The head of the fish
LaRosa started with store manager training because training them and improving their management skills provides the greatest leverage to build and improve the skills andattitudes of other store employees.
“It’s all about the head of the fish, the leader at the store level and how they interact with their team, because the head of the fish makes it happen,” says LaRosa. “We talkabout it all the time; the head of the fish has to understand and value the people and make sure that from the very first day on the job that they set their people up for successand create the expectations and support and resources around that person that positions them for success.”
The first step was to ask managers what kinds of training they thought would be of most value in a formal program.
“We went to all of the managers and assistant managers, and we asked them, ‘What are the types of classes that you would like made available that you could receive focused,additional training on?’” says LaRosa.
He investigated what other organizations in his industry were doing with training to get ideas for his company.
“It was difficult initially to offer everything that everybody wanted, but we prioritized the list based on inside and outside perspectives and got the program going,” saysLaRosa. “Over time, we’ve added a couple of classes each year.”
LaRosa’s uses in-house professionals to teach some of the classes.
“Many of the classes are taught by people in our organization who are experts in that subject matter, so we may have a leader who always has been superlative at controlling food costs, so he or she leads the food costs brush-up class,” says LaRosa. “Our HR director will lead a number of classes that are related to human resource management.Our finance director will teach classes about profit-and-loss statements, cash balance sheets and things you can do to improve efficiency in your back office work.”
Outside experts such as lawyers are brought in to discuss more complex topics such as regulatory matters.
One of the most successful aspects of the program has been involving managers as trainers and information providers in the training process. LaRosa discovered that managers like to get the firsthand experience of their peers who are working in the restaurants and have demonstrated success. “The managers like to see some of their peers involved in the classes,” says LaRosa. “At the beginning, it was corporate types who were teaching everything. But they told usthey really wanted to hear from their peers.”
Those types of observations led LaRosa’s to form roundtables at the Center for Learning for general managers to address specific topics related to store operations.
“We’ll put a panel in front of the room that are some of the best-in-class, and they’ll just expand on a topic like safe food handling,” says LaRosa.
A critical part of the process that has helped to improve the program has been the use of a process that LaRosa’s uses across the organization to do self-evaluation, solicitfeedback and drive improvement. “We use a lot of quality processes at LaRosa’s,” says LaRosa. “We have a term we call Plus Delta. After any event or significant piece of work, we’ll get a group of peopletogether and do a Plus Delta. The pluses are what went well, what we feel good about. The deltas are the things we need to do better or different.
“After every class, every participant is given a feedback form and we ask, ‘What are the three things you liked about this class, and what do we have to do to make it better?’”LaRosa’s also surveys some employees about their managers to identify additional training needs.
“Another thing we do is a type of 360 survey with all of our managers and our directors once a year,” says LaRosa. “It’s a process where they give a feedback form to six oreight people that they supervise or they work very closely with, and they’re rated in four areas: their communication, their professionalism, the quality of the work they do andtheir accountability. The feedback provider gives a grade, an A, B, C or D. If they give a B or less, they have to provide a comment explaining why they gave the grade.”With the success of its management training efforts, LaRosa is planning to expand them to include the general employee population in its stores.
“When we do our strategic planning, we spend a lot of time looking at strengths and weaknesses,” says LaRosa. “On the weakness sheet, we identify that we have an inconsistent approach to training at the store level. We provide materials for them, books, videotapes and signage, but it’s really up to each store to do the training.”
LaRosa’s strategic plan for this year includes providing improved training for its store-l
evel
employees below the management level. Part of the reason is to leverage a newIT system slated to go online at LaRosa’s later this year. “That new system is going to provide some capabilities that will allow us to understand who our best customers are, what the preferences of our guests are,” says LaRosa.“So we want to make sure we put in some training in advance of that equipment hitting the stores.”