When I started in an HR role in a hotel, a manager had been complaining for months about one team member’s performance. I was told that every week they brought another example and every week the same pattern repeated. Frustration, pressure on the team, and no conversation with the person at the centre of it all.
My first question was when they had actually spoken to the employee, the answer was simple. “I haven’t”
This story shows up in different forms across customer facing businesses, but this one came from a hotel restaurant. A senior waiter with years of service behind him. Customers genuinely loved him, regulars asked for him by name. He remembered preferences, built rapport quickly, and had a genuine warmth that can’t be taught in a training room.
On paper, he looked like a valuable long serving team member. The kind of person you don’t want to lose. In practice, the picture was more complicated. His service was slow, not in occasional moments, but consistently across shifts. Tables waited longer than they should have and orders (often incorrect) took longer to reach the kitchen. The rhythm of service around him never quite flowed in the same way as the rest of the team.
Alongside that, mistakes started to build. At first they were small things, missed side dishes, incorrect drinks, orders needing correction. Over time they became more visible. Re-done bills, food sent back, quiet fixes made by colleagues before customers noticed. None of it catastrophic on its own, but together it created pressure that others had to absorb.
That pressure always lands somewhere. In this case it landed on the rest of the team. Other waiters started compensating without being asked. They checked orders twice, picked up tables that were falling behind, stayed longer after shifts to help reset the restaurant. Over time, frustration built, not loud, not confrontational, but present in the way people spoke to each other at the end of a long shift when they are carrying more than their share of the workload.
The managers saw it.
They talked about it often.
But nothing changed.
The reason wasn’t lack of awareness; it was avoidance. The waiter had been there for years and he was liked by the managing director. Customers left glowing feedback about him and always asked after him if has on a day off. In a hospitality environment, that combination carries real weight. It made managers hesitant. They didn’t want to risk damaging a relationship with someone senior over a waiter who, from the outside, still looked like a strong asset.
So the issue stayed exactly where it was. Known, discussed, and untouched.
When I got involved, the first question wasn’t about the person. It was about the role. What does this job actually require when it is done well, consistently, across a busy service? The answer wasn’t personality or charm. Those things matter, but they are not the full job. The role requires speed, accuracy, teamwork, and the ability to maintain flow during peak service without others having to step in to compensate.
That reframed everything, because once you define the job properly, you stop evaluating someone based on history or likability and start looking at performance against clear expectations.
The first step I suggested was a straightforward conversation, but one that had been avoided for far too long. Private, factual, and calm. No build-up, no frustration finally being released, just clarity. The manager needed to explain what they were observing in specific terms. Slower table turnover compared to peers and a higher rate of order errors. They need to explain the impact on colleagues during busy shifts. Not opinion, not frustration, just what was happening in the real world.
Then came the part that is often missed in situations like this, which is listening. Asking him what he thought was going on. In many long serving roles, people develop their own internal explanation for how they work best. In this case, he genuinely believed he was being careful and thorough. He thought speed would compromise quality. He had no idea that the rest of the team were consistently adjusting around him to keep service moving. Probably because nobody had spoken to him about this before.
“Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”
Maya Angelou
That gap between intention and impact is where most performance issues sit.
Once that was clear, expectations needed to be reset in practical terms. Not vague language about “improving” or “speeding up”, but specific standards tied to the job.
- Timeframes for table handovers during busy service.
- Accuracy expectations for orders.
- Clear ownership of sections without relying on colleagues to absorb delays.
- Simple, observable behaviours that everyone could see and measure in real time.
Alongside that, support mattered, not punishment. A period of shadowing a high performing colleague during peak service so he could see pace in action. Light touch feedback during shifts rather than waiting for end of week conversations that arrive too late to be useful. Small adjustments that gave him a clearer sense of what good looked like in practice, not theory.
The more difficult conversation sat underneath all of this and this was about fit. Sometimes there are situations where someone’s strengths are real but not aligned with the demands of the role they are in. His warmth with customers wasn’t in question. It was one of the reasons he had stayed so long and been appreciated by guests and senior leadership. But warmth alone does not carry a busy service.
So part of the plan was about exploring alternatives if improvement didn’t happen. A different type of role within the hotel where his strengths would add value without the operational pressure of fast paced service. A greeting or guest welcome role was one option. A reduced section during peak times was another. The aim wasn’t to push him out, but to stop forcing him into a role that consistently exposed a gap in his capability.
What mattered most was that the managers finally moved from observation (and complaining!) to action.
“Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.”
Peter Drucker
Situations like this rarely fail because managers don’t care. They fail because they care about the wrong thing at the expense of clarity. Likeability, history, customer feedback and internal relationships all influence decisions, even when performance is slipping in front of everyone’s eyes. It feels easier to hope the issue settles itself than to confront it directly.
But it never settles, it just shifts and in this case the pressure moved onto the rest of the team. The standards drifted slowly and the frustration built quietly. Customers may still have a good experience, but the cost sits behind the scenes in morale, consistency and workload.
The original problem was never the waiter’s personality. It was the absence of a clear, early conversation about performance. Once that conversation finally happened, everything else became easier to deal with. Not necessarily comfortable or effortless, but clear. And clarity is what most teams are missing long before anyone starts talking about “common sense” or attitude.
