The Way Things Are Aren’t How They Have to Be

The cooking part of culinary school is hard—obviously—but most of our written assignments aren’t designed to be terribly challenging. Hence, I challenged myself to identify the leadership and strategy lessons from all of the work.

(This is also part of my ruse in convincing my wife that culinary school is somehow connected to my main job.)

One of the dynamics of the restaurant industry is that there’s often a taken-for-granted culture of hierarchy, aggression, and masculinity in professional kitchens.

If you’ve seen Gordon Ramsey yell at people and smash plates on any of his numerous tv shows, you’ll get a hint. It’s tempting to think of him as just a character, until you realize that he’s been the head chef at Michelin-starred restaurants.  

My culinary instructor told us an anecdote about a restaurateur who approached him about opening a restaurant with her. One of her main stipulations: No cursing in the kitchen.

His response: “You can’t have a kitchen without cursing.”  

In the book Yes, Chef, Marcus Samuelsson describes both the hierarchy and lack of psychological safety that existed in the professional kitchens he experienced.

 About one of those kitchens, he writes: 

“...[A]ssemblé was a rare chance to hear directly from the general’s mouth—and in a setting where he was not yelling at you for some mistake you’d made. This was no holding-hands moment, of course. The hierarchy of the kitchen was zealously maintained, even in meetings: Line cooks and commis stood in the back of the room and said nothing.”

As I absorbed these anecdotes, I kept thinking, “Why is this the case?” When I asked the head chef of my culinary course for his rationale, the answer was basically, “That’s the way it’s always been.”

In contrast, I’ve luckily recently read Jeffrey Liker’s The Toyota Way, which describes the Toyota Production System, the gold standard in operations. I couldn’t help but to compare their approach to restaurant dynamics. 

Automobile production is similar to restaurants in that both have very high capital costs, a need for humans to produce with high consistency to exacting standards, and an ever-present threat of business failure. A lot can go wrong when standards are violated! 

In that situation, one can easily imagine treating employees as cogs in a machine and making their jobs be about doing the same thing, exactly the same way, as fast as possible. 

Whereas Samuelsson describes being fearful of being fired as a junior chef, Liker writes of Toyota: “The foundation of team member trust is job security, and Toyota goes to unusual lengths to protect the jobs of its employees.”

Where Samuelsson describes driving innovation in a solo, top-down manner as an executive chef, the Toyota Production System distributes the innovation role to everyone. Liker writes, “Toyota needs every employee to always be thinking about how to improve processes—continuous improvement—just to keep up with the demands of the highly competitive automobile business.” 

In fact, the high levels of job security are seen as an enabler of innovation and continuous improvement. 

In the book Setting the Table, Danny Meyer makes this point: “The restaurant business can be grueling. [...] Under those circumstances our people need to remember that the best, most efficient way to work through all the [food orders] is first to take care of one another and work together as a team. Does working together take more effort than screaming and yelling—a more common practice in restaurant kitchens? Not especially. But the results of respectful collaboration build long-term success and prevent the same problems from recurring every day.”

In other words, it’s possible to get great results without the negative parts of the historically accepted professional kitchen culture.

What’s the wider point?

As a consultant, I’m often asking leaders a form of “What drives your organization to operate this way?” 

Their answer is most typically a historical accounting of why the culture and operation formed the way that it did. And for the negative parts of their culture—e.g., the hierarchy, the silos, the lack of motivation by frontline staff—there’s often a belief that they’re unchangeable.  

What leaders usually don’t give is an argument that the economics or “physics” of the operation dictate how things are. That’s good, because it also means that for most organizations, there truly is a better way—the way things are aren’t how they have to be. 

We have the choice to form our cultures and operations around the positive values that we want.