By David Potesta
Lately, I’ve been thinking about how often survival can start to feel like leadership. Here’s just one example from my own history.
I remember when of the best managers I ever worked with almost left the restaurant. She was my assistant general manager—smart, dependable and exceptionally good at her job. If something went wrong, I knew she could handle it. She became my right hand.
Outside the restaurant, though, life was becoming harder for her. She struggled with alcohol. It never affected her performance at work, but it affected everything around it. Every so often, we’d sit in my office after a shift and talk. Sometimes, we’d talk about the restaurant; sometimes, we’d just talk about life.
I spent a lot of time coaching her, both personally and professionally. I never felt my job was to fix her. Mostly, I listened. But, as we talked, I’d point out things she hadn’t noticed about herself or about the situations she was describing.
We rarely solved everything in one conversation—that wasn’t really the point. But every now and then, something would click. She’d see one small part of her life differently. You could almost feel the weight come off her shoulders. If one thing could change, maybe other things weren’t as fixed as they seemed, either.
Over time, she told me several times that the pressure of the restaurant was becoming too much. She wasn’t sure she could keep doing it.
I cared deeply about what she was going through. But when I seriously considered the possibility that she might leave, my first thought wasn’t about her—it was about how difficult she would be to replace. My mind immediately started calculating the extra hours I’d have to work, the responsibilities that would fall back on me and how much harder my own life was about to become.
Looking back, I don’t see that moment as a failure. I see it as a window into what pressure had quietly done to me.
If your restaurant is doing well and you feel like you’re managing things just fine, you may not recognize yourself in this story. But there could be people inside your business carrying more than anyone realizes.
It could be a manager who’s quietly drowning but has become very good at hiding it. It could be a shift lead who still shows up every day but has already decided this isn’t where they’ll be a year from now. These undercurrents exist in struggling restaurants, but they can also exist in successful ones.
If you’re the owner lying awake at 2 a.m. running numbers through your head, or the manager who can’t remember the last dinner you made it through without checking your phone, you probably already know what I’m talking about.
Pressure doesn’t always announce itself. Sometimes it simply changes the way we listen. Perhaps an employee tells us they’re struggling, and while they’re still talking, our mind is already calculating what their situation means for next week’s schedule. Or a manager says they’re overwhelmed, and we’re thinking about who will cover if they leave.
After a while, that starts to feel normal. For years, I thought it was leadership. I believed the answer was to carry more, work more and solve more. And, from the outside, it probably looked like I had everything under control.
But inside, it felt very different. Many mornings, I woke up already feeling the weight of the day ahead. Every new problem became another pressure point. I kept moving, because that’s what operators do.
Don’t get me wrong—there were plenty of moments I genuinely loved. I loved taking care of guests, watching a team come together, and seeing people I’d coached begin to grow into themselves.
But one of the most consistent feelings of relief came at the end of the night, when I turned off the lights, walked out the back door and locked it behind me. For the next 12 hours, the restaurant could no longer ask anything from me.
Of course, I’d wake up and do it all over again. At the time, I wouldn’t even have called that survival. I called it leadership.
But the cost of this approach eventually reached far beyond the restaurant. After 27 years of marriage, my wife and I divorced. I missed years with my children that I’ll never get back. Somewhere along the way, I had become so identified with the business that I no longer knew who I was without it. And, like I explained in my last column, none of those costs ever showed up on a profit-and-loss statement.
That’s why I’ve come to believe that turnover, communication problems and management issues aren’t always separate problems. Sometimes they’re symptoms of the same thing.
When we’re surviving, hiring becomes about filling a hole instead of finding the right person. We solve problems for managers instead of developing them because it feels like a faster fix. Little by little, everyone becomes more dependent on the person at the top.
Most operators don’t choose that, but they adapt to it. I know I did.
If this sounds familiar, and if you’re looking for one place to begin, I’d encourage you to do this: The next time an employee tells you they’re struggling, or a manager brings you a difficult problem, pay attention to your first thought. Don’t judge it; just notice it.
Then ask yourself one question: Was I really hearing what this person was trying to tell me, or was I only hearing what their situation was about to require from me?
This question won’t solve everything. But it might help you see one small part of your own leadership differently. In my experience, this simple change in perspective is often where real change begins.
In my next column, I’ll explore how survival quietly becomes an operator’s normal way of leading—and how recognizing that pattern is the first step toward changing it.
David Potesta spent 35 years operating restaurants, including the family pizzeria his father opened in 1975, still in business today after 51 years. He spent more than a decade as a corporate trainer, working with leadership teams across the country. He now works with restaurant operators and franchise groups to build high-performing workplace cultures.
