Leadership Lessons from a Chef ( Part 4)

Build Your Leadership Team First

Now that you have reflected upon what inspires you, thought about
your ideal kitchen atmosphere, and identified the foundation of your
professional values, you are ready to build your leadership team. The
whole basis of my leadership team—and really the program as a whole—is
what I call SEF: Schedule, Empower, and Follow Up. This will be discussed
later in the chapter.

Build a Leadership Team

What is a leadership team? My leadership team is the team-within-my-team
that helps me build my program. The first, and probably hardest, lesson
every manager has to learn is that you can’t do it all by yourself. The sooner
you understand and accept that, the faster you will grow as a manager and
the more effective you will be in putting together and directing your team.
This team and the way in which you set it up will be your saving grace. That
is why it is the first and most crucial step in building your program.

‘‘The awesome thing about a team is that it can
accomplish so much more than any one individual
can, and at a higher quality level as well.’’

There are three reasons for the leadership team—to
 (1) promote communication,
(2) develop new programs, policies, and procedures, and
 (3)
empower your employees to discuss any challenges to be met in building a
better operation. The awesome thing about a team is that it can accomplish
so much more than any individual can and at a higher quality level as well.

The leadership team should include the individuals that you determine
have the most to offer your operation. They will be the individuals who
display the most determination, heart, and soul and who possess the wherewithal
and desire to be great. All properties are different; but the beauty of
this program is that it works for all size organizations. Whether yours is a
kitchen of five employees or sixty, this program will work. Your leadership
team may well consist of employees outside your department, and in fact
that is actually encouraged. The more departments you get involved, the
better chance the program has to be successful.

The Structure of the Leadership Meeting

At River Oaks Country Club, our leadership team consists of twelve individuals,
from sous chefs and stewards to station chefs, all of whom have a great
passion for our field, and even a tennis pro. Select your team on the basis
of who you believe will excel in this environment and who will be of the
greatest help to you. I also let the leadership team members know that they
have been given the privilege to be a part of this team, but they have to earn
the right to keep it.

When holding leadership meetings, don’t hide the team away in a meeting
room or even one of the dining rooms. I have a table in the kitchen for
this meeting. Doing this will raise interest among the rest of your culinarians.

They will wonder what it takes to be a part of this special team. Our meeting
is held on payday every other week (everyone shows up for their check!).
We have the meeting at 2:00 P.M., when business slows down a little.
Always have a printed agenda for the meeting. This keeps you organized
and helps the meeting run smoothly. One of the best tips I can give you is
to take minutes at these meetings. If minutes aren’t taken, the meeting may
just turn into a gripe session. Without minutes you lose control and accountability.

The reason for this goes back to the SEF concept—Schedule, Empower,
and Follow Up! Schedule the meeting, empower your employees to
recognize challenges, put procedures in place to solve them, and follow up
with them at the next meeting with the minutes.

‘‘A good leader encourages followers to tell him
what he needs to know, not what he wants to
hear.’’
—John C. Maxwell

Assign leadership team members clear goals and objectives, give them
deadlines, and make them follow up at the next meeting by holding them
accountable to the group and for their assigned tasks. This is crucial to your
success, the group’s success, and the property’s success. No one wants to
come to a meeting only to be called upon when unprepared. To be unprepared
in front of your peers is embarrassing. You have to follow up. If you
don’t, your staff will not take you or the meeting seriously.

Then you have a real problem—apathy! Do you remember the feeling you had when you
where a kid in school, the teacher asked the class for its homework and
somebody (not me) was not prepared. Be firm at these meetings. Start out
firm, and it will just become standard in your operation.

In addition to sending everyone a copy of the agenda before the meeting,
I send out copies of the previous meeting’s minutes the day after that
meeting so everyone can follow along during the meeting, be reminded of
their responsibilities, and be prepared to discuss what they have done to
follow up!

