Run The Region

Mentoring 21 General Managers Without Micromanaging Any

Twenty-one franchise units across six states. A rhythm you can hold, and the exact moment you become their second GM without meaning to. The coaching cadence that scaled, and the moves that quietly stopped working when I forgot to be patient.

Kiyong (Eric) Lee·Operations Executive·August 2026·9 min read

The short version

Coaching 21 general managers is not 21 coaching relationships. It is one rhythm that all 21 can rely on.
The rhythm is weekly 30-minute one-on-ones, a monthly regional operating review, a quarterly 90-minute development conversation, and a twice-yearly skip-level with the shift leads.
Micromanagement happens between the touchpoints, when you step in to "help" because the weekly meeting felt too far away.
The three coaching moves that scale: question first, one thing per week, self-diagnosis before advice.
The two mistakes I kept making: writing schedules for weak GMs, and helping during service. Both taught the GM that when things get hard, I would do the work.

I inherited 21 franchise units at Hana Group across 6 states. The P&L was $36M. The units sat inside Walmart, Sam's Club, Whole Foods, and Target footprints, which meant the operating environment was not mine to design and the GM was the entire management structure on the ground. If a GM was strong, the unit was strong. If a GM was drifting, nobody at the location was going to catch it before I did.

The instinct with 21 GMs is to divide your attention. Spend more time with the ones who need it. Pull back from the ones who are humming. That instinct produces a familiar failure mode: you become the substitute GM at the four units that are hurting, and the seventeen that were humming quietly stop humming because you are no longer paying attention to them. The average holds for a quarter. Then it breaks.

The move I made, after burning a full quarter learning what not to do, was the opposite. Same rhythm for every GM. Same weekly slot, same monthly review, same quarterly development conversation. Not more time for the weak GMs. Different questions for the weak GMs, inside the same rhythm.

Why 21 GMs is different from 5

At five GMs you can carry the coaching in your head. You know each GM's kids, their commute, the piece of equipment they are frustrated with, what they said in the last review. You can text them when you think of it. Coaching feels warm and personal because there are only five relationships.

At 21 GMs, if you try to carry it in your head, you will drop the ones who need you most. Not because you do not care. Because a human brain does not track 21 evolving contexts in parallel. So the coaching has to move out of your head and into a structure. The structure is not colder than the five-GM version. It is what makes the twenty-one-GM version possible without any of them getting quietly abandoned.

The moment your GM count crosses roughly ten, the rhythm is the coaching. Anything you do outside the rhythm is a bonus for them and a bottleneck for you.

The four-part rhythm that scaled

Here is what actually went on the calendar at Hana. Every piece is boring by design. Boring is what holds.

Fig. 1 · The four-part rhythm. Same for all 21.

The weekly 30-minute one-on-one

Same day, same time, same 30 minutes, for every GM on your list. The standing agenda is three items: last week's three numbers (labor as a percent of sales, food cost, top variance), this week's one thing to fix, one blocker they need you to remove. The GM runs the meeting. You listen more than you talk.

Thirty minutes times 21 GMs is 10.5 hours of one-on-one time per week. That is a lot of your calendar. It is also non-negotiable. If you cannot protect ten hours a week for standing GM coaching, you are running too many units for one seat and you need a district layer under you. That is a real answer, not a failure.

The monthly regional operating review

Once a month, all 21 GMs in a room, in person if geography allows and on a call if it does not. Each GM presents last month's P&L and next month's plan in five minutes. The rest of the room listens and asks one question each. That is it. No PowerPoint theater. No motivational speaker.

The reason this works is not the review itself. It is that no GM wants to stand up in front of the other twenty and explain why their labor variance was 6 points high for the second month running. Peer accountability does more work than manager accountability, and it does it without you having to be the enforcer.

The quarterly 90-minute development conversation

This one is separate on purpose. Ninety minutes, once a quarter, and the P&L is not on the agenda. Where does this GM want to be in two years? What skill are they building this quarter and what is the practice ground for it? What do they need from me from my seat? Written down. Reviewed the next quarter. A one-page document that lives in a shared folder.

