. And sometimes, even in that moment, they can just catch themselves and go, oh no, that doesn't make sense. We're gonna let's try it like this. How did you learn that skill of listening?

SPEAKER_02: 14:27

Well, I think it actually came easier for me than most people. And the reason why I say that is that what most people don't know is that I've had a stuttering challenge since I was a wee tot, since I first started speaking. So much of a challenge that even in grade school, second grade, third grade, fifth grade, sixth grade, I was pulled out of class to learn how to do proper breathing techniques in order to learn how to finish a sentence, one sentence, without stuttering. Of course, I was called all the names, all that good stuff. And so for me, listening became a bit more natural because of a fear of speaking. And I know most people that know me decently were like, well, Jason, you speak on stage to thousands of strangers almost every day. You do workshops for large groups, for executives, for professionals in and outside of the hospitality industry. How is it that you have a stuttering problem? And it goes back to how I thought through what my challenge was and began to use it as a strength. I dug a bit deeper into things like that. We won't go through all of that on this podcast here, but but that's where my natural listening abilities began to strengthen. Now, uh we don't just use the listening ability just for coaching, but I've also found it very um very uh um very uh useful in doing field visits. Now my background, I came from washing dishes age of 15, and I chose to wash dishes. Why? Because I wanted to take that little wand in the dish pit, have my back turned to to everyone, and just knock out pans and not have to speak. But of course, what I didn't know was as I got better at dishes, I had to train others on dishes. And then when someone called out on pantry, Jason, can you work pantry? Okay, well, now that you're working pantry, can you work grill? Can you run a ship? Can you train someone? I eventually still had to learn how to speak to people and use the least amount of words to make the most impact. So I even going through my restaurant background, I got into multi-unit management, which had me doing field visits. The listening aspect is also key in doing great field visits. Uh most field visits suck, meaning I know you've been either the one on the end, the GM of that field visit, or that district manager that comes in and likes to poop and swap, just drop a big hot pile of shit and leave right back on out, fly right back on out, and leave a list of 99 things that a near perfect general manager has to do just to make the point that they were perfect. So one of the things that I understood and learned in the beginning, in the beginning, as I got better at doing field visits, was how to listen first. Because that that first 90 seconds that you're walking into their house, you're you're walking into their family. What you say and ask and do, like, okay, let's talk about your numbers. You know it feels like an odd. Let's talk about food costs, feels like an odd. Let's talk about guest complex. From from there, it's all downhill. But when you can start asking questions and asking questions like how is your week and then actually listening and taking notes, you'll you will find that you de-escalate and let their guard down for them to open up later within that visit for them to actually take feedback versus fight and resist it. So listening works not only with coaching, but in our world also with field visits.

SPEAKER_00: 18:43

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's one of the things I learned from taking coaching courses was that in all the skills that I learned in coaching could be applied to any single aspect of my life, whether it's working with training my dogs, walking the dogs, spending time with the dogs, marriage, uh, friendships, you know, business work, how I designed my coaching business, all the things. Um, I think I'm I'm laughing on the inside because, you know, when I was a regional manager, I didn't know what I was doing in the beginning. And, you know, when I when I became a regional, it was a brand new position for the company that I'd worked with. And so we were all kind of trying to figure it out on our own. And I I know there's probably some people listening that used to work with me. And I would just like to take a moment to apologize for the poop and and swoop that I probably did it to you when I was trying to figure out um how to manage my schedule overseeing six restaurants. And I know there were times I ran in really quickly and I had something else on my mind, and I ran in and did a couple things and ran out. And I think, you know, as if there's any regionals or director of operations listening to this, having intention around what your shop visits actually look like, what you're doing there, how long you're there, it's so, so important. And I didn't learn that until about three years in to the role when somebody actually asked, like, what are you actually doing when you're in there? What are you looking at? Who are you talking to? What are you spending time on? Because in a lot of ways, I was still a super GM. I would, if I saw a bottleneck, I'd jump in and help out, right? Rather than asking questions about what why is this happening right now? What's going on? You know, I know a lot of times I what, you know, a lot of my favorite times in in the restaurant business as a regional and as a GM was was yeah, sitting down one-on-one with people and listening, like you said, asking a lot of questions, but just creating that distraction-free space for us to take a second, take a couple deep breaths, and get really intentional. And I love sitting in an ops meetings and just watching the teams interact and understand what they were talking about. And same thing, butting in and asking some questions, which they probably thought at the time was kind of annoying, but but I loved offering those moments of, you know, have we thought about this? Have we talked about this? And and just hearing from them. Yes, they have or no, they haven't, and really understanding how to help them again build their confidence. And it helped me, you know, understand if I could trust their judgment or not, which was super important in the role. Um, yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 21:25

