A promotion can happen in a moment. Learning to lead takes longer, especially when a new manager receives the keys, the schedule, and little guidance. Clay David Laugier’s two-book series, Coaching Playbook For Modern Times, speaks to people facing that first shift in charge.
When the Best Employee Becomes the Manager
In restaurants and retail stores, the next manager is often someone who already knows how to keep the operation moving. They can handle a rush, solve a guest problem, and step in when a teammate needs help. Once promoted, though, they’re responsible for work that calls for a different set of skills: giving feedback, setting expectations, and helping other people perform consistently.
Clay understands how quickly that change can happen. His books address the questions a new shift lead may carry home after a difficult night. How should they correct someone who keeps missing a standard? What can they say to a team that has lost trust in management? How do they keep a useful change in place after the excitement of a rollout fades?
The series treats those questions as part of everyday operations. Its examples come from busy floors, where a full ticket rail or a short-staffed shift leaves little time to search for the perfect response. Clay’s aim is to give managers something they can remember and use while the work is happening.
A System for Coaching, Then Words for the Moment
Book one, The Coaching Playbook: Lead with Heart. Coach with Clarity, gives readers a structure for developing their teams. Its Coaching Loop follows five steps: Observe, Coach, Apply, Review, and Repeat. The sequence encourages a manager to notice a specific behavior, discuss it, give the employee a chance to practice, and check whether the change holds.
A second framework, the S.H.I.F.T. Sequence, asks managers to See it, Hear it, Install it, Frame it, and Transfer it. It’s designed for recurring breakdowns that call for a closer look before a solution is put in place. Together, the frameworks give operators a way to approach coaching across different shifts and locations.
The book also covers situations that can feel personal for a new manager. Clay discusses rebuilding trust after a team has had a poor experience with previous leaders, holding a standard while maintaining a working relationship, and coaching a person who outranks them. Each chapter ends with an action readers can try on their next shift.
Book two, Set The Tone: What to Say, and How to Lead, When It Matters Most, moves into the conversations themselves. It looks at the pre-shift talk, the correction a manager has delayed, and the first month with a team they’ve inherited. Across twelve chapters, Clay offers scripts and tools intended for managers to use in real working conditions.
That practical focus gives the books a natural order. A reader can start with the coaching system, then turn to Set The Tone when they need language for a particular situation. A shift lead looking for help with tomorrow’s conversation can also pick up the second book on its own.
About Author Clay David Laugier
Clay is a hospitality and retail coach, operations consultant, and author based in New York’s Hudson Valley. He has spent more than twenty years working in food service, hospitality, and retail, from floor roles to the general manager’s chair. He writes under Clay David Laugier and runs his coaching and content work through Clay Laugier Ventures.
His work centers on making the habits of experienced operators teachable. Through Clay Laugier Ventures and Seeded Concepts, he works with businesses on team development and behavioral coaching. He also cofounded a community café and business incubator in Kingston, New York, built around training, paid work, and reinvestment in the local community. Those experiences shape his belief that managers should pay close attention to people whose strengths are easy to overlook.
A Better Next Shift
Coaching Playbook For Modern Times offers support for people who’ve been asked to lead before anyone showed them how. Its first book provides repeatable steps; its second helps managers find words for the moments that test them. Both are available in Kindle and paperback editions on Amazon. For the operator preparing to walk onto the floor tomorrow, Clay’s message is encouraging: leadership can be learned, practiced, and improved one shift at a time.
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.