Most regional operators never book this conversation because it feels soft next to the weekly numbers meeting. That is exactly why it matters. If the only conversation you have with a GM is about the P&L, the GM correctly concludes that you care about the number and not the person running it. And people who feel like a number treat the P&L like a number.

The skip-level with the shift leads

Twice a year, with the GM's advance knowledge, sit with the shift leads under each GM without the GM in the room. Not to catch anyone. To hear what the GM cannot hear. The shift leads know things: which prep cook is quietly holding the kitchen together, which piece of equipment breaks every Saturday, which product complaint keeps recurring at close. That signal is regional intelligence you cannot get any other way.

Tell the GM in advance. Debrief the GM afterward on themes, not on individuals. The skip-level is a coaching tool for you, not a surveillance tool.

What NOT to do: be their unit's second GM

This is the trap. It looks like leadership. It feels like leadership. It is not leadership. It is bottleneck creation with good intentions.

The move usually starts small. A GM is struggling with the schedule, so you rebuild it for them one week to "show them how." Then a Friday service goes sideways at a unit and you drive over to help. Then the labor variance report at another unit does not add up and you dig into the raw punches for them. Each of those decisions, in isolation, looks like you being a helpful boss. In aggregate, they teach the GM one lesson: when the work gets hard, my regional director will step in and do it for me.

I did all three of those things in my first two quarters at Hana. Every one of them made me feel productive. Every one of them made the GM weaker. The GM whose schedule I wrote never learned to write one. The GM whose Friday I rescued never learned to hold a Friday. The GM whose variance report I fixed never learned to read one.

The first time is a rescue. The second time is a failure of teaching. The third time is you telling the GM they do not have to learn.

Three coaching moves that actually scale

The rhythm is the container. Inside the container, three specific moves make the coaching stick at scale.

Question first

When a GM brings you a problem, do not give them the answer. Ask them what they think is causing it. Wait through the silence. Silence is where the thinking happens, and the thinking is the point. Most regional directors fill silence because it feels awkward. The GM was about to say something interesting until you jumped in.

The pattern I use: "What do you think is going on there?" then "What have you already tried?" then "What would you try next?" Three questions. In most cases the GM works out the answer on their own inside those three questions, and the answer they work out is one they will actually implement, because it is theirs.

One thing per week

At the end of every weekly one-on-one, the GM leaves with exactly one thing to fix in the coming week. Not three. Not a list. One. If they fix it, we build on it next week. If they do not, we understand why before we add anything else.

Most coaching fails not because the ideas are bad but because there are too many of them. A GM who is trying to fix five things fixes zero. A GM who is fixing one thing per week for a year fixes fifty things. Fifty things is a transformed unit.

Self-diagnosis before advice

When a GM's numbers slip, do not walk in with a diagnosis. Ask them to diagnose it first. "Your food cost was 3 points high last month. What do you think happened?" The GM almost always knows. They knew before you asked. Your job is not to tell them the answer. Your job is to make it safe for them to say the answer out loud.

Once they have named the cause, the fix is theirs to build. Then you can ask "What are you going to do about it?" and get a real plan rather than a compliance plan.

The development plan template

One page. Reviewed every quarter. Updated in writing. Four sections:

The two-year target. Where does this GM want to be by their next birthday times two? Multi-unit leader, corporate operations, own restaurant, stay right here and be excellent. All of those are valid answers. The point is that they have named it in writing.
The skill they are building this quarter. One skill. Concrete. Something like "run a monthly ordering forecast without the corporate template" or "hold a difficult conversation with an underperforming shift lead." The practice ground is specified.
The shadowing experience for the year. One senior person they will spend two days with this year. Could be another GM in the region who is strong on the exact skill they are building. Could be a corporate function they need exposure to. Booked and dated.
What I owe them from my seat. The GM tells you what they need from you. Not the other way around. This is where you find out you have been unclear on decision rights, or that your monthly report is not answering the question they actually have. Write it down. Deliver it.

What I got wrong

Three specific mistakes in my first year with 21 GMs at Hana. Naming them because the fix only shows up if the mistake gets named.

First, I wrote schedules for two of the weakest GMs for a full month. I told myself I was showing them how. What I was actually doing was making myself feel useful and making them feel dependent. Both of those GMs plateaued while I was writing their schedules. One of them turned around within six weeks after I stopped and asked them to bring me their draft schedule every Sunday for me to react to.

