The Boomerang Manager: Real Life

From reading Chapters one, two and three, the one topic that really caught my attention was the reading on the boomerang manager. I had viewed this situation first hand while working. Yet, this occurrence did not take place while I was on extern. In fact, this situation happened before I came to The Culinary Institute of America.

Before college, I had been working at Panera Bread for two and a half years. When I first started working there, we had a great group of three managers. However, as many may know, location transfers within a hospitality corporation are frequent and it wasn’t long before every manager that I ever really enjoyed working with was no longer there. Chris, a manager that I really enjoyed working with was eventually transferred. However, when I first began working there, Chris was only an associate trainer. He was the one that trained me through my first couple of days there. He had a great personality that all of our guests really appreciated and his sense of humor was popular within our close-knit group of employees. He had a game face on whenever needed and he was always there for his fellow co-workers. However, it came the day that he was promoted to closing supervisor and his new authority was a threat to his former co-workers. As I watched this situation, I began noticing the struggle that Chris was having with his new authority. Many of my co-workers did not take him seriously as a closing manager because of their past relationships with him. He was the “funny guy” to them. They couldn’t possibly think that he was possible of any real authority. But in this case, they were wrong. Chris was perfectly capable of a management position. The only problem was the other employees just didn’t view him as a “higher up”. It took a few months and many conversations between these unbelieving employees to really get the respect that Chris needed. He kept his past relationships strong and he showed them that even though he had a funny personality, this did not mean that he could not supervise and get the work done.