1. What have you found most challenging as a leader?

Building the right culture is vital for any organization. Unfortunately, productivity is prioritised over culture but they are both interlinked. It takes months and sometimes years to imrpive work culture to boost productivity.

2. How did you become a leader? Can you please briefly tell the story?

I started off as a regular crew member in a pizza store. I worked hard and learnt everything the business had to offer and was eventually promoted as a manager. Being business minded, I evetually (some 5 years after) had saved up enough to buy into the franchise and had 3 restaurants in 3 different states. Once I had adequate returns on my investments, I decided to take the next step and enter corporate and help other franchisees grow their businesses and thus moved into operations.

3. How do you structure your work days from waking up to going to sleep?

I am a firm believer in planning. I usually pre plan my days. I wake up at 5 am, and adjust to any irregularities and priorities for the day. I usually try to upskill my crew and thus spend atleast 2 hours a day training my Managment crew across a restaurant. I work during peaks(2 hours of rush) with my crew to better understand their mindset and create a bench plan for what my tram can do and where I need to focus. I do about 2 hours of admin, making sure my orders, inventories and HR is up-to-date.

I take about 30 mins to walk around a restaurant and check for anything that could potentially affect guest experience and if I find anything concerning, I fix it straight away. And finally, I spend a few hours making sure my team is better set up for the rest if the day and for tomorrow, and I plan what I need to do the next day and sometimes for next week.

4. What's a recent leadership lesson you've learned for the first time or been reminded of?

"Every manager gets the team they deserve"

I was reminded of this important lesson whule I was going through the figuers of the restaurant for the past year. We had major improvements across the restaurant due to good leadership and constant upskilling.

Have you ever seen a high performing team with an incompetent manager? Or have you ever seen an incompetent team with a high performing manager? - this does not exist.

5. What's one book that has had a profound impact on your leadership so far? Can you please briefly tell the story of how that book impacted your leadership?

Crucial conversations : Tools of talking when stakes are high.

This book has been an immense help to me specially in dealing with tense situtations. After reading the book, I started focusing on creating an environment of safety during my discussions when things get heated up, to ensure that the conversarions stay to the point and both parties can safely state their point of views so we can achieve a rwsolution of a atart of one.

This books is all about staying in control of your emotions when it matters.

6. If you could only give one piece of advice to a young leader, what would you say to them?

Do not be afraid to make mistakes. Ask yourselves "Are you good enough to get better". Mistakes are teachers we get for free. Everytime you make a mistake or when thungs go wrong, try to trace it back to where it started, fix it and run eith it again to make new mistakes. Keep doing this for long enough, and you will run of of mistakes to make.

7. What is one meaningful story that comes to mind from your time as a leader, so far?

I once took over a restaurant that was doing mediocre figures, had toxic culture, no customer service and was overall performing poorly.

Once I spent enough time with the crew, I realised that the crew were not trained properly. It wasnt that they did not want to excel, but they lacked the training to do so.

Once I gave them the information, tools and training to excel, we saw the whole restaurant transform. We staryed doing bigger numbers, fewer complaints, better culture and in general we did better.

Although this took nearly a year to happen, but the way my crew at the time stepped up and came out of their shells was amazing to see, and all it took was a bit of training and positive reinforcement.