The key to your leadership team and the
development of your program is to:
1. Schedule
2. Empower
3. Follow Up

It is no harder to remember than SEF!
This is a typical agenda for our meeting:

Open with the culinary team’s mission
statement.
Read the minutes from the last meeting.
Review any assignments given out to the team.
Present Sanitation Product Champion Report.
Present Certification Product Champion Report.
Present Stewarding Product Champion Report.
Present Purchasing Product Champion Report.
Assign new deadlines, if needed, on old items.
‘‘Go around the table.’’ Let each chef give a
two-to-five minute update on his or her
department or station. Discuss any challenges.
Open the discussion to resolve any issues.
Hear executive chef’s report on the property’s
schedule of events.
Discuss sales and food cost.
Assign new projects, goals, and deadlines.

I am willing to bet that 99 percent of all kitchens that have meetings
don’t keep minutes during their culinary meetings. How can any problems
or tasks be followed-up on without minutes? Is anyone held accountable for
anything? For example, one issue that was reported during one of our meetings
was that the storeroom was continually being left unlocked. The team
discussed how it was getting unlocked, reviewed our closing procedures, and
documented the results. The leadership team was then responsible for relaying
the policy to the rest of the staff.

In another example, the Sanitation Product Champion (I will discuss
this concept later in the chapter) reported that the first in-house sanitationinspection
program started the previous week. The system seemed to work
well; as a result, the team agreed we needed to add a column on the inspection
form for maintenance issues. Because of the program, the chef in
charge of inspection can report any maintenance issues, which are then
transferred to a work order. One copy of the inspection form now goes to
the club’s general manager, one to the executive chef, and one to the head
of maintenance. These are just a few examples of how the meeting proceeds.
Ideas are talked about, fine-tuned, and then developed into policy, which
the whole team is involved in. Important tip: If you are having problems
getting things fixed at your property that pose possible safety hazards, you
would be surprised how much faster they get fixed when the general manager
gets a copy of what is reported week after week.
1. Organize
2. Focus
3. Assign tasks
4. Create deadlines
5. Follow Up!
6. SEF: Schedule it, empower your people, and
follow up!

Another important practice and tool for these meetings is to give deadlines!
Remember, everyone is busy, so you need to tell them what is expected
of them and when. If assigning a task like developing a kitchen sanitation inspection
form, be sure to tell the team and the person responsible for
creating the form when the first draft is due, record the due date in the
minutes, and hold the team member accountable. If the task is not done by
the due date, the person responsible will have to come to the next meeting
and explain why it has not been done.

To aid the leadership team in staying organized and focused, each team
member is given a three-ring binder in which all agendas and meeting
minutes can be kept together. My leadership team is required to bring this
binder to all meetings. It becomes their bible of policies, procedures, history,
guiding principles, and mission statements. They will also use this binder for
any meetings they may have with people in their department. I don’t care if
the line chef only has three other people on his team, I expect him to hold
his own team meeting and require him to be organized and to set his own
station goals. Let team leaders feel good about leading their team.

Leadership meetings are different from staff meetings. Leadership meetings
are the core group, your coaching staff, the team that designs all the
plays for the game and trains the players to be the best they can be. The
leadership team develops the programs, policies, procedures; troubleshoots
problems; and sets the standards for the team. Staff meetings consist of the
entire culinary team, and these meetings are where you announce new programs
and enforce them. I call our staff meetings Culinary Workout Sessions.
They are held every six weeks with the entire culinary staff.

‘‘Leadership is calculated risk-taking.’’
—Ted Ward
Now, the leadership team is considered to be a special group, as I discussed
earlier. It is a privilege to sit at this table. Consequently, if a cook or
chef comes to this meeting without fulfilling his or her assignment, the individual
should have a good reason for it, or he or she will be asked to leave
the table and come back when the assigned project is complete. Yes, the chef
or cook is helping with a lot of work, but do not ever forget that the person
is learning supervisory and program-building skills—this skill-building is a
major component of the chef’s or cook’s professional development! This is
very important: The purpose of the leadership team is not to decrease my
workload. I am proud of the fact that I am teaching and growing my culinary
team to be great leaders and team managers. There are very few properties
teaching front-line cooks and sous chefs these skills. This program is ‘‘onthe-
job training’’ for team management. This is a very special opportunity
for any young person who is looking to grow into an executive chef position.
This is why these people are willing to do the work; they see the value of
learning and practicing new skills.

