When Your Team Stops Respecting You
When Your Team Stops Respecting You
I’ve managed restaurants for a while now. The single biggest mistake I see other managers make is managing from the office instead of the floor. You lose your team’s respect one spreadsheet decision at a time.
You know the look. The one your sauté guy gives when you change the prep list for the third time this week. The exhale from your best server when you announce another menu revision at pre-shift. The way the dishwasher stops mid-rack when you walk into the pit to check on things you don’t understand.
You make decisions without understanding how they land on the other side of the pass. You implement policies you read about on some management blog without asking the people who work the line whether those policies make sense. You talk about labor cost while your Sous Chef is running sauté and grill because you scheduled based on last year’s Tuesday sales, not this Tuesday’s reality.
I have been on both sides of this. The cook was rolling my eyes at an owner who thought a staff meeting at 10 am meant something when they closed at midnight. The manager realized too late why my best prep cook quit. All the while, watching my team lose faith in me one service at a time.
Losing your crew’s respect happens slowly. Then it happens fast.
According to the National Restaurant Association’s 2025 State of the Restaurant Industry report, 77% of operators say recruiting and retaining employees is their top challenge. The Bureau of Labor Statistics found the median tenure for restaurant workers is 2 years. You know what those numbers don’t tell you? They don’t tell you how many of those people left because their manager made them feel invisible.
The Part Where You Look In The Mirror
Ask yourself if you are making the same mistakes twice? Are you ignoring what the floor is telling you? Are you creating policy without understanding what it costs your team? Are you dismissing people who know more than you because admitting it feels like weakness?
If yes, fix what you control first. Everything else is noise.
Some of this is on you. Some of this is on ownership squeezing labor budgets until you’re scheduling skeleton crews and wondering why morale is low. Some managers are dealing with impossible constraints from above. Even when you’re getting squeezed, you still control how you listen, how you show up, and whether you acknowledge what your team sees.
I worked under a chef who refused to adjust par levels even after three servers told him we were running out of the special by 7 pm every Friday. He believed the math. The math said we should have enough. The math didn’t account for the first table at 5:30 pm ordering six of them because their server was good at selling.
We ran out every week. For two months.
He lost two servers over it. He wouldn’t listen to people who were watching it happen, not because we ran out of the special.
This is the gap. The space between what you think is happening and what is happening.
Close it or lose people.
The Conversation You’re Avoiding
You need to talk to this person. Schedule it. Not during service. Not during prep. Give them an hour when they’re not thinking about tickets or side work or whether the walk-in door is going to hold another week.
Sit down. Ask what is wrong.
Don’t defend yourself when they tell you. Write it down. Let them finish. Ask if there is more. You’ll want to interrupt. You’ll want to explain why you made the call you made. Don’t.
When they’re done, tell them what you see.
“When I ask you to do something, and you sigh, the rest of the kitchen hears it. When you roll your eyes, the new guys notice. I need to know what I am doing wrong. I also need you to stop undermining me while we figure this out.”
Then shut up. Let them respond.
You’re looking for one of two things. Either they’re willing to work through it, or they’re done. You’ll know in the first thirty seconds. Watch their body language. Someone who wants to fix it leans forward. Someone who is finished with you leans back and crosses their arms.
If they lean forward, build something. What would make the job better? What are you missing? What do they need from you to do their job well? Then do it. Don’t promise to do it. Do it.
Try this when they tell you the prep list changes every week, make it impossible to stay ahead. You stop changing the prep list mid-week unless something changes. Special event. Big football game. Something at the live theater. Weather. They tell you the new POS system is slower than the old one, and nobody asked them before you bought it. You bring them into the next vendor meeting. They tell you the schedule comes out too late. You posted it three days earlier.
Small moves. Concrete fixes. Follow-through.
If they lean back, start documentation. You’re headed somewhere else.
What Happens After The Conversation
You talked. They leaned forward. You identified problems. Now comes the part most managers skip.
Write down what you committed to. Put it somewhere you’ll see it every shift. If you said you would stop changing prep lists without explaining why, stop. If you said you would check with the floor before scheduling changes, check. Your team is watching to see if anything changes.
Some fixes are in your control. Scheduling. Communication. Listening before deciding. Do those immediately.
Some fixes aren’t. Your owner gave you a labor budget built for a different reality. Your GM wants table turns faster than the kitchen can move. You’re caught between what your team needs and what the spreadsheet allows.
