Being Busy Doesn’t Lower Restaurant Standards
- Noble Restaurant Success
- 6 days ago
- 7 min read
Here’s a moment I think a lot of former Starbucks store managers will recognize:
You’re in the middle of a rush. The line is building. Mobile orders are coming in. Someone placed two huge orders at exactly the wrong time. A break needs to be run. Your shift supervisor is trying to keep everything moving…
Your district manager walks in, looks around the store, and points out the fingerprints on the front windows.
Seriously? That’s what we’re worried about right now?
I remember being frustrated by moments like that. We were busy. The team was working hard. Guests were being served. Surely a few fingerprints could wait.
Years later, I understand those conversations very differently.
Restaurant Standards Matter Most When You’re Busy
My district manager was relentless about standards. We were a high-performing district, and excellence mattered to him. If something wasn’t being executed, he wasn’t particularly interested in hearing that we had been busy.
At the time, that could be incredibly frustrating. But the conversation didn’t end with: “Why are the windows dirty?” That was where it started.
The lobby being clean and ready for guests was a standard. We had agreed that was part of the experience we were supposed to deliver.
So if it wasn’t happening, the question became: Where did the plan break down?
Usually, his first question was about deployment. And there was a good reason for that.
Starbucks had put an enormous amount of research into understanding how its stores operated: expected revenue, dayparts, days of the week, historical performance, current trends, forecasted business, even down to what station and channel business was leaning toward.
All of that information helped determine how many people we needed and where they should be deployed. It wasn’t perfect. Restaurants and cafés are still unpredictable. Sometimes business spiked unexpectedly.
But you weren’t supposed to abandon the plan. You adjusted, recovered, and got back to it.
So when the windows were dirty, there were questions we could actually answer:
Was the deployment correct?
Was the shift supervisor working from updated information?
Did baristas understand their primary and secondary routines?
Was there a bottleneck that wasn’t identified quickly enough?
Were they so focused on getting breaks out that they lost sight of what was happening elsewhere in the café?
When “We Were Busy” Becomes a Restaurant Operations Problem
Suddenly, we’re not talking about fingerprints anymore. We’re diagnosing an operation.
“We were busy” is an explanation. It isn’t always an excuse.
Of course there are exceptions. Someone calls out. Equipment breaks. Business comes out of nowhere. Every restaurant eventually has one of those shifts where the best plan in the world gets punched in the mouth.
But those aren’t usually the situations we’re talking about.
When the same standards disappear every time you’re busy, being busy isn’t the problem.
The problem is that your operation isn’t designed to maintain those standards under pressure.
That’s an important distinction. Pressure doesn’t create standards. It reveals whether your operation can actually deliver them.
If the dining room only stays clean when you’re slow, you don’t have a dining-room-cleaning system. If prep only gets completed when business cooperates, you don’t have a reliable prep system.
If hospitality disappears the moment there’s a line, hospitality hasn’t actually been built into your operation.
And if your managers have to personally rescue every rush for the restaurant to function properly, you haven’t built leadership underneath them.
Great Restaurant Leadership Happens Before the Rush
One of the things I appreciate most about Starbucks in retrospect is how much responsibility we gave our shift supervisors.
At many restaurants, the rush is considered the most important part of the day, so naturally that’s when the leader needs to be most involved. They’re the one running the show.
Starbucks taught almost the opposite.
When I was working on the floor, I was a barista. The shift supervisor ran the floor, freeing me up to coach them. It allowed me to step away momentarily with the shift still in good hands. It also meant that the person in charge when I wasn’t in the store was well practiced in keeping things moving.
So my job as the store manager largely happened before the rush started:
Did I promote the right person?
Did I train them?
Did I coach them?
Did they understand the deployment?
Was the playbook current?
Did they understand what great execution looked like?
If my shift supervisor wasn’t capable of running a successful rush without me taking over, I couldn’t simply point at them and say they weren’t good enough.
I promoted them. I trained them. I coached them. Excellence started with me.
Employee Accountability Requires Clear Expectations
My district manager had another habit that drove this lesson home. If there was disagreement about an expectation, he’d pull out the Standards of Excellence book.
There it was. This is the standard. This is part of your job. You agreed to execute it.
