You hired a general manager to get your life back, and somehow you're still the one everyone asks. If that's you, your restaurant manager probably isn't the problem. I've been that owner, and the fix wasn't a better hire. It was a better handover.
For ten years I ran Ojo Rojo, a 250-capacity restaurant and cocktail bar in Bournemouth, named one of the UK's Top 50 Cocktail Bars three years running. Gemma, my general manager, was my number two from a year before we even opened. And for a long time, the place still ran through me.
This is why that happens, and the five steps that turn a manager into someone who actually runs the place. Each one comes with something you can do this week.
Picture a whiteboard. At the top it says OWNER DECIDES EVERYTHING. That line gets crossed out, and underneath, in green, it says MANAGER DECIDES. That's the aim. Not overnight. One decision at a time.
Why your restaurant manager still asks you everything
If your manager keeps bringing you everything, the first place to look isn't at them. It's at how the job got handed over.
Think about how it usually goes. You say, "you do the rota now." On paper, that's an hour's job. But when you write the rota you're also thinking about who's had a hard week, who works well with who, and which nights need a stronger team behind the bar. If all your manager gets is "you do the rota now", they get the hour without the thinking. So it comes back wrong, you take it back, and you decide they can't do it. They could. They just never got the whole job.
I know that from the inside, because I did the rota myself for years. I told myself it was because I had the best overview. That was partly true. What was more true was that I hadn't taught anyone else to do it, and it felt too important to let go of. Keeping it in my hands felt responsible. It felt like leadership.
Then there's the loop, and this is what keeps it alive. You're the person the team brings things to, so they've never built the muscle to handle those things without you. You step back, it gets handled differently from how you'd have done it, and you take that as proof they can't be trusted. So you step back in. Which tells them you're the person to bring things to. Round it goes.
That loop is a founder pattern, and your manager is behaving exactly as they've been trained to behave.
Here's a sign to check. Does your manager ask permission for things they don't need permission for? That usually means that at some point, decisions got overridden after the fact. So checking first became the safe route. Nobody planned it. It just got learned.
This is also why hiring a general manager to "take over operations" so often ends badly. Someone leaves within months, or turns into a messenger. The person was good enough. The decisions never really moved.
So the fix is a better handover, in five steps.
Step 1: Hand over the whole job
Hand over the ability to do the job, along with the task.
When I finally handed the rota over to management, two things happened that I didn't expect. The first was the time. The hours spent doing it, and the hours spent thinking about it: the background load I'd been running in my head, constantly. The second was that the rota got better. It was being done by the people in the building day to day, who could see who was tired and who was thriving, and make the small adjustments only someone in the room can make. My rota, done from the office, was an approximation. Theirs, done from the floor, was the real thing.
But handing something over badly is its own problem, and Christmas bookings are my example. The first time I handed them over, I gave no proper training and no real guidance, just some basic information. It was mayhem. That wasn't down to the team. I'd handed over the task and none of the job. The following year we put a much better system in place.
Most owners write down the tasks and miss the hundreds of small, automatic judgement calls they make every shift. Reading a customer's mood. Knowing which two people shouldn't be on together on a Saturday. Knowing the kitchen's about to go under. Those invisible calls are the actual job. If they're not on the list, they never get handed over.
It doesn't have to start big. Handing stock control to a manager, and rota swaps to supervisors, freed up hours every week for me. And for me, the thing in the way wasn't trust. It was guilt. Guilt about offloading, and about not being the hardest worker in the room.
This week: pick one task that keeps coming back to you. Sit down with your manager and tell them how you decide, along with what to do. What you look at, what you watch for, what would make you change your mind.
Step 2: One named person with real authority
Handing over the thinking only works if everyone knows whose thinking it is.
That means one person the team knows they can go to, who can say yes. A management team who all sort of share it doesn't work. If nobody is clearly in charge, every hard call finds its way back to the one person who clearly is allowed to decide, and that's you.
For me, that person was Gemma. She was my number two from a year before we opened, whether or not she always had the title. Name it. Say it to the team, out loud.
Then give them real authority. Let them make calls you'd have made, and back them publicly when the call was reasonable and the outcome was poor. That last part is the test. Anyone will back a good outcome. Your team is watching what you do when a sensible decision goes badly.
Give someone a checklist and they'll do the checklist, and watch a problem develop right next to it, because it wasn't on the list. Give them the outcome and tell them you'll back them, and they'll handle things you never thought to write down.
Good people don't leave because the work is hard. They leave when they've stopped growing, and nothing stops that faster than an owner who owns every decision in the building.
This week: tell your team who your number two is and what they can decide. Out loud, not in an email.
