If you’ve managed a restaurant, or retail outlet, customer service center, or nearly any company lately, you might be able to relate to an Olive Garden manager’s frustration with people calling off work.

Fed up with staffing challenges, a manager of an Olive Garden restaurant sent the email below to restaurant employees. The manager writes…

“If you’re sick, you need to come prove it to us. If your dog died, you need to bring him in and prove it to us. If it’s a “family emergency” and you can’t say, too bad. Go work somewhere else.”

“Do you know in my 11.5 years at Darden how many days I called off? ZERO. I came in sick. I got in a wreck literally on my to work one time, airbags went off and my car was totaled, but you know what, I made it to work, ON TIME!”

“If you don’t want to work here don’t.”

The email was posted to Reddit yesterday, December 7, 2022 and has nearly 9,000 replies.

Olive Garden saw the obvious leadership failure of the email and a spokesperson said, “We strive to provide a caring and respectful work environment for our team members. This message is not aligned with our company’s values. We can confirm we have parted ways with this manager.”

There is more to it than this one email, however. The email reveals leadership failures beyond the one manager or location.

Here are six additional issues the $4.1 billion company should dig into:

1)   What is causing so many employee call-offs? Olive Garden would benefit from deeper exploration of what employees need in today’s world. Life is different today than it was in 2010 when the fired manager joined the company. Has Olive Garden adapted enough? For example, some local restaurants offer shortened shifts that were not requested five years ago. They adapted. Olive Garden needs to as well.

2)   Do other managers take time off? Why would a manager feel it was brag-worthy to get in a serious car crash on the way to work and still show up on time? There is a mentality that even a car wreck does not earn a break. It is obvious that anyone would be impacted by a car wreck, right? Perhaps physically, but definitely mentally. Managers need breaks too or they will burnout, as evidenced by the email.

3)   How well does messaging from senior leadership align with the company’s core values? What kind of senior leadership messaging tells a store manager they cannot even take an hour to get themselves together after a car wreck?

4)   Why was the fired manager’s extreme attitude supported for 11.5 years? Darden liked this manager’s pushy ways because it helped make money during the good days when people were eager to work there. Now that the email got out publicly, the style is not accepted. I highly doubt that email was the first time someone in upper management ever heard about the manager’s style. Who let that go for 11.5 years? Olive Garden’s parent company, Darden, should be worried about how the people who tolerated that attitude treat other managers and employees.

5)   What kind of leadership training had the manager received over 11.5 years? What kind of mentoring had the person had this year? Everyone knows about the challenges restaurants face. Olive Garden needs to change the way it leads—as far as role modeling, mentoring, expectations, performance management, and more. A manager got so frustrated, they sent that email to everyone. The email sounds like the author is speaking for the location’s team. Perhaps other managers agreed with and supported the message, if not the actual email, before it was sent? Is Olive Garden doing something now for the other burned-out managers at that location? At all of their locations? The managers need help!

6)   The company cut loose a manager they let burnout. Olive Garden failed the employees, other managers, and the email author by allowing the manager to continue leading the restaurant. No doubt there were signs of burnout—why were the signs not acted upon? When the manager reached an unreasonable boiling point, Olive Garden cut them loose. The email was horrendous, but it was just an email to one location’s employees after all. No one died or went to prison because of the manager’s action. Was there no room for empathy and compassion for the burned out manager?

Number One on Olive Garden’s Five Principles is: Hold Each Other to High Standards and Treat Each Other with Respect. Their spokesperson said the manager’s message did not align with their core values. The company’s treatment of the manager did not align either—for years, not just this week.

I love Olive Garden as a customer. From my experience, they have that Principle (“The Guest Wins”) nailed down. Hopefully, the company works on the inward-facing Principles, learns from what happened this week, and does something about it for the sake of all employees.

Look at the list of leadership issues above. Those are not unique to Olive Garden. Are they? Every leader can learn from the tough lesson Olive Garden is learning this week. I hope you do and that you do better for all of your people—managers included.

If you need help, give us a call. The Voyage team can help you prevent the leadership failures Olive Garden is experiencing. We can help repair them too.