A restaurant can tell when its manager walks in distracted. The team notices the pace, the tone, and whether anyone has a plan for the night ahead. In Coaching Playbook For Modern Times, Clay David Laugier explores how managers can shape those moments, even if they were promoted before anyone taught them how to lead.
The Moment After the Promotion
Many managers earn their new role by being excellent at their old one. They know the menu, remember regular guests, cover gaps in the schedule, and stay steady during a rush. Then the responsibilities change. They have to develop employees, address repeated mistakes, and make decisions that affect the whole team.
Those tasks can feel especially difficult for someone who learned the job by watching others. A shift lead may know exactly how a station should run while struggling to explain it to a new employee. A store manager may spot a pattern in team performance yet keep postponing the conversation that could address it. Clay writes for those familiar situations.
His two-book series draws on more than twenty years in hospitality, food service, and retail. Its central idea is practical: people lead more confidently when they have a process they can follow and words they can use. Both matter on a busy floor, where managers must respond while guests are waiting and the rest of the team is watching.
Building Habits That Survive the Rush
The first book, The Coaching Playbook: Lead with Heart. Coach with Clarity, focuses on how a manager helps a behavior take hold. Clay introduces the Coaching Loop: Observe, Coach, Apply, Review, and Repeat. The steps give a manager a way to move from noticing a problem to helping an employee practice a better approach, then checking in again.
That last step matters. A helpful conversation during one shift may fade if no one follows up. Clay encourages managers to make coaching an ongoing part of the work, so expectations stay clear when teams, schedules, or locations change.
The book’s S.H.I.F.T. Sequence offers another way to examine recurring problems: See it, Hear it, Install it, Frame it, and Transfer it. For a manager who keeps solving the same issue every week, the sequence creates space to understand what’s happening and put a workable response in place.
Clay applies these tools to the human side of operations, too. He writes about earning trust with a team that’s grown wary of management, correcting an employee with care, and maintaining standards through a difficult shift. Chapters close with a move readers can try at work, making it easier to turn an idea into a habit.
The second book, Set The Tone: What to Say, and How to Lead, When It Matters Most, picks up where a framework alone can leave someone stuck. A manager might understand the need for a conversation and still wonder how to begin it. Across twelve chapters, Clay supplies scripts and tools for pre-shift talks, delayed corrections, and the early days of leading an inherited team.
There’s particular value in that focus on language. The few minutes before service can help a team understand what needs attention. A clear correction can give an employee a fair chance to improve. Clay’s examples bring those moments down to a size a manager can handle during an ordinary workday.
About Author Clay David Laugier
Clay is an author, leadership coach, and operations consultant based in the Hudson Valley, New York. He has worked across food service, hospitality, and retail, from the floor to the general manager’s role. Through Clay Laugier Ventures and Seeded Concepts, he helps operators develop teams and build coaching practices that fit their daily work.
He also cofounded a community café and business incubator in Kingston, New York, with a focus on training and paying people whose potential others had overlooked. That commitment carries through his writing. Clay pays attention to the employee who needs a real opportunity and the manager who wants to do right by their team.
What Tomorrow’s Manager Can Take Away
Coaching Playbook For Modern Times meets managers at a familiar point: they have a shift coming up, people counting on them, and a skill they’re still learning. Book one gives them a coaching process; book two helps them speak when the moment arrives. Available in Kindle and paperback editions on Amazon, the series offers a useful starting point for turning experience on the floor into thoughtful leadership.
We had the privilege of interviewing the author. Here are excerpts from the interview:
Thank you so much for joining us today! Please introduce yourself and tell us what you do.
I’m Clay Laugier. I’m a hospitality and retail coach, an author, and after more than twenty years on the floor, still very much a floor operator myself. I write and publish under Clay David Laugier and run my coaching and content work under Clay Laugier Ventures out of the Hudson Valley in New York. What I do is simple to describe and hard to do well. I coach managers and operators to turn ordinary shifts into places where people actually want to work, and guests actually want to come back. I take the coaching, the systems, and the guest read that most great operators only carry around in their heads, and I make them teachable, so a team can run on a standard instead of running on whoever happens to be working that day. My brand mark is Bigfoot, and that is not an accident. I’ve built a whole career on paying attention to the people and the details everyone else walks right past. Lead with heart, coach with clarity. That’s the whole thing.
Please tell us about your journey.
On the surface, my story looks like a lot of hospitality careers. I started at the ground level and spent more than two decades learning the business the slow way, one shift at a time, across food service and retail. What changed everything was a shift in how I saw the problem. For years I watched good people get blamed for what were really broken systems. Turnover got called a hiring problem when it was almost always a coaching problem. Bad service got called a bad attitude when it was really a missing standard. So I stopped shaming staff and started building systems, and those systems became a coaching philosophy, and that philosophy became two books, Set the Tone and The Coaching Playbook: Lead with Heart. Coach with Clarity. I wrote both of them while still working floors, on purpose, because I never wanted to be one more person teaching leadership from a distance. On the writing side, coaching was never the only thing on my desk. I’m a Hudson Valley native and a lifelong storyteller, and I’m at work on a fiction series rooted in Indigenous and American legends, the old stories this country was built on top of and then mostly forgot. It runs on the same instinct as my coaching. Pay attention to what’s been overlooked, take it seriously, and hand it back to people in a form they can actually use. Bigfoot, folklore, and floor coaching are closer cousins than they look.
What are the strategies that helped you become successful in your journey?
On staying close to the work. The best decision I ever made was refusing to leave the floor. Everything I coach comes from lived experience instead of a slide deck, and operators can feel that difference in about thirty seconds. That is the whole reason my stuff lands. I’m not teaching from a distance; I’m teaching from inside the shift. On building systems instead of leaning on effort, I run a simple loop with everyone I coach: observe, coach, apply, review, repeat. When the system carries the standard, you stop depending on heroics, and you stop burning out your best people to cover for a process nobody ever actually built. Managers hire me because they’re exhausted, and what they usually need isn’t more effort. It’s a system. On treating hospitality as a skill and not a personality trait, I break the guest read down into a few questions anyone on the team can learn. Warmth becomes coachable. Memorable, generous hospitality stops being something you either have, or you don’t, and starts being something you can install in a new hire inside a week. And on integrity, I never put a claim in front of an operator that I can’t personally stand behind. In an industry full of noise and guru nonsense, being the person who only says what’s actually true turns out to be the strongest sales pitch there is.
Any message for our readers
On this one, I’ll keep it short and mean every word. Your team isn’t broken. Your system is. Stop grading your people against a standard you never actually taught them, and start building the system that makes the standard obvious. Lead with heart, coach with clarity, and stay close enough to the work that your team knows you’d never ask them to do something you wouldn’t do yourself. If that hit home, here’s where to find me. Both of my books, Set the Tone and The Coaching Playbook: Lead with Heart. Coach with Clarity, are on Amazon under Clay David Laugier. If you want the system built with you instead of just read about, I coach operators and managers one on one, and you can reach me at claylaugier.com. And if you’re the kind of reader who loves a good American legend, keep an eye out for my fiction. Same eye for the overlooked, pointed at the old stories instead of the schedule. Hashtags
Thank you so much, Clay, for giving us your precious time! We wish you all the best for your journey ahead!
Clay David Laugier is a hospitality and retail coach and the author of Set the Tone and The Coaching Playbook: Lead with Heart. Coach with Clarity, both on Amazon. He coaches operators and managers at claylaugier.com and is at work on a fiction series drawn from Indigenous and American legends.
