For the most part, they work where they want to work and are not afraid to leave employers who do not earn their loyalty. In the age of service, the measure of success is how people feel about the way you served the 200 lunches. Volume alone will no longer sustain long-term success. What all this means, of course, is that your level of human understanding and not your technical expertise is what will assure your success into the next century. No matter what the specific symptoms, the common denominator of all foodservice problems is people.
People cause all the problems and people ultimately have to be part of any lasting solution.
I suspect that most people become supervisors by decree. In truth, probably very few managers have ever had any real training in what makes people tick. Even in my own case, the closest I ever came to gaining such knowledge in my formative years was in a high school psychology course where I learned about paranoid schizophrenics and manic-depressives, but not much about normal people. Without any formal training to fall back on, we learn to manage by following the model set by our previous managers. The Cop Mentality Most of us were likely mentored by managers who grew up with a cop mentality.