Leadership Lessons from the Kitchen

When I grew up, both my parents worked and as I became a teenager and started driving, I needed car insurance and it was expensive. I made a deal with my working parents that I would prepare dinner five nights a week in exchange for them paying for my car insurance. I started with simple and easy things to make and over time as I got better at cooking, I moved on to more difficult meals. It was a start to a lifelong love of cooking, and I still enjoy cooking to this day. Along the way I have learned a number of things about cooking that are similar to leadership.

Who am I cooking for: ?Who am I cooking for? Who’s coming to dinner? This is one of the most important questions I can ask as a cook, because my goal as a cook is to please my dinner guest. After all, I am cooking for them. It is important to know who my guests are and what it is they like. What could I cook that would make them happy with the meal I am about to deliver. What would meet or exceed their expectations in bringing an exciting culinary experience to the table for them to enjoy. In order to accomplish this, I need to know who are my guest? Similar to business, we need to know our customer and what it is they are looking for is about your strategy. Strategy is essentially knowing your customer and what is it they like, need or want. ?It is an intentional focus on meeting your customers needs or eliminating their pain.

The important point here is just like, in cooking, your goal as a cook or leader is to align all the resources at your disposal, to deliver maximum value to your customer. In order to do so, you have to know your customer and you must know and understand what it is they need. What will solve their problem or eliminate their pain. This is the essence of strategy.

If I can prepare a meal that would have my guest asking for seconds or when the next invite is, I will have a loyal following. In business if we meet the customers needs, solve their problems or eliminate their pain, they will keep coming back for more of what we have to offer. One of my key opinions about strategy is that too many consultants or business owners tend to overcomplicate the process making it difficult to implement. My advice is always the same, keep it simple. Find the need first then organize your business to meet those needs. This principle applies to the kitchen as well. What is it that my guest would love to have and how can I deliver that to them to meet that desire or need? When I try to overcomplicate the meal, it often doesn’t turn out well. Keep it simple.

What do I want to dish to look like when it’s complete: All great journeys start with a clear vision of where you would like to end up. It is not any different in cooking. What do I want the meal to taste like, look like, and smell like when I am ready to serve it. As Stephen Covey said in his Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, begin with the end in mind. Before I begin preparing the meal, I need to have a clear vision of what it will be like when we finish. Often when looking at cookbooks, I find a picture of a meal that looks amazing and I think, wow, I would like to cook that. So now I have a vision of what I want my end result to look like. I leave the cookbook open to the picture and work towards making my meal look just like that.

Develop Your Cooking Skills: I didn’t become a good cook through osmosis. Granted I started at an early age, but I had to develop and improve my skills over time, by taking classes, reading cookbooks, watching cooking shows, and watching other great cooks. One of my favorite things to do when going out to eat at a restaurant is to sit at the chef’s counter and watch the experts at work. I have learned so much about cooking by watching other cooks practice their art. In order to become a better cook. I am constantly trying to upgrade and improve my skill set. I can’t depend on the skills I learned as a teenager and expect to be good at cooking beyond the very basic and simple meals. To be a better cook, I have to get better. ?I need to continually be learning and improving my own skill set.

If as a leader you are relying on leadership skills, you learned 20 or 30 years ago, you will not be as successful as you could be. John Maxwell in his book The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership discusses the concept of the Law of the Lid. Your own leadership ability determines your level of effectiveness and if you as a leader have done nothing to upgrade your skill set, or to learn from other great leaders, you are getting in the way of the success of your organization. If you want your organization to get better, then you need to get better. There are so many opportunities available to us today to improve our leadership skills, there are no excuses that justify being a poor leader. Just like sitting at the chef’s counter to observe the expert’s practice and hone their talent and skills, we have that opportunity available to us today with the touch of our fingers. To be a more effective leader you have to improve your skill set. All great leaders tend to be lifelong learners always trying to become better leaders. Interesting, that all great chefs are continually upgrading their knowledge and skill sets as well.

