Let me start with some tough love. (Sorry, this might sting a little!)
The very thing that got you promoted to a multi-unit role – your ability to run a great operation – could just be what’s holding you back. That’s not a criticism, it’s a pattern. And it’s been documented by Professor Chris Muller, one of the world’s top thinkers on this topic. He calls it the super operator trap, it catches almost everyone at some point.
The super operator isn’t a bad manager. They’re usually a brilliant one. They care deeply, know their business inside out, and their teams feel the benefit of their presence and expertise every single day. The problem is that when you move from running one site to leading across many, brilliance at the operational level is not enough.
The role changes, but if your behaviours do not change with it, you’ll find yourself perpetually busy, perpetually needed, and so perpetually frustrated that you can never quite get ahead.
Working with multi-site leaders in hospitality, the traps are remarkably consistent. Here I’ve outlined the four most common mistakes I see, and the operational disciplines that create a genuine way out of each one.
Multi-unit manager trap one: your conversations never quite get to the point
When you sit down with a site manager, what do you talk about? If the answer involves staffing levels, rota gaps, food prep times, and whatever the most pressing operational issue of the week is, you might be living in this trap. The warning sign, as Muller describes it, is that conversations stay firmly at the tactical level, and the bigger strategic objectives, things like guest satisfaction, team development, and growth, barely get a look in.
The problem this creates is significant, but often invisible. Your site leaders start to see you as someone who cares about the detail, and they respond … by bringing you detail, escalating operational questions, and gradually seeing you as being interested in detail, rather than the why or the where. Over time, that costs you their thinking, because people stop bringing big-picture ideas to someone they do not expect to engage with them at that level.
The discipline that changes this is Clarity of Expectations, and it works because it changes the nature of the conversation before you have even walked in the door.
When you set expectations properly, not just communicating what needs to happen but explaining why it matters and how it connects to what the business is trying to achieve, you shift the level at which you and your managers operate. The Performance Agreement framework is particularly useful here, because it builds a shared understanding of desired results, guidelines, resources, and consequences, and that process is strategic conversation rather than an operational one. If you want your site managers to think like leaders, the conversations you have with them need to model that.
Multi-unit manager trap two: you are fixing things when you should be understanding them
This one is easy to fall into. Mainly because you’ll feel rather virtuous while it is happening! Which is precisely what makes it dangerous. A wait time is spiking, so you add more staff. A customer complaint comes in, so you retrain the team on the spot. A product is not selling, so you run a quick promotion. Each of those responses are reasonable in isolation, but if that’s the primary mode of operation, you’re reacting to symptoms rather than diagnosing causes, and the problems will keep coming back in slightly different forms until you do the deeper work.
Muller is unambiguous on this: the super operator prioritises quick fixes over sustainable, system-wide solutions. The effort goes into managing the surface rather than understanding the underlying patterns, and so nothing structurally changes.
The Period Review is the discipline that breaks this cycle, but only when it is done well. A great period review is not a recap of last month’s numbers; it goes much deeper than that.
The framework asks three things:
1. What did the KPIs and KRAs tell us about the prior period?
2. What were the leadership behaviours behind those results?
3. What do we want to do next?
That middle question is the one most managers skip, and it is the most important one, because numbers don’t move on their own. When you build the habit of asking your site managers to own the narrative of their results, tell you what happened, why it happened, and what they did about it, you stop being the person who spots the problem and start being the person who builds the thinking capability to prevent it. That’s a fundamentally different job, and from experience, it is a much more rewarding one.
Multi-unit manager trap three: you know what is wrong, but nothing changes
This one follows naturally from trap two, and the sequence matters. Let’s say you have done the work. You have run a strong review, identified the root causes, and have a genuinely strategic conversation about what is driving underperformance or where the opportunity lies. That is a great start but knowing what’s wrong and doing something structured about it are different things, and plenty of capable managers are excellent at the first and inconsistent with the second.
The trap here is not lack of insight, but lack of a system for converting insight into forward momentum. Without one, the learning from each review tends to dissipate in the noise of the following week, and by the time the next review comes around, the same themes appear again, maybe slightly reworded, but fundamentally the same.
Proactive Planning is the discipline that bridges the gap. The Big Rock framework asks a direct question: given everything we know about this business right now, what are the two or three things that will make the biggest difference in the next 90 days?
These are committed priorities with lead measures attached, so that progress is trackable rather than hopeful. The 60:30:10 rhythm then holds those priorities in place, with 60 minutes of quarterly planning to set the direction, 30 minutes each week to check alignment and choose the week’s most important activities, and 10 minutes each morning to make sure the daily reality stays connected to the bigger goal. The analysis from your Period Review becomes the foundation for your Big Rock goals, and the planning rhythm ensures those goals aren’t buried under daily noise.
Multi-unit manager trap four: your visits feel more like surveillance than support
I’m a big believer in the power of being present with your teams, but presence without purpose is one of the most common mistakes in multi-site management. The unannounced drop-in, arriving at a site to see what is really going on, checking on standards, making sure everything is being done right, feels proactive and conscientious from the manager’s perspective. From the site manager’s perspective, it can feel very different indeed.
When your visits are unpredictable and inspection-focused, what you tend to get is performance for the visit rather than consistent performance for the guest. Teams tighten up when you arrive and relax when you leave, and you never quite see the real picture. More significantly, you create a dynamic where your presence signals checking rather than supporting, and that erodes trust in ways that are hard to rebuild.
Critical Impact Visits reframe what being on-site is for. The discipline draws a sharp distinction between the seagull visit (swooping in, raising concerns loudly, disappearing), the audit visit (compliance is inspected but development barely gets a look in), and the high-impact visit – which is intentional, structured, developmental, and coaching-focused.
The five-step framework, covering pre-visit preparation, alignment and engagement, walking the site with purpose, coaching the site manager, and closing with clear agreed actions, changes the experience of a visit from both sides. Your site managers know what to expect, they help shape the agenda, and they leave with energy and clarity rather than anxiety about what you might have noticed. Jim Sullivan puts it well: making an appearance is not the same as making a difference, and the Critical Impact Visit framework is precisely what turns one into the other.
This blog is an excerpt from a LinkedIn article by Lee Sheldon. If you want to read the rest and discover some practical next steps, you can read it here: The four mistakes that keep multi-unit managers stuck.