That clarity didn’t leave much room for shifting blame. But here’s what mattered: He didn’t stop there.
He was available when I needed help. If he didn’t know the best solution, he’d connect me with another store manager or someone who did.
He didn’t have to be the expert on every problem, and he didn’t solve every problem for me.
His job was to protect the standard. My job was to figure out how to consistently achieve it.
That’s a very different relationship than a leader walking into a restaurant, finding something wrong, and telling everyone to work harder.
This Week’s Rhythm: Can Your Team Actually Meet the Standard?
Before you decide your team needs to work harder, pick one standard that regularly slips when your restaurant gets busy.
Then give yourself a quick self-check:
Clarity: Does everyone know exactly what success looks like?
Ownership: Does someone clearly own it, or does everyone assume someone else will handle it?
Training: Have you actually taught people how to execute it?
Plan: Does your deployment or workflow realistically allow it to happen during your busiest periods?
Resources: If someone doesn’t know what to do, do they know where to find the answer?
Support: Have you asked the people doing the work what makes this difficult?
Accountability: If all of those things are in place, are you actually holding people to the standard?
This week, find one version of “we were busy” that you hear regularly in your restaurant and trace it backward.
Don’t lower the standard. Find what’s preventing your team from reaching it.
Rooting For You,
-Colby
Frequently Asked Questions About Restaurant Standards:
What should I do when my restaurant team isn’t meeting expectations?
Talk to them. Start by assuming they want to do a good job and ask them what they need to do it. Don’t assume you know everything. Experienced managers and employees, especially those who have worked in other restaurants or cafés, may have solutions or perspectives you haven’t considered.
You may also discover that your team needs more clarity about what success looks like, who owns what, or how they’re expected to operate when business gets busy. Accountability matters, but before holding someone accountable for missing a standard, make sure you’ve given them a realistic way to reach it.
What should I do if my restaurant can’t maintain its standards because we’re understaffed?
Sometimes the answer is to reduce your capacity to what you can actually execute.
When I took over Freshii again after the pandemic, we shut down dinners and weekends until we were staffed and ready. We focused on executing our busiest days and busiest shifts well while hiring and training. Then we gradually reopened additional periods as the operation became ready for them.
It took about two months for us to not only reopen weekends and dinner, but add a breakfast period as well. That’s a dramatic example, and reducing operating hours won’t be the right answer for every restaurant. But the principle matters: Protect the experience over the capacity. Don’t knowingly sell more of an experience than your operation is capable of delivering.
How do I know if an employee problem is actually a restaurant systems problem?
Look for patterns. If one employee repeatedly struggles with an expectation that everyone else consistently meets, you may have an individual performance issue. If multiple employees struggle with the same expectation, or the same standard disappears every time business gets busy, look at the operation.
Ask whether expectations are clear, training is sufficient, ownership is defined, resources are available, and the workflow realistically allows the task to happen. If the system is broken, fix the system. If the system works and someone repeatedly chooses not to follow it, that’s an accountability conversation.
Good restaurant leadership requires being willing to recognize both.
How can I build restaurant systems that still work during a rush?
Design them around the periods when they’re actually going to be tested.
Look at what repeatedly falls apart when you’re busiest and trace the problem backward.
Is ownership unclear? Is someone deployed incorrectly? Does a task happen at the wrong time? Is training incomplete? Does the team understand what can temporarily flex and what cannot?
Then test your plan during real business and adjust it based on what happens. A restaurant system that only works when you’re slow isn’t finished yet.
Need Help Building a Restaurant That Runs Consistently?
If your restaurant runs well when you’re there but standards start slipping during a rush, or when you step away, the answer isn’t always asking your team to work harder. It may be time to look at the systems, training, expectations, and leadership behind the operation.
At Noble Restaurant Success, I help independent restaurant and café owners identify what’s getting in the way and build practical systems their teams can actually execute.
About the Author:
Colby Behrends is the founder of Noble Restaurant Success and a restaurant leadership coach with more than 20 years of experience in restaurants and cafés, from national brands to independent businesses.
His goal is to take the systems, leadership practices, and lessons that help successful restaurant companies thrive, and make them useful for independent owners without losing what makes their businesses unique.
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