Team or Family?

Why the Foodservice and Hospitality Industry Needs to Stop Romanticizing "Family" and Start Building Real Teams…

You've heard it a thousand times. Maybe you've even said it yourself, standing in the middle of a pre-shift huddle with your crew: "We're not just coworkers here. We're family."

It sounds warm. It sounds loyal. It feels like the kind of thing that should hold a restaurant together through a brutal Saturday night, a skeleton crew on a holiday weekend, or a walk-in cooler that decides to die at 4:45 p.m. on a Friday.

But here's the uncomfortable truth: calling your staff "family" might be one of the most damaging things you can do as a leader in this industry.

Simon Sinek, the bestselling author and leadership thinker behind Leaders Eat Last and The Infinite Game, has built an entire philosophy around this distinction. His argument is sharp and direct: a team is built on trust, accountability, and shared purpose. A family is built on unconditional obligation. And in business, confusing the two creates dysfunction that bleeds into every plate you serve, every guest interaction, and every P&L statement you review at month's end.

As Sinek himself puts it, a team is not simply a group of people working together. It is a group of people who trust each other. That distinction matters enormously in an industry where the average annual employee turnover rate exceeds 75 percent.

THE TURNOVER CRISIS NOBODY CAN AFFORD TO IGNORE

Let's put some real numbers behind this conversation. The foodservice and hospitality industry continues to lead every other sector in the United States for employee turnover. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the leisure and hospitality category averaged 5.8 percent in monthly separations as of mid-2024, the highest rate across all industries. Annualized, that means roughly 70 to 75 percent of the workforce is cycling through the door every single year.

Between January and April of 2024 alone, nearly three million hospitality workers quit, a rate 204 percent above the national average. Quick-service turnover for hourly employees hit 135 percent in the third quarter of 2024. Even full-service restaurants saw hourly turnover running at 96 percent during the same period.

And it's not cheap. According to Black Box Intelligence, the average hard cost to replace a single hourly employee is now $2,305. Replacing a non-GM manager costs $10,518. Replacing a General Manager? That runs $16,770 walking out the door. Cornell's Center for Hospitality Research puts the full average cost of turning over a single front-line hospitality employee at about $5,864 when you factor in recruiting, training, lost productivity, and service disruption.

These numbers are not abstractions. They are the difference between profitability and failure in an industry that already operates on razor-thin margins.

So when leaders default to the "we're a family" script, the question becomes: is that language actually helping retain your people, or is it masking a culture that hasn't earned the loyalty it expects?

THE PROBLEM WITH "FAMILY"

When a restaurant operator tells their team "we're family," what they usually mean is: I care about you. I want you to feel like you belong. I want you to go the extra mile because this place matters.

Those are admirable intentions. But the word "family" carries obligations that don't translate well to the employer-employee relationship.

In a family, you don't fire your brother because he can't keep up on the line. You don't let your cousin go because sales are down 12 percent. You don't restructure your sister out of a position because the business model changed.

But in a restaurant? You have to make those decisions. And when you've spent months telling someone they're family, those decisions feel like betrayal. To them and to everyone watching.

Sinek has articulated this tension brilliantly. He argues that the obligation of a leader is not to create unconditional bonds but to build environments where people feel safe, valued, and motivated to contribute their best work. Leadership, as Sinek frames it, is about taking care of those in your charge, not about being in charge.

Danny Meyer, the legendary restaurateur behind Shake Shack, Union Square Cafe, and Gramercy Tavern, offers the foodservice industry's most powerful counterpoint to the "family" myth. Meyer's philosophy of Enlightened Hospitality puts employees first. Before guests. Before the community. Before suppliers. Before investors. But he doesn't call them family. He calls them a team. And he holds that team to extraordinarily high standards.

Meyer has said that in all the years he's been in business, his restaurants have never succeeded at making customers any happier than staff members felt coming to work. The input to what he calls the "virtuous cycle" is whether leadership created conditions for people to thrive. Did they provide servant leadership? Did they give people the tools they needed? Did they hire for emotional intelligence, what Meyer calls the "hospitality quotient," weighting it at 51 percent, with technical skill making up the other 49?

That is not the language of family. That is the language of intentional, high-performance team building.

WHAT THE DATA SAYS ABOUT WHAT EMPLOYEES ACTUALLY WANT

Here's where the "family vs. team" debate meets hard evidence from inside our industry.

