Before I was evaluating Fortune 500 org charts, I was managing bar shifts in Athens. Late nights, narrow margins, last-minute call-outs, and the particular kind of chaos that follows a fully booked Saturday in summer.
I learned more about people management in those years than in any classroom or framework I've encountered since.
Accountability is built at the edges
In hospitality, the cost of unclear accountability is immediate and visible. A drink doesn't get made. A table waits. A guest leaves. There's no quarterly review process to obscure what went wrong.
That clarity shapes how teams hold each other to standards. People take ownership not because a job description says so, but because the next person in the chain depends on them — and they know it.
Most office environments dilute that loop. The dependency is real, but it's slower, harder to see, and easier to escape. When I'm helping organisations design roles, I keep coming back to this: how short is the feedback loop between doing your job badly and someone noticing?
Trust is operational
In a kitchen or behind a bar, trust isn't a value statement on the wall. It's whether you can leave the floor for ten minutes without coming back to a problem.
That's still the test I apply to teams. Not "do they like each other?", but "can the leader step away?" If the answer is no, you don't have a team — you have a queue of decisions waiting for one person.
Pressure exposes the design
Quiet weeks make any structure look fine. Saturday nights show you which roles are overloaded, where the handoffs break, who absorbs the slack, and what happens when someone calls in sick.
The same is true at scale. The way an organisation behaves under pressure is the truer picture of its design — not the version on the slide.