Developing Job Descriptions for Red Lobster

Red Lobster operates over 670 casual-dining seafood restaurants in the US and Canada, employing more than 63,000 people. When Red Lobster developed a new business strategy to focus on value and improve its image, it established a new vision, mission, and goals for the company. The restaurant chain simplified its menu with the highest-quality seafood it could offer at mid-range prices, traded its restaurants’ tropical themes for a crisp, clean look with white-shirt-and-black-pants uniforms for its employees, and added Northeastern coastal imagery to its menu and Web-site. Executing the new mission and differentiation strategy required hiring fun, hospitality-minded people who shared its values.

Although Red Lobster had not had any problem with hiring restaurant managers, the company felt that the managers it hired did not always reflect Red Lobster’s strategy, vision, and values. The company feels that their old job descriptions do not convey the passion and creativity that the new strategy requires from its employees. They want their job descriptions to help bolster recruitment of the kind of managers that will help advance the mission and create restaurant environments where employees feel motivated and customers feel welcome upon entering the establishment and positive about their experience when they leave.

The Charge

You have been hired as a consultant to help Red Lobster recruit management level staff. They have asked you to design an overall strategy that will help create job descriptions to improve the fit between its new management hires and its new business strategy. Job descriptions should help convey the importance of the Restaurant Manager position within the company and also in the restaurant itself. The process you design will help them, later on, develop other restaurant job descriptions for the service-level staff.

Question

Draw up a job description for the Red Lobster Restaurant Manager position that includes, at a minimum, the following:

Job title

Overall purpose statement - overall description of the broad function and scope of the position

List of duties or tasks performed critical to success

Decision-making requirements

Description of the relationships and roles within the company, including supervisory positions, subordinating roles and other working relationships

List of minimum qualifications and what experience/competencies an ‘ideal candidate’ would possess.