These resources and programs are priceless for them to learn in a live
environment. I strongly believe this is why I have such a great crew with rare
employee turnover. In fact, I have a file of applicants waiting to get into the
program. I feel good about the fact that I am developing leaders within our
team, a person others learn to respect as a leader. This is so important to
me that it is part of our mission statement.

Product Champions

To further motivate and empower the staff, I implemented a Product Champions
program. These are employees who champion a product and become
the most educated and trained in that particular subject. For instance, we
have a product champion at the property for the point-of-sales system. I like
the title, because it has the word champion in it. Think about it. Doesn’t
everybody want to be a champion? Champions are great, they are winners,
and they are the best of their kind. So, if I have a product champion of
sanitation, this person is going to be the lead person on the program’s development.
I believe the title—product champion—shows confidence and
trust, and it lends prestige to the concept. It also says, ‘‘Hey, I have a lot of
responsibility.’’ It also helps motivate the staff and recognizes the individuals
who are doing a lot of work.

‘‘The measure of success is not whether you have
a tough problem to deal with but whether it is
the same problem you had last year.’’
—John Foster Dulles,
former U.S. Secretary of State

Typically, the more ideas, concepts, and programs I envision, the more
frustrated I become. We all have some days where it takes everything we’ve
got just to put out the business at hand. How is it possible to consider accomplishing
so many programs? How many times have you thought of some
great concepts, different menu styles, or staff incentive programs and just
did not have the time to accomplish it? How do you find the time? That is
the beauty of product champions. It makes so much sense, and your team
is stronger for it, because they are part of the development process. Schedule,
empower, and follow up (SEF). Empower your people to be a part of
the process. Even when the departments are all running smoothly and efficiently,
I can always see areas for improvement. Currently, there are four
areas in our kitchen that I want to attack. New programs have to be written,
new forms designed, and more communications implemented. There is no
way I can do this all by myself, especially in the time frame that I want them
completed...usually yesterday. So, I came up with four new product-champion
areas:

PRODUCT CHAMPION OF SANITATION

This leadership team member is responsible for designing an inspection
form (to be used in the club) based on the city’s health inspection, report,
and standards. This champion also puts together a team to ensure sanitation
and safety standards are being met and schedules inspections of all the kitchens
every week. There is no such thing as being too careful. This serves as
a tool to provide a more sanitary and safe environment.

PRODUCT CHAMPION OF CERTIFICATION

My goal is to have more chefs in my kitchen certified by the American Culinary
Federation (ACF) than any other club in the United States. This takes
a little work and someone dedicated to help with the process. What better
way to invest in your staff than to help them take the next step in their own
careers, while at the same time making your kitchen stronger?

PRODUCT CHAMPION OF STEWARDING

I love this one! What department in your kitchen has the most turnover? In
mine, it is stewarding. The leadership team member who heads this group
is responsible for meeting with the group every four weeks. The stewarding
team also meets at our kitchen table. The chefs serve appetizers, sandwiches,
and snacks to the stewards. We want them to feel special. We want them to
know that we care about them and understand how important they are to
our program. We give them an opportunity to talk about any challenges they
currently have. You know what I was amazed to find out from one of these
meetings? Many times the stewards work around a problem rather than report
it. Sometimes they feel too intimidated to report a problem to the chef.
So, instead of getting a piece of equipment fixed, they work around it.
We also go over their monthly review and discuss each steward’s performance,
which leads into the incentive program, which I will touch on
later. The exciting thing about this area of discussion is that when you start
talking about incentives and performance, the group loosens up a little. I
was frustrated during the first few meetings and could not understand why
the group would not open up. I think they were intimidated by the Chef
sitting at the table. At the first meeting, nobody even ate an hors d’oeuvre.
After the third meeting, when we awarded the incentives, they were eating
and talking up a storm. I was so excited. They opened up, and we now get
a lot accomplished.

