Coaching and then Counseling

My externship site was a very small restaurant that didn't actually give labels to their employees. So I will say my General Manager was really the guy who trained me and taught me how to pick my way through the restaurant. They were really good about group evaluations wich happened every week, and constantly evaluated us every night on a personal note. Their system for new employees was to coach at first. This made coming in very easy because they told you exactly what they wanted and how they wanted it. Told you what time to come in, when to leave, just about everything. Every night he would identify the nights weaknes and strength. Where we did best and the reason we messed up, and how to avoid it the next service. He would also ask us personally about how other employees felt knowing he would never get everything out of a single person, thus creating a solid idea of where everyone was at, how they felt, where they felt weakest, where they felt strongest. With this knowledge he could pick up a conversation with a person and direct it towards the issue he wanted to get at without being to direct wich kept a lot of people more comfortable. He solved a lot of workplace problems by doing this, and the amount of employees that actually left were very minimal. Most actually came back to work after school, and after graduating. After so much time though, he would change his style into counseling wich I believe is being coached into teaching yourself. Instead of answering a question straightfoward, he would make us figure it out. He would also give us the responcibility to figure out new recipes, try new things, and gave us a lot of room to play. We came up with some neat dessert specials through this method of teaching, and knowing we could be responcible for it, gave us more specials for the actual menu. Because he did this we as a single person could make management desicions where we wouldn't have been able to months previously. He would ask us about these desicions and tell us if we did the rite or wrong thing, and if it was wrong how we should have handeled it. As we got better he was able to spread himself more through he kitchen and check the quality of more work because we had become responcibile enough to be left alone for longer periods of time. His method of teaching and then letting us teach ourselves allowed us to be better aquainted with our jobs and then being able to do them better.