Second, I "helped" during service at three units in the first quarter. I stood at the pass. I expedited. I felt like an operator. The GMs at those units learned that when things got busy, the regional director would show up and take over the pass, which meant they never had to build the muscle of running the pass under pressure themselves. That was a full quarter of teaching wasted.

Third, I skipped the quarterly development conversation with two of my strongest GMs because they were "doing fine" and I had bandwidth issues. One of them left within six months for a competitor who booked the conversation I did not. The lesson is that the strongest GMs need the development conversation the most, not the least, because they are the ones with real market options and they are watching to see whether you invest in them or take them for granted.

The point

Coaching 21 general managers is not a superpower and it is not a personality trait. It is a rhythm. Same day, same time, same agenda, same document. Boring by design. Every GM gets the same container. Different questions inside the container. Fewer answers. More silences.

The regional operator who tries to be a personal mentor to 21 people fails at 21 mentoring relationships. The regional operator who installs one rhythm and stays out of the room between the touchpoints builds 21 GMs who can run their units without them. Those are the GMs you can eventually promote. Those are the units that keep humming when you move on.

Cadence beats charisma. It is true at the P&L level and it is true at the coaching level. The rhythm is the coaching.

Coaching a region right now?

I work with regional operators taking on their first 15+ unit portfolio and with groups building the district layer under a stretched regional seat. If you are trying to figure out the rhythm that works at your unit count, I am happy to compare notes.

Get in touch

Questions people ask

How do you mentor 21 general managers without micromanaging them?

You install a rhythm they can rely on and then you stay out of the room the rest of the time. The rhythm is a weekly 30-minute one-on-one, a monthly regional operating review with every GM in the room, a quarterly 90-minute development conversation, and a skip-level with the shift leads twice a year. Between those touchpoints you resist the urge to solve problems for them. The rhythm carries the coaching. Presence between the rhythm carries the micromanagement.

What is the biggest coaching mistake a regional director makes with a weak general manager?

Becoming their second GM. It usually starts with writing the schedule for them one week, then stepping in during a rough Friday service, then reviewing the labor variance with them because they were not going to catch it. Each of those feels like coaching in the moment. What it actually teaches the GM is that when things get hard, you will do the work. The right move is to ask them what they would do, wait through the silence, and let them decide with you as a sounding board rather than a substitute.

What is the right cadence for a regional director's one-on-one with a general manager?

Thirty minutes, weekly, same day and same time, no exceptions. Standing agenda: last week's three numbers, this week's one thing to fix, one blocker they need removed. The GM runs the meeting. You listen more than you talk. The consistency of the slot is what makes it work. When the meeting is moved or shortened, the GM learns that coaching is optional.

How do you develop a general manager beyond the P&L?

A quarterly 90-minute conversation that has nothing to do with the P&L. Where they want to be in two years, what skill they are building this quarter, what obstacles they need you to remove. Written down. Reviewed the next quarter. The P&L is the day job. Development is a different conversation, and if you never book it, the GM correctly concludes that you only care about the number, not the person running it.

Should you do skip-level meetings with the shift leaders under your general managers?

Yes, twice a year, with the GM's knowledge and consent. Not to catch the GM. To see what the GM sees and to see what the GM does not see. Shift leads know things the GM does not: which prep cook is quietly running the kitchen, which product complaint keeps recurring at close, which piece of equipment breaks every Saturday. That signal is regional intelligence you cannot get any other way.

How do you coach a general manager who keeps making the same mistake?

Stop giving them the answer. If you have solved the same problem for a GM three times and it is coming back, the problem is not the problem. The problem is that they have learned to bring it to you rather than solve it. Change the question. Ask them what they think is causing it, what they have already tried, and what they would try if you were not available. The first time you do this it feels cruel. It is not. It is the only way they build the muscle.

What does a good development plan for a general manager look like?

Short and specific. One 12-month career target, one skill they are building this quarter with a concrete practice ground, one shadowing experience they will do this year with a GM or leader they respect, and a written record of what you owe them from your seat. One page, reviewed every quarter, updated in writing. The plan is not the point. The conversation the plan produces is the point.