On today's episode of The QSR guru Podcast, the podcast dedicated to helping you become the quick service restaurant leader you were meant to be. Matt and Tricia are going to discuss the topic of employees becoming hard to deal with.

Sometimes employees become difficult over time, and you start to think that it's them that they're having a problem. But really, if they started out as a great team member and they suddenly become hard to deal with, you need to take an inner look and find out why they become hard to deal with. What Matt and Tricia have noticed over the years is employees become hard to deal with, because we've allowed them to become hard to deal with.

A great example is say you have an employee that is constantly on their phone when they're at work and you have no cell phone policy at your restaurant. Well, why are they on their phone? Odds are it's because they have had their phone out before and you have walked by them and not told them to put their phone away. You have passively approved the behavior in their eyes by not correcting it from the beginning.

So you have allowed your team member to become difficult to deal with. This isn't on them. It is on you for allowing me behavior. So how do you fix that? What do you do?

Say you have a team full of people who have become hard to deal with? How do you solve that problem? Now Matt has an idea that he has used before that helped a lot and what he does there is he will get all of the team members together, do a staff meeting and apologize to them. Apologize for not making sure that all the rules are followed. Apologize for not being the leader that you should be and apologize that you now have to backtrack and change things because you allowed them to get away with things that they shouldn't have been been getting away with.

So if you have a big issue, where a lot of the team is doing things wrong, take a step back and realize that it is probably you passively approving things and you were making your team members hard to deal with.

Now, if it's one team member, take a look at the behavior, see how long it's been going on. Find out if it's something that has always been an issue or if this is new, if it's something that has always been an issue. Again, that is still the leaders responsibility, because they didn't solve the problem from the very beginning or maybe they made a poor hiring choice. Either way that is on the leader. If it is a new development. It's probably time to ask that team member what's going on in their life because for behaviors to change very suddenly, there's more to the story than they have just decided not to do something. Something has changed in their life and as leader it is your responsibility to help your team.

For that and so much more. Listen to today's episode of The QSR guru podcast. The podcast dedicated to helping you become the quick service restaurant leader you were meant to be.

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