Be honest about this. Tell your team what you control and what you don’t. “I hear you need another body on Saturday brunch. I am fighting for it. Here is what I am doing.” Then fight for it. If you lose, tell them you lost and why. They’ll respect honesty about constraints more than vague promises.
The managers who lose their teams are the ones who pretend they have power they don’t have, or refuse to use power they do have.
Respect Doesn’t Come From A Title
I worked with a Chef who had never worked pantry at our restaurant. Good guy. Understood service. Didn’t understand why we needed two people on garde manger on Saturday.
He scheduled one. We got slammed. Tickets piled up. The pantry cook would get so frustrated that myself or one of the other managers stepped on line to help.
I had the Chef start to be scheduled with the garde manger. Came in early every Saturday for a month to work it until he understood the timing. Never schedule it short again.
He earned something in those weeks. He admitted he showed up for the work, that he didn’t understand, and was wrong.
Get on the line during a rush. Wash dishes when the pit is drowning. Cover a section when someone calls out. Do the work you’re asking other people to do. Your team will notice the difference between a manager who talks about being hands-on and one who is.
Your prep cook has a suggestion for cutting down ticket times? Try it. If it works, tell the owner it was their idea. If it fails, you own it.
You say the rule applies to everyone? Enforce it the same way every time. The server who brings in money doesn’t get a pass. Your friend from culinary school doesn’t get a different standard. You make a rule, you follow it first.
Show up for the hard shifts. The understaffed Saturday when the printer won’t stop, and someone is crying in the walk-in, and you’re down a dishwasher. This is where your team decides whether you mean what you say.
When To Let It Go
Some people are finished with you before the conversation starts. You’ll try everything. They’ll stay cold. The attitude will poison the prep station, the dish pit, the pre-shift meetings. Other people start looking at them to see how to treat you.
When someone keeps undermining you after you have named it, after you have addressed your part, after you have given them space to fix it, you’re done. Document the conversations. Write down the incidents. Note the dates. Then let them go.
I kept a line cook for six months longer than I should have. He was fast. He knew the menu. He also made every new hire miserable and questioned every call I made in a way that the rest of the kitchen started to think I didn’t know what I was doing.
I thought I needed him. Turns out I needed him gone. The kitchen got lighter the day he left. Ticket times got faster. People smiled more.
Some people are better at their job than they are for your team. Learn to tell the difference.
The People Who Make You Better
The line cook who questions you isn’t always the problem. Sometimes they’ll see something you missed. Sometimes they are frustrated because they are good at this, and you are getting in the way. Sometimes they are the person who’ll tell you the truth when everyone else stays quiet.
I had a prep cook tell me an order was off. She was right. She had been watching waste for three weeks and noticed we were throwing out half the butter lettuce every inventory. I was ordering based on the previous year’s numbers without checking what we were using now. We were a 120-seat place doing 400 covers on weekends. Half a case of lettuce twice a week at $20 a case adds up.
She saved us some money. I made her lead prep. She still works there.
The person who pushes back is sometimes the person who cares enough to fix what is broken. The ones who check out don’t say anything. They leave.
Figure out which one you have.
What This Comes Down To
Managing someone who has lost respect for you is a reckoning. You have to look at what you’re doing wrong. You have to ask whether you’re leading from knowledge or from a position you don’t understand.
Some of this is on you. Some of it’s not. If ownership sets impossible labor budgets and you’re the one delivering the news, your team will lose respect for you even when the call isn’t yours. If corporate mandates a new system nobody wanted and you’re the face of it, you take the heat. If the building is falling apart and the owner won’t fix anything, you’re still the one working in a broken kitchen.
Acknowledge this when it’s true. Tell your team you’re fighting for them even when you lose. Show them the constraints you’re working under. Don’t hide behind them. You still make calls. You still set the tone. You still decide how you show up.
Most managers lose the people who tell the truth and keep the ones who stay quiet. Then they wonder why morale is low and turnover is high.
Talk to your team this week. Ask what you’re missing. Fix what you control. Be honest about what you don’t control. Show up for the work.
Respect is what happens when people see you doing the work, fixing your mistakes, and showing up when things get hard.
What retention strategies have worked in your kitchen? What made you lose respect for a manager, and what earned it back? Drop your experience in the comments.
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