PowerPoints full of vision.
Words like "elevate," "elite," and "excellence" tossed around like cilantro.
And here we are. Still trying to make it through dinner service without the wheels coming off.
You bring a 30/60/90. We bring trauma, duct tape, and shitty spaghetti that still sells.
I've been on both sides of this. I've been the new guy with the plan. I've also been the one watching the new guy with the plan, arms crossed, counting the days until the plan meets reality.
The Bear got this right. Carmy walks in with pedigree and awards and a compulsion to prove something no one asked him to prove. But there's already a team there. People who've been holding the walls up with duct tape and stubbornness. Maybe it was dysfunctional. But it was their dysfunction. Predictable chaos. Known territory. They knew where the landmines were. Which equipment needed a smack to work.
Then suddenly everything changes. No warning. No prep. Just chaos plated as vision.
I've done this to teams. Walked in with a 90-day plan that made perfect sense on paper and no sense to the people who'd been surviving the previous regime. The plan was about the business. The team was about something older. Belonging. Stability. The knowledge that at least this version of broken was familiar.
Day one, you walk in thinking this is a new beginning. They're still cleaning up the last ending.
You see a team. They see a group of people who've adapted around dysfunction. You say "let's rebuild." They ask "with who?" Because they're not sure you see them.
It's not cynicism. It's survival. They've learned to keep moving even when the kitchen's on fire. Clocking every word. Measuring every silence. Wondering if this is the moment things actually change or just another shift that leaves them cleaning up the mess.
Sydney says the quiet part out loud: "I don't need you to like me. I need you to listen to me."
Every inherited team wants to say that to every new leader and almost never does.
The mistake I made, the one Carmy makes, is confusing ambition with fundamentals. You come in hot talking about training, restructuring, redesigning. Looks like a prodigy from the outside. From the inside, the team is watching to see if you'll still be here when things get ugly. Not whether your vision is beautiful, but whether you can survive the dips.
Training isn't transformation. You don't become a different person because someone flew in from Eleven Madison Park and taught you how to torch crème brûlée. You still need to be led. You still need room to ask questions. You still need consistency before you can build confidence.
When Carmy gives Tina his knife before she leaves for school, it's not about steel. It's about seeing someone who's always been capable but never invited to rise. That's the moment. Not the grand strategy. The small recognition that says I see what you've been carrying.
Richie learns this at Ever. Polishing forks. Folding napkins. For the first time, someone shows him that precision is care. That a spotless wine glass can say I see you. It doesn't just make him better at leading the front of house. It makes him better.
I think about my own version of this. The teams I inherited where the best thing I could have done on day one was shut up. Not optimize. Not restructure. Just watch. Learn the rhythm before trying to change the tempo. I didn't always do this. When I didn't, the room told me. Not with words. With silence, missed deadlines, and a particular quality of compliance that looks like agreement but feels like retreat.
I think about the times I came in with vision and no presence. The room could feel the difference. Vision without presence is just pressure. And pressure without trust behind it breaks people.
Trust doesn't come from mission statements. It comes from the moments no one claps for. The Friday night meltdown. The conversation I'd rather skip. Whether I changed my plan after hearing the truth.
From the team's side, leadership doesn't start when the new person says it does. It starts when they can finally exhale.
Carmy had to crash to see it. Locked himself in the walk-in for an entire service. Most leaders have their version of this. The quarter where the grip gets so tight that the thing you're holding starts to break. The moment you realize the room isn't resisting your plan. It's resisting the energy behind it.
The best leaders I've watched, the ones whose teams would run through walls, didn't start by changing the menu. They started by staying in the kitchen long enough to understand why the old menu existed. What it meant to the people who'd been cooking it.
"While you're chasing perfection, you might miss the one call that actually mattered."
Claire says that. She's not talking about restaurants.