Decisions, Decisions

I’ll be the first to admit that making decisions is a process that I trip over on a frequent basis. I lay out my options, weigh the pros and cons of each choice and proceed to worry and deliberate over the decision for a few days. I’ll discuss it with family and friends and add their opinions to my knowledge bank for each option. Eventually, I’ll make a decision. Sometimes I make the right decision, and sometimes I look back and realize that I should have listened to myself instead of taking everyone else’s opinions into consideration when I chose. Although this is the way that I typically make decisions, I have also been challenged to make quick, on the fly decisions during my few years working in the industry.

The two years that I spent working at Sherwood Oaks was the time that I first started to learn how to make quick decisions. I often worked as a host, assigning residents to tables as they came in. One of the first things you learn when you are training to be a host is the residents that you don’t want to sit together, for whatever reason. It’s fairly easy to know who not to sit together, but it’s another matter altogether to act upon that knowledge. This is especially true when you have room open at a table and you really can’t afford to give any other server another table at the current time because they are all far too busy. Well, following cardinal rule number one of hosting, you’ve got to find another place to put the residents because you know sitting them at your only table with an opening will be problematic. There’s no one solution for every time this situation occurs. I learned to figure out my options, weigh them, and choose what I thought would work best for both the residents and the servers, all in about five seconds, while the residents in question were standing there waiting for their table assignment. I had to learn to make decisions such as the aforementioned because there was no other option. I couldn’t just stand there and hope that one of my supervisors would come and tell me what to do. It wasn’t always easy and there were times that my decisions caused a chain reaction of other events through the dining room. But practice makes perfect and before I left that job, I was confident in my quick decision making abilities.

I also worked as a supervisor at Sherwood Oaks for about a year. In the beginning, I wasn’t asked to make many decisions. I simply followed the procedures laid out for me in training and there was always another supervisor there with me during dinner service to guide me if I had a question or needed to help solve a server dilemma. As time progressed, I began to work service hours by myself so that the other supervisors could have more time off. It was quite a change for me when this happened. I now had to make decisions on my own instead of going to someone else. If one of the residents had a problem with their meal, I was the one who had to decide how to fix it. If one of the servers came to me with an issue, I had to have a solution. Now, it’s not as if I was completely unprepared for any of these situations. I was trained well and was given a chance to observe others doing my job before I was left to my own devices. Typically the solutions to the problems were simple and obvious but every once in a while a challenge would come along. These situations further tested and improved my decision making abilities from what I had already polished by hosting.

Working at Sherwood Oaks was incredibly rewarding for me. I learned an incredible amount in my two years there and I grew as a person, both individually and in the industry. I learned the importance of communication, teamwork, delegation, and as previously discussed, decision making. My experiences there made me a stronger person and gave me a solid decision making base as I launched into my college career.