PRODUCT CHAMPION OF PURCHASING
The leadership team member who heads this group researches better procedures
for this department as well as works directly with our new computersoftware
programs and inventory-control systems. This product champion is
also the liaison between the chefs and the purchasing agents. Other responsibilities
include maintaining a current ‘‘burn-out’’ sheet for products that
need to be moved (see Certificates and Forms).
These are just four examples of areas I wanted to improve on. And improvements
have started to happen since product champions have been
named. As a team, we have been able to accomplish so much in such a short
time. To accomplish these particular programs would have taken me more
than a year to complete on my own. What is more important here, however,
is the Empowerment and Follow-Through. All my executive chef life I have been
developing new programs here and there, as well as new policies and procedures,
as all chefs do. But what is different here? What makes this system
so much better?

1. You have a team helping you to develop programs, procedures, and
policies.
2. You get a much more refined product with input from others.
3. The programs will be much stronger because of team involvement.
4. You will accomplish so much more in less time.
5. Your leadership team will be vested! They will believe. They will help
monitor and maintain the programs so they will not fall apart.
6. Your leadership team members are learning valuable management
skills.

‘‘I not only use all the brains that I have, but all
that I can borrow.’’
—Woodrow Wilson

Input from Everyone
Many times I have come up with an original idea, floated it to the team, and
had them come back with a concept ten times better. Look at it as a corporation
or a club. How do you get things done efficiently and with expertise?
Assign a committee chair, give them a goal, show them the direction in
which you want to go, empower them to do it, and then follow up. This is
so huge to me. First of all, we all win! Second, the other culinarians are
learning how to build programs, and they are learning about team building
and being part of a team. Third, they are vested in the program because
they played a vital role in building the program. That is very important, so
I am going to say it again. They are vested in the program! They believe because
they helped develop it. How big is that? You can come up with programs all
day long, but none of them will be worth the paper they are written on
unless the team is on board and vested in the project. Again, SEF is vitally
important, or you will fail. Schedule the meeting. Empower your employees to
help design and research. Follow Up in the next meeting with the minutes
and the assigned tasks.

‘‘They are vested in the program!’’

So what areas in your current program need help, need improving, need
more attention? New menu concepts, more contemporary station ideas for
banquets, better pool menus, better cross training in your kitchen, or motivation,
incentive programs, journeyman programs, employee dining? Whatever
area you want to improve on, discuss it at your leadership meeting;
collectively, the team will identify the problem, discuss ways of improvement,
develop an action plan, make policy, and put it into action. This way you
can have three or four major projects going at the same time and know that
they all will be accomplished. Your product champions will develop their
own team outside of the leadership meeting to attack the issue. Don’t fall
into the trap of thinking you can do it all yourself.

A New Kitchen Brigade

So what is the big deal? you may ask. This is nothing new, and I am sure you
have heard all of this before. But how many kitchens have you heard of that
are actually set up like this? In my experience, it has not been the chef’s
‘‘nature’’ to set up his kitchen like a corporation. Why should it have been?
The culinary kitchen brigade includes (and has for centuries) the garde
manger, saucier, entremettier, poissonnier, and so on. The chef set up the
kitchen, ordered the food, instructed the staff, and the staff did exactly what
the chef said—no questions asked. This is how we set up our kitchens. But,
as I keep saying, the role of the chef has changed; therefore, the way in
which we do things needs to change. Chefs are asked to meet with members
and guests and to help plan, cost, style, and set up functions. Chefs are
involved with directing front-of-the-house teams, and they have been promoted
to general managers. Someone even made up a new culinary term
‘‘Chef & B,’’ a play on the acronym F & B, that is, food and beverage. Some
smaller operations have pushed responsibility for the foods and beverages
onto the chef. This new era forces us to be thriftier with our time management,
and this is what led me to devising these programs and writing this
book.

