This isn't the job I trained for.
I didn't set out to be a manager. I set out to run a good restaurant and build a good agency. But somewhere along the way, managing people became its own full job, and it's not the one I started with. The expectations have shifted so much since I first started working, and they shifted again after COVID, that some days I feel like I'm doing a completely different role than the one I thought I signed up for.
What actually changed
When I started out, the deal felt simple: show up, do the work, earn the trust, move up. Staff today have options I didn't feel like I had at their age, and that's not a complaint, it's just true. People will leave a job that doesn't respect their time, and honestly, they should. But it means the old ways of setting expectations don't land the same way anymore. You can't just post the schedule and assume buy-in. You have to build it.
COVID changed something deeper too. A lot of people came out of it re-evaluating what a job is supposed to cost them. Flexibility, mental health, being treated like a person and not a line on a schedule, those aren't nice-to-haves anymore. They're the baseline. I had to relearn how to lead around that, not against it.
Standards and guidance counselor, same day
Some shifts, I'm the person holding the line: this is how we do things here, this is the standard, no exceptions. Other shifts, I'm sitting with someone twenty years younger than me talking through something going on in their life that has nothing to do with the restaurant, but everything to do with whether they show up tomorrow. Both of those are the job now. I used to think leadership meant picking one mode and staying consistent. I've learned it means knowing which mode the moment calls for.
The grass is greener where you water it
If there's one line I keep coming back to, it's this: the grass is greener where you water it. Not as a lecture I give to staff who are thinking about leaving. As a reminder to myself. Culture, trust and loyalty don't show up because you posted the right values on a wall. They show up because you put in the work every single week, with empathy and accountability in equal measure. Too much of one without the other and it falls apart. I'm still figuring out that balance. I don't think that part ever fully stops.