I would say that uh one of the key pieces that you that you spoke to there is that that super GM mentality and how whenever most managers uh get to their first multi-unit role, um, they leave behind everything that made them successful. And that is when they were successful as a single unit operator, they had checklists everywhere, clipboards and checklists everywhere. They had mini GMs everywhere, a GM that owned the walk-in cooler, a GM that was in charge of the walk-in freezer, a GM that was in charge of the expo line, a GM in charge of the dining room, even one in charge of that messy ass closet that everyone put stuff in in the front that knew it didn't go there. They had many GMs, they had checklists, they had all their systems in place, and they were doing it so well it was running for lack of better terms, without them having to micromanage it. But the moment that they shifted into multi-unit, they became a very different super GM and trying to jump in on everything and almost leaving every single tool belt, every single thing that they learn as that great GM. Let's think about the restaurant owners same thing as they run one location and and they get really good at the operations of that one location, yeah, and then they shift to two and three and five. Yeah, next thing you know, they're walking in, they're on the phone, putting out a fire at a location that's all the way across town while walking into another location, putting the phone down, helping to knock down the line at the front door, jump on expo, get the tickets out, get the truck order in, fix something on payroll, give some high fives, jump back on their cell phone, driving to the next fire thinking that they did something, and very little, if not nothing, changed during that visit that they were just at. Yeah, that's one of the key fundamentals of actually listening, planning, and understanding how to coach whenever we are walking in the building, even for multi-unit locations as well.

SPEAKER_00: 23:48

Yeah, I love it. Uh what is another one of your favorite coaching skills?

SPEAKER_02: 23:55

Another one of my favorite coaching skills is giving feedback. Giving feedback. I I love one that is my go-to, and I actually learned this from Manager Tools. Um and Manager Tools is a podcast that I actually picked up on when I was a uh training manager for O Charlie's. And my training GM was uh Mark, and Mark was, I swear, he I always say this, he was the mayor of what he did. But manager tools taught me um how to apply manager techniques even in the uh fast-paced world of the restaurant industry. One of those things was how to give feedback. Think about our kitchens. Our kitchens are one, very loud, right? It's a lot of fast-paced bodies. We have hoods going, we have flames, we have fryers cutting on and off, things getting fried, orders being called, and it's so loud and so exciting inside of that moment. Giving feedback gets lost. We think we say something, and what's being heard, and all of that noise is only but a few words, most of those negative. And what we're trying to get across in that moment is what the person, the person who is receiving it, that's not what they're hearing, that's not what they comprehend it. So, one of my favorite coaching tools is how to give feedback. And one technique that I always use is one question Can I give you some feedback? Because when I walk up to someone and I say, Hey, you're burning that sauce, make sure you turn down that flame, or else the butter is gonna break, and then we're gonna have to redo it. All they heard was Jason said I suck with my sauces.

SPEAKER_01: 26:02

Yeah, okay.

SPEAKER_02: 26:03

Yeah, but whenever you give their brain the moment to accept feedback with one question of can I give you some feedback? It is almost mechanical. I love it. That they just pause and then they listen and they listen to everything that you say. And you'll even find yourself saying it a bit differently because you can feel the attention on you. So that one question, can I give you some feedback is one of my other very favorite coaching tools.

SPEAKER_00: 26:35

I love that one. It feels very um, very direct, very harsh, very uh, what's the word I'm looking for? You're just choosing to insert. You're there's no like thoughtfulness or intention around. The other one is simply an invitation. Are you are you ready for this right now? And maybe that person says no, right? Right? Like, can I say maybe they say no? I don't know. I think that's a beautiful thing to design with employees, though, when you are talking about you know, through the interview process, you're talking about, hey, we have a culture of feedback. We we love, you know, we do performance reviews, we do one-on-ones. Have you ever been a part of a restaurant that's done that before? Because if you know, if you have not been in a culture of one-on-ones and then all of a sudden you are asked to do a one-on-one, your first thought is, oh shit, I'm in trouble. What did I do? What did I do? Right. Yeah. But if you can infuse that in your culture from the very beginning, then it's a much more welcome, open, honest conversation about we're always looking for ways to get better. I love that. That's great. Okay. Tell us about this amazing new book that you have.