So how are we successful? By scheduling, empowering, and following up,
we are acting like CEOs. We need to build our organization and think of it
as a corporation and set it up like a corporation. Then we will accomplish
more together. Think beyond the traditional kitchen organization. If you
intend to compete in this fast-moving business, you need to grow as an executive.
It has worked for me, and my team has been able to get a boatload
of work done because of it.

This concept came to me one day as I was leaving a department head
meeting run by our club’s general manager, Joe Bendy. I remember wishing
I had all those managers working for me. I could get so much more work
done! There would be twenty-five of us sitting in the room, and each of us
had ‘‘homework’’ to do. Each one of us had to go back to our departments,
develop, improve, excel, and report back the following week. If you were not
ready for that meeting, you were called out.

‘‘The only people who don’t make mistakes are
the people who don’t do anything.’’
—Phil Learned, CEC, AAC

I had these same thoughts as I watched my good friend Chef John Folse
run his meetings. I would think to myself, ‘‘If I had all those powerful people
sitting around that managers’ table like John, I could be that successful too.’’
Well, guess what? I have a talented crew, too! And I bet you have a talented
crew as well. This is how you are going to be successful. This is how your
staff is going to grow and learn how to manage. This is how you are going
to find time to be great No Excuses
‘‘I won’t live long enough to learn from my
mistakes so I have to learn from the mistakes of
others.’’
—Joe Bendy

The number of employees you have does not matter, whether ten, fifty,
or hundreds. What is important is that you ask other key employees in the
operation who you think may be great for their input, whether it is the
dining-room manager, the assistant manager, or anyone else. I have our head
tennis pro join our group, because he believes so strongly in team building.
Come on, think outside the box.

How about the excuse that you can’t get anybody to come to the meetings?
Three thoughts come to mind from this. First, you are hiring the wrong
people. It is vital to hire people who are motivated and who want to continue
their professional growth. Second, if you lead, they will follow. Third, when
you outline your goals at the beginning of the year, you can link it to performance
bonuses. Talk to your general manager about it. It does not have
to be a lot of money, just the idea that your staff is getting a bonus based
on completing tangible goals. I have linked our certification product champion’s
success directly to his performance review and rewarded him for every
team member he helps get certified.

‘‘Great leaders are never satisfied with current
levels of performance. They are relentlessly
driven by possibilities and potential
achievements.’’
—Donna Harrison

When I describe this concept to other people, they often ask how I get
the leadership team members to do all this extra work. The answer is simple.
This program is an incredible experience for them. They are learning how
to build teams; build programs, policies, procedures, mission statements,
guiding principles; develop organizational skills; and so much more. Think about how, traditionally, you did what the chef said and that was it. There
was no debating of concepts. There was no team building.

Many properties don’t necessarily help their sous chefs grow and train
for first executive chef positions. It takes too long to get a really good sous
chef and too long to train them, so why help push them out the door? I am
blessed because our Green Beret program (see Chapter 12, ‘‘Green Beret
Sous-Chef Program’’) is popular, and I have a line of great young chefs coming
through the program. Our turnover rate is very low, and the team is
young and hungry. It does not happen overnight, but it will happen when
you offer this opportunity to your employees.

Communication

Let me say one thing about communication. When there is a breakdown, a
problem occurs, or a mistake happens, most of the time you can track it to
a communication breakdown. What a powerful statement! If that is the case,
would it not make better sense to improve your own communication skills
to cut down on what few mistakes you do make? It makes sense to me.

‘‘Communicate, communicate, communicate—until
you are sick of hearing yourself. Then
communicate some more.’’
—Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric

Think of a problem in your operation; track it back until you get to the
root of the problem; and then see if I am not right. More often than not,
someone did not tell somebody, did not explain clearly or it was not clearly
understood, did not change a number, or forgot to copy something. As Phil
Learned, CEC, AAC, of the Balsams Resort Hotel, once told me: ‘‘The only
people who don’t make mistakes are the people who don’t do anything. It
is OK to make a mistake, just don’t serve it!’’ The secret is to learn from
other people’s mistakes.

