Home Cooking

I feel fortunate that my mom and dad modeled to me a love of cooking and hospitality. They consistently opened their home and were exceptional at making people feel welcome.?

A week from now, I will be hosting my family on Christmas Eve and, if everyone shows up, we will have thirty-eight people. The menu will feature beef tenderloin, twice-baked potatoes and an award-winning Caesar salad. My wife and I have been hosting Christmas Eve for 20 years and the process has morphed from stressful to dialed in. We really enjoy it.

I do most of the cooking and typically prep over 2 days so that I am not overwhelmed the day of the event. However, if I were to attempt to serve this big of a crowd say fifty times a year, I would have to change my process. I might write the menu, but I would have to build a project plan, recruit people and assign them to roles in the new process. Similarly, if you consider how a commercial kitchen operates, you will find they have specialized roles by dividing tasks so they can achieve productivity and consistency in their results at scale. In a commercial kitchen you might find an Executive Chef, Head Chef, Sous Chef, Junior Chef, Kitchen Porter and Dishwasher.?It makes sense, right? Specialization enables repetition, focus and productivity, thereby increasing the quality of output and consistency of results.?

Of course, this very same concept is transferable to sales. I often wonder why more sales teams do not create specialization to increase productivity and consistency of results? It turns out high growth companies do! In fact, they often have distinct roles for hunters and account managers because they recognize one person attempting to activate new customer relationships and cultivate existing customer relationships is a recipe for mediocrity.?

Creating specialization within your organization requires designing the org chart, placing the right people in the right seats and building processes so that your team can win. Too often, we unknowingly design the org chart to fail because we are married to our conventions and have not rigorously explored better ideas.?

As I plan for 2022, I will be thinking about designing new and better futures for my clients and myself. What about you? Consider how specialization can unleash productivity and produce more predictable results! ?