A 2024 report from 7shifts on restaurant employee engagement found that 58 percent of respondents said coworkers and camaraderie were the primary drivers of their engagement at work. Not the paycheck. Not the schedule. The people around them and the feeling of being connected to a crew.

But the same report found that 45 percent of employees who quit did so because of poor management or negative interactions with supervisors. They didn't leave the restaurant. They left the manager.

Sixty percent of employees indicated they would stay longer at a job if there were clear opportunities for career advancement. Among workers aged 24 to 35, a full quarter see themselves as lifers in the industry, but only if they can see a future.

Gallup's global research reinforces this at a macro level. Organizations with highly engaged employees see turnover drop by 51 percent, productivity increase by 23 percent, and employee well-being improve by 68 percent. A five percent increase in employee engagement correlates with a three percent increase in customer loyalty growth, an equation that is especially potent in hospitality, where every single interaction between a team member and a guest either builds or erodes your brand.

None of these outcomes are driven by telling people they're family. They're driven by trust, clarity, development, and accountability. The building blocks of a real team.

SO DOES SIMON SINEK UNDERSTAND OUR INDUSTRY?

This is the question operators ask all the time. Sure, Sinek's ideas sound great on a TED stage. But does he get what it's like to run a kitchen at midnight on New Year's Eve with two call-outs and a busted hood vent?

Fair point. Sinek isn't a restaurateur. He hasn't broken down a line station or run food when the expo caller quit mid-service.

But here's the thing: the principles he teaches aren't industry-specific. They're human-specific. And the foodservice and hospitality industry is, above all, a people business. Danny Meyer understood this when he established that the first and most important application of hospitality is to the people who work for you, then, in descending order, to guests, community, suppliers, and investors.

Sinek's insight that great companies hire already motivated people and then inspire them maps directly onto the best operators in our space. The ones with the lowest turnover, the highest guest satisfaction scores, and the strongest teams aren't running their kitchens like a family reunion. They're running them like elite units where every person knows their role, trusts the person next to them, and understands the mission.

When 64 percent of hospitality managers report seeing employees quit specifically because of burnout, and nearly half of departing workers cite toxic management as the reason, Sinek's framework lands with serious weight. Great leaders sacrifice the numbers to save the people. Poor leaders sacrifice the people to save the numbers.

BUILDING A TEAM, NOT A FAMILY: WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE IN PRACTICE

If you're ready to move past the "family" label and build something that actually works, here's where to start.

Hire for character, then train for skill. Meyer's 51 percent rule, weighting emotional intelligence above technical ability, isn't soft. It's strategic. You can teach someone to run a POS system. You can't teach empathy, curiosity, or integrity.

Create psychological safety. Sinek's concept of the Circle of Safety means your team needs to know that honest mistakes won't get them publicly humiliated. When people feel safe, they communicate problems early, take ownership, and innovate. When they're scared, they hide, cover up, and eventually leave.

Invest in development. Sixty percent of restaurant employees say clear advancement paths would keep them longer. If your only career path is "keep doing what you're doing until you burn out," you will keep losing your best people to industries that offer more.

Hold people accountable. This is where "family" culture breaks down completely. Families tolerate dysfunction. Teams address it. If someone is consistently underperforming, dragging morale down, or violating the culture, a team-oriented leader deals with it directly. With compassion, but with clarity.

Lead by example in the trenches. In our industry, your team watches everything you do. If you're willing to jump on the line, run food, or stay late to help close, that earns more trust than any motivational speech.

What’s Next then…

The foodservice and hospitality industry doesn't need more leaders telling their employees they're "family." It needs leaders who build teams that people are proud to belong to. Teams where trust is earned, expectations are clear, growth is possible, and the mission is shared.

Simon Sinek may not have ever worked a double on a Friday night. But his core insight, that people don't need to be loved unconditionally at work but need to feel trusted, valued, and safe, is exactly what this industry has been starving for.

Danny Meyer proved it can work at the highest level of our business. The data proves it drives retention, profitability, and guest satisfaction.

The question isn't whether you should treat your people like a team or a family.

The question is whether you're willing to do the harder, more honest work of building a team that doesn't need to be called a family, because the culture speaks for itself.

SOURCES

Canada's Restaurant Guy writes for operators, leaders, and professionals across the foodservice and hospitality industry.