Here is one example of a communication skill that works great for me.
At the River Oaks Country Club, we average between sixty and seventy parties
a week. The odds are against us making it through the week mistake-free.
When I get a copy of the banquet events, I spend up to one-and-a-half hours
going through the packet, making notes, plate drawing, and giving instruction
to all departments. Then, on Friday, we make copies for all the depart ments,
so everyone knows what is going to happen. Everything from the plate
design to table layouts, even the recipe references are included.

It is well worth my time to get it right at the beginning of the week rather than to
scramble to get it right while handling the various other issues on the fly,
sometimes explaining myself five times. Communication is the key. All sixty
employees can read my thoughts rather than wait for me to speak to them
personally. The less time I spend at the beginning of the week, the more
time I have to spend explaining what I want in the following week.

I remember one time when I was scheduled out
of town on business and our pool restaurant was
switching from the summer to the post–Labor Day
schedule. Some of our cooks were moved around
because of school schedules, so we had two chefs
that were not familiar with the menu for the
station they were now working. As a precaution, I
scheduled a senior chef to oversee the kitchen
that night. I did not give any explanation why, I
just scheduled it. That night the senior chef found
himself with nothing to do. He went over the
stations thoroughly with both cooks and left
around seven o’clock. What I had failed to
mention or to communicate to the chef is that I
knew of a pop-up birthday party coming in at
7:30 P.M. for thirty people. On top of that, there
was not a banquet-event order on the party
because it was a late-notice event. Nor had
banquet food been ordered, which was strike
number two. Needless to say, the two chefs got
hit all at once. The senior chef should not have
left his scheduled shift, and I reminded him of
that. But the bottom line was that I should have
communicated better.

‘‘There is nothing more annoying than a weak
follow-through.’’

Follow-Up

When I got my first executive chef job, I wasted a
lot of time handing out instructions one employee
at a time instead of identifying the problem
areas, developing the solution, and holding a
meeting with the entire staff to make it policy.

The employees will have absolutely NO follow through
if YOU don’t have any follow-through. If
you are too busy chasing your own tail, as I once
was, you will find that you don’t have time to run
behind and check every employee’s work. So we
make policy as a team, we report our progress as
a team, and everyone is held accountable that the
policy stays in place.

As I have stated many times already, follow-up is one of the most important
elements to your success while developing your programs. If you don’t
follow through, no one will take you seriously, and no one will attempt to
finish the task you have assigned because you don’t bother to follow up.
There is nothing more annoying than someone who does not follow
through. I judge the character of a person very highly when he or she has
a follow-through rate of 100 percent. What a person! What a pro! I never
have to go behind this person to see if he or she has done the job. With this
particular character attribute, I know that he or she did the job and usually
better than I expected. These people are very special. Remember that the
next time your boss asks something of you. Not only do you drop everything
you are doing to get his request done, you go above and beyond his expectations.

This is a very simple formula. What kind of employees do you want
working for you? When you get that one employee who not only finishes an
assigned task but also goes above and beyond, that is the employee you will
come to trust and who will earn a promotion. That is also the employee you
have to be. There is nothing more annoying than a weak follow-through!
The reason behind this discussion is to stress that the leadership team
will do whatever you tell them. The secret is that you must tell them. Communicate!
They have to understand. You cannot change on the fly and be
successful. You cannot be successful if you are instructing only one person
at a time. At one of the first executive chef jobs I had, I would walk from
one end of the kitchen to the other and see ten things that needed to be
changed or addressed with the staff. At first, I would stop and point out to
each employee how to do the procedure differently. Two days later, I would
have to stop and tell a different employee the same thing. What is the lesson?
Take notes, develop your new operating policies, and present them to your
entire team during your ‘‘culinary workout sessions,’’ or staff meetings. Once
that is done, everyone should be on the same page.

1. Identify the problem.
2. Develop the solution.
3. Make a policy.
4. Educate the entire staff at the same time of
the new policy.
5. Follow through.

Now that we have the leadership team together, your first goal is the
Mission Statement.