Leadership Lessons from the Kitchen

Growing up, both my parents worked and were careful with money. When I started driving, I made a deal with my parents that I would prepare dinner five nights a week in exchange for them paying for my car insurance. I started with simple meals, and as I got better at cooking, I increased my repertoire. This is how my lifelong love of cooking got its start, and along the way I have learned a number of things about cooking that have taught me lessons about leadership.

Who Am I Cooking For?

Who’s coming to dinner? This is one of the most important questions I can ask, because my goal as a cook is to please my dinner guests. That means I need to know about my guests and what they like. In business, we need to know our customers and what they are looking for, which leads to our strategy. Strategy is an intentional focus on meeting customers’ needs or eliminating their pain.

If I can prepare a meal that would have my guest asking for seconds or wondering when they’ll receive their next invitation, 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. Keep your strategy simple. Find the need and then organize your business to meet those needs. This principle applies in the kitchen as well. What would my guest love? When I try to overthink or over-complicate the meal, it usually doesn’t turn out well.

What Do I Want the Dish to Look Like?

Food can have a powerful visual impact. Therefore, I envision what I want to serve. 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 I finish preparing it. Often when I am looking at cookbooks, I find a picture of a meal that looks amazing and I think, wow, I would like to cook that. It’s a vision of my end result. It helps when I leave the cookbook open to the picture and work toward making my meal look just like that.

In business success often depends on having a vision or clarity of direction. 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 go. I always know what I’m cooking before I get out the pots and pans.

Develop Your Cooking Skills

I didn’t become a good cook through osmosis. I developed my skills over time, by taking classes, reading cookbooks, and watching cooking shows. 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 simply by watching other cooks. To become a better cook myself, I am constantly trying to upgrade and improve my skill set. I can’t depend on the skills I learned as teenager making dinner for my parents. To be a better cook, I have to work at getting better.

If you are relying on leadership skills that you learned twenty or thirty years ago, you will not be as successful as you could be. In his book The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, John Maxell discusses the concept of the Law of the Lid. He says our own leadership ability determines our level of effectiveness. If you have done nothing to upgrade your skill set as a leader, or to learn from other great leaders, you are getting in the way of your organization’s success. If you want your organization to get better, then you need to get better. To become a better leader, take a proactive approach to your own self development in this area. The best investment you could ever make is in your own self-improvement.

There are so many opportunities available to us today to improve our leadership skills that there are no excuses that justify being a poor leader. Opportunities to learn exist at the touch of our fingers. Great leaders tend to be lifelong learners, and it’s the same for great chefs.

Planning Ahead

Great meals don’t just happen. They require planning. I plan to make sure I have all the right ingredients and tools necessary to go from start to finish without interruptions or that terrible moment when I realize that I forgot a key ingredient. My planning breaks the preparation and cooking process into manageable pieces. Next, I write down a schedule by working backwards to think through how long it takes to prep and how long it needs to cook so that all the dishes will exit the oven or the stove at the right time.

This is critical: I 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. For me, this leads to success—delicious meals and delighted guests.

Successful leaders don’t leave results to chance. They plan 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, which is why they are successful. A great leader will make sure they have thought through everything they need in order to execute the vision. They will provide guidance and direction to the team and make sure they have the skills, tools, and ingredients to be successful.

I recommend breaking a vision down into ninety-day goals. Just as I map out the prep time and cooking time to ensure a successful meal, the smart leader will break down the timeline between their current state and their future state into manageable pieces.

A one-year vision can be broken down into ninety-day goals for the entire team. This keeps everyone on the same page, doing their part to work toward the collective goal.

Execution

This is where the rubber meets the road, or the spatula meets the pan. We must be able to execute on the 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 under-cooked, and the end result will be exactly as I envisioned it. This means I have to execute.

This is the point where I typically do not allow anyone in the kitchen with me, because if I am not focusing on what I am doing, the end result will be less than desired, and my guests may not be interested in returning the next time I invite them for dinner!

Business demands excellence in execution. We must deliver to our customers/ clients what they expected to receive, in the condition they envisioned it, and at the time they expected to receive it.

I have seen companies do a great job with strategy, vision, and goal setting, with the right people in the right seats with the right tools to get their job done, and still stumble on execution.

This lack of execution causes customers/clients to look elsewhere the next time. Ultimately, it’s execution that brings my guests back for another meal.

Neither cooks nor business leaders can fly by the seat of their 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 for our organizations. Like great cooks, great leaders put in the effort to become better at their craft.

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For more information on how to create a successful business and improve your leadership skills in 2022, reach out to me at 503-312-3145 or email me at [email protected]

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