How important is your staff to your restaurant? To a large degree your staff "is" your restaurant. The quality of the interaction of the staff with your guests is just one of many areas your people can either make or break your business.

Your staff not only has a lot to do with the success of your restaurant but the quality of your life too. Dealing with people can be agony or ecstasy, the source of your greatest frustrations or your most gratifying accomplishments.

Besides providing you with many useful ideas and resources that deal with the routine and administrative functions of staffing the restaurant, it's our goal to enhance your ability to effectively interact, direct and work with people. Most of us never got any good people training along the way. Like Bill Marvin, the Restaurant Doctor says, "when we go into management positions we're just expected to understand what people are all about, it's like, you are one, so well you should know."

The problem is that most of us don't intuitively know what makes people tick and as a result get involved in all sorts of counterproductive and self-defeating approaches in managing and dealing with people.

In the past, some operators got away with having a people skills deficit because they were used to having a constant source of disposable labor. If an employee didn't work out, you could count on plenty of other applicants eager to jump on board. As you know those days are gone, and today the reality is that you need good people more than they need you.

This section will give you practical ideas to get more applicants, do a better job of selecting good people to join your team and how to maintain a productive, enjoyable working environment so people will want to stay and not leave you for a quarter more an hour.