SPEAKER_02: 27:46

Every team needs coaching. Um, every team needs coaching is part two of my every leader series. First book, as you know, Every Leader Needs Followers, that was um released back in March of 2024 while I was on stage at the Bar and Restaurant Expo. And uh it was 10 keys to help transform restaurant uh restaurant managers to hospitality leaders. And it was a great that first book was a great deep dive in just 10 keys, 10 keys that helps you shift from managing to actually leading. But there was a piece that was included in the book, but wasn't the total focus, and that's the coaching aspect and my mantra the thing that I live and breathe by that I will fall on the sword with is manage, lead, coach, repeat. And that is the understanding that we do have to manage. There's nothing wrong with managing, we are a business first, that's what we do. But as we manage within those four walls, we can't uh look over or overlook the fact of leading. Leading is everything outside of that four walls, painting the picture of where we're going. And when the team gets to a challenge that's so great that they don't know what the next step could be, that leader paints that picture that picture so vividly, but leaves room for everyone on their team to still apply brushstrokes as well. Now, if managing and leading is the mastery of large groups, coaching is the mastery of one-on-ones. So I wanted the second book to be the focus of every team needs coaching, and that's every team. It doesn't matter if it's a team of executives or a team of street sweepers, every team needs coaching, and it walks through uh different ways to build a coaching framework, a coaching culture within your business. This doesn't have to be just restaurants. I also wanted to. And and I asked professionals that are the heart of coaching to help give me quotes to put into this book. And you are one of those great people that I tapped and I thank you for giving me a quote to put inside this book to help teams and help leaders view coaching differently. It's not just something that is reserved for the top 1% of teams. Every person, every leader needs coaching. Our kids get coaching. They can get coached in karate, in AAU basketball, in popcorn or football, in soccer leagues. They can get coached all through high school playing both out of school and in school. And then if they're just that good, they get coached in college when where there is no more uh out of school leagues because college is getting the very few ready for professional sports. And then even those professionals that's been getting coached since the age of seven getting paid tens of millions of dollars to do what they do, and they've been doing the exact same thing for decades, they still have a man or woman screaming at them on the sideline, what to do next. And yet, still at work, we think coaching is something that is only reserved for our kids or for the elite. It's not we all need coaching in order to get that outside of the bottle view of what's going on.

SPEAKER_00: 31:36

I love that. Thank you for the sports analogy. I think somebody challenged me a couple weeks ago on LinkedIn and said, can you imagine if sports teams only hired coaches when they had losing seasons? And I and I thought that's absolutely ridiculous, right? It's absolutely ridiculous. But I do talk to a lot of restaurant owners that think that they only need coaching when something is going wrong in their business. And imagine what the industry would look like. And I'm on a mission to make sure, and I know you're working on it too, every restaurant has a coach in it. And hopefully that's the owner or the person that's that's leading the team. Uh, and so that person can teach everyone else how to be a coach. But if every restaurant group that was really successful invested in coaching, it would do nothing more than just strengthen the entire industry. And the thought of that is what gets me out of bed every morning. It's very exciting.

SPEAKER_02: 32:37

I love that.

SPEAKER_00: 32:38

Well, um, thank you, Jason, for coming on the show again and sharing your incredible wisdom. It's always a always a joy talking to you. Um if anybody's listening, well, I know they're listening, but for those of you that are listening to the show, uh come catch Jason at the Bar and Restaurant Expo in Denver October 26th, 27th, 28th. He's gonna be uh in town with us, which will be super exciting. And you can grab, I don't know, are you gonna be selling books there or how can people be selling books via QR code?

SPEAKER_02: 33:09

My back's getting weaker as I age.

SPEAKER_00: 33:19

I love it. I love it. And where, if the people aren't able to attend the conference, where else can they get the book?

SPEAKER_02: 33:25

Absolutely on Amazon, on Amazon. You can search for every leader needs followers or every team needs coaching. Of course, you can also go to my website, jasonebrooks.com. That's jasonebrooks.com. You can learn more about my speaking, about my workshops, even about my program I do with nonprofits and for restaurant associations called CoachUp. And it's designed to help the hospitality future leaders think about coaching going into their first roles, not just as they are already well down the road.

SPEAKER_00: 34:05

I love it. Awesome. Jason, thank you so much. I know we'll have you back on the show. I have a feeling we'll probably see another book or two from you down the road as you're working through those four bullet points. Thanks for sharing that mantra with us. Uh, we'll put all the links in the show notes for all of you to go tap into Jason's network and become part of his community and his ecosystem. So thank you so much, everybody. That's going to do it for this week. And please share this episode with any leaders that you know in the restaurant business that could benefit. And we'll talk to you soon.