Planning Ahead: In order for the meal to turn out as I have envisioned. I have to plan ahead. All successful meals begin with the vision of what I want the finished meal to look like and then planning it out to ensure success. I have to make sure I have all the right ingredients and tools necessary to go from start to finish without interruptions or that “oh shit” moment when I realize that I forgot a main ingredient. This takes planning ahead. I tend to go a step further and break the preparing and cooking process into manageable bite-size pieces. I write down a schedule by working backward on each dish as to how long it takes to prep and how long it needs to cook so that all dishes will exit the oven or the stove at the right time. I also prep all the ingredients ahead of time so once I start cooking, all I need to do is add the ingredient that has already been measured and is ready to go. I don’t have to stop in the middle of the cooking process to prepare another ingredient. In order to get the results, I envisioned when I first thought of cooking a particular meal, I have to plan ahead. Imagine what would happen if I tried to cook a very involved meal and I had not completed any of the steps mentioned above. I doubt the meal would be a success.

In business, your success often depends on having a vision or clarity of direction as to where you want the business to be in the future.

What do you want the end result to look like when you arrive? It is the leader’s responsibility to articulate the vision of the future for the company. Without a clear vision or direction, the business will tend to meander off course and will likely not even meet its short-term or long-term performance goals. Every journey starts with a clear vision of where you currently are and where you want to be. Without a clear vision of what I want the end result of my cooking to look like, smell like and taste like, I probably won’t get to where I want to be or if I do get there, I may not recognize what I have created.

Successful leadership is not much different. A successful leader after envisioning where the company is headed and what that will look like once they have arrived at their destination doesn’t leave this to chance but plans ahead. A successful leader will create a plan of action that will allow the organization to bridge the gap between where they are now, their current state, and where they want to be, their future state.

All successful businesses have a plan, that is why they are successful. A great leader will make sure they have thought through everything they need in order to execute on the vision. They will provide guidance and direction to the team and make sure they have the skills, tools, and ingredients to be successful.

Often with an organization, the vision is one-year out in the future and sometimes more than that, up to three years out into the future. When that is the case, it is necessary to break down the timeframe into more manageable pieces. Similar to how I map out the prep time and cooking time to ensure a successful meal, the smart leader will break down the timeline between where they are now and their future state into more manageable size pieces.

The one-year vision can be broken down into 90-day goals for the entire team that will help to move them in the same direction to achieve the desired future. We must get our entire team on the same page and headed in the same direction and then provide manageable bite-size pieces to help them achieve their goals and the vision of the company. We can’t leave this to chance or try to wing it and hope it will somehow miraculously come together in the end. Just like my meal won’t come together without great planning, your business will not either.

When I cook, I will chunk things down into 15-minute and 30-minute increments to make the process more manageable which is the same concept as setting 90-day goals.

Execution: This is where the rubber meets the road, or the spatula meets the pan We must be able to execute on our plan. The most important aspect of cooking once I have done all the prep work is to execute the plan in the order it was designed to be prepared, so that the flavors will have the appropriate time to meld with each other, the meal will not be over or undercooked and the end result will be exactly as I envisioned it and that requires focusing on executing my plan. This is the point where I typically do not allow anyone in the kitchen with me. I tell them to get out of my kitchen. Because if I am not focusing on what I am doing, the end result will be less than desired. I must execute and this requires focus. If I am distracted, I may get the timing off, or miss an ingredient which has happened before. If I execute well, my guest will be pleased with the result and will want to come back again to experience another meal with me. If I mess up the final and last piece, and the execution is less than desired, the meal will not taste as good as it could and most likely when I invite these guests back for another meal they may decline.

In business, it is critical to our success to execute well. We must provide to and/or deliver to our customers or clients what they expected to receive, in the condition they envisioned it and at the time they expected to receive it. This is execution and I have seen far too many companies do a great job on developing their strategy on how they will meet the customer’s needs or wants, create a compelling vision on where they are going, hire the right people and put them into the right seat, provide them the tools they need to get their job done, and even assist in setting goals for achieving a successful end result then stub their toe at the final step when it comes to executing on the delivery of their product or service. This lack of execution causes many a customer or client to look elsewhere for what they are looking for in the future. No different than the need to flawlessly execute in creating a delicious meal that my guest will rave about. We must flawlessly execute in delivering the value to our customers and clients that they will rave about and keep them coming back for more.

?Whether a cook or business leader, we cannot fly by the seat of our pants and hope that it will all turn out in the end. In today’s fast-paced business environment, we need to be continually learning, growing, and developing our knowledge and skill sets in order to achieve the level of success we desire, or our organizations need in order to be successful. Just like great cooks, great leaders put in the effort to become better at their craft.

If you would like to know more on how to increase your top-line revenue and maximize your bottom-line revenue, give me a call, 503-312-3145 or visit my website for more articles and tips.

Gary Furr, LLC