Step 3: Write down what good looks like
Most staff don't want complete freedom. They want clarity. They want to know the rules of the game, and when they're doing well and when they're drifting. Not micromanaged. Told.
Here's where it goes wrong. Owners write down what to do, and leave out why. If your manager only knows the steps, they'll follow them perfectly until something unusual happens, and then they'll ring you.
So for every standard, write three things:
- What needs to happen.
- Why it matters.
- What good looks like when it's been done well.
Owners almost always leave out that last one, and it's the one that lets someone judge their own work without bringing it back to you.
Go back to those Christmas bookings. The first year, nobody had been shown what good looked like, so they couldn't have hit it. That's what the better system the following year had to fix.
You don't need to do this for everything. If the same question lands on your phone three times a week, that's the first standard to write down. Control says, "I need to do this to make sure it's done right." Clarity says, "If I explain what right looks like, someone else can do it well."
When I hand something over, I use what I call the Clarity Loop:
1. Define the outcome clearly.
2. Give the context.
3. Equip and train.
4. Empower them to make the decisions their way.
5. Reflect and review.
Keep it short. A few clear lines for the things that have to go the same way every time beat a binder nobody opens.
This week: write down the one question you got asked most. What needs to happen, why, and what good looks like. Then hand that page to your manager.
Step 4: Decision limits for your restaurant manager
A manager who knows what good looks like still needs to know how far they can go.
The other mistake is handing over authority without the numbers. If your manager doesn't know your targets and your limits, how are they supposed to make a good decision? That's a handover problem, and it isn't theirs.
So give them a ladder. Anyone on the floor can resolve a guest problem up to a set amount without permission, and they just tell someone afterwards. A supervisor has a higher limit. A manager higher again. You take what's above that. I shared the amounts I used in [how to build a hospitality business that runs itself](https://www.trevorhill.uk/trevors-blog/how-to-build-a-hospitality-business-that-runs-itself).
The numbers matter less than the fact that they exist and everybody knows them. Without a ladder, every judgement call defaults upwards to you. Then you get frustrated at being interrupted over a decision you never actually gave anyone the authority to make. If every road leads back to you, you're the traffic jam.
Put it on one page:
- What they can spend.
- What they can comp.
- What they can change on the rota.
- What still comes to you.
Share your targets with them too. A good decision is only good against a number. And if your team asks permission for small things, this page is the answer. It tells them they don't need to.
This week: write that page. Even a rough one. Sit down with your manager, go through it line by line, and ask them where it's wrong. They'll know.
Step 5: What you do when they get it wrong
This is the step that decides whether the other four hold. Your manager will get a call wrong, and what you do next decides whether this works.
Valentine's Day. The first year I handed it over and wasn't there, I got called in, because everything had gone wrong. The food, the menu, the service, all of it. So I came in and worked the shift.
My first reaction was to step in, and that night I had to. But the fix wasn't taking it back for good. The fix was what I did afterwards: I built a better system for the following year. If you take over every time, you've taught them to stop deciding. If you fix the system, you've taught them to decide better.
It will feel worse before it feels better. There's an awkward middle period, and you'll feel the pull to step back in. That discomfort is the price of the shift. On the other side, when I trusted my managers to handle areas without me, they started coming to me with ideas in place of problems. Delegation didn't make me less important. It made the team more powerful.
In the later years I had a solid management team who could carry the ethos without me if needed. I still ran a shift or two a week, to see what was actually happening, and each handover made the next one easier, because the team got used to deciding and I got used to letting them.
This week: next time something comes back wrong, don't take it back. Ask one question: what would you do differently next time? Then fix the system together and leave the job with them.
The five steps, together
1. Hand over the whole job, thinking included.
2. One named person with real authority.
3. Write down what good looks like.
4. Set the decision limits.
5. When they get one wrong, fix the system and leave the job with them.
Pick one and do it this week. Then look at that whiteboard again: the first line crossed out, the second one a bit more true.
Want help doing this with your own manager?
That's what the Hospitality Handover is for. It's 1:1 coaching for independent hospitality owners where nothing really happens without them. We work on your venue together, so the decisions move out of your head and into your team, and your manager becomes someone who runs the place.
It's by application, and the waitlist hears first. [Join the Hospitality Handover waitlist](https://thehandover.scoreapp.com/).
You can [watch the full video on YouTube](https://youtu.be/qSTglB2EbRo), and read more about how I got here in [my story](https://www.trevorhill.uk/my-story).
This article shares my own experience of running a hospitality business. It is not medical, legal or financial advice. If you are struggling with your mental health, speak to your GP or NHS Talking Therapies.