We’ll Be Coming ‘Round the Mountain
Our journeys are very human journeys; and our work journeys are full of people. And every person we meet knows something that we don’t―and it’s not about their sex, age, gender, disability. But it is about a lot of things. A lot of human things.
One super important thing is all the information that we give each other. And we give each other a lot of it, through how we choose to act and think. That's why William Glasser said, All we can give another person is information.
Often, in our lives and in our work, our choosing somehow never makes a choice itself. Instead it returns us to the same crossroads.
And yet, I meet and work with people every day who inspire. People who helped me see my crossroads differently. Because at some point, we need to cross the threshold. We need to go from experiencing to implementation and pursue our purpose.
My parents taught us that the best in life was in our experiences, and encouraged me to experience as much as I could. And I did. No Regerts.
Trust me. Everything that has a front has a back . Behind the experience has to be action. No matter how small or how long, we have to take action that spurs us on―to give, to influence, to fight if we have to.
It’s action that gets us to wherever the crossroads are; the choices we made brought us here. And now we choose a better path. Better than the one we’ve travelled so far.
Yours is a new path that is authentic for you. At some point, “authentic for you” is going to mean taking that experience and acting and thinking in new ways.
Sorry, SNL
The other day, I wrote what was…at the time, okay…the funniest sentence ever. Are you ready? Here it is:
“The happiest time in my life was when I was a comparative lit major.”
Alright. I’ll never write for SNL. Still, if Leslie Jones or Kristin Wiig said it? Hilarious.
What’s funny is that this statement claims there was a period of my life of absolute art. There was a complete lack of practicality; nothing sensible and grounded whatsoever. There wasn’t a conventional thought process to be seen.
The other part is that I always seem to manage to get a poet in on something. It’s a pattern that I have.
And that’s the point. Whether it’s a new road or a new strategy, a lot of leadership is stuck with a conventional thought process. One that’s dependent on your patterns.
Honestly, I still hear people referring to Robert Frost. Saying something about how they took the road less traveled by, and how that has made all the difference. I get it, don’t you?
It’s become a maxim for more than 100 years. The road less traveled by, now conventional wisdom. The sages contend that a single decision can transform a life.
Seriously, though, it can. Wisdom is wisdom. Yes, a single choice can transform the landscape of your life irrevocably.
And yet, so often this choice isn’t a choice. It’s just a repeated pattern that brings us back to the same set of circumstances. That’s what Frost was saying. There is no road less travelled, it’s more like a cartoon version of “She’ll Be Coming ‘Round The Mountain.”
How many times are we going around that same mountain, issue, problem, situation, or what have you? It’s true, isn’t it? Whatever we’re doing, we’re wired to win. We took the road less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.
No. It hasn’t. Because we’re too busy winning at going around the same mountain. We're busy “choosing” the same roads and people and circumstances. This is not making all the difference.
What it does is it makes the last line of Frost’s poem a little bit ironic, maybe a little dark. That will seem to be the case sometimes when reality creeps in. You might be art, but at some point you're going to need to get grounded and take a look around.
You realize it’s all the same, all over again, probably expecting things to change. Choice confronts you like that. You have the opportunity to adopt new habits or you can settle for what seems to be a pretty good definition of hell.
You’re always going to take the road that your patterns, habits and choices dictate. Don’t get mad at me. That’s Frost. I’m saying you can change these things if you start by acting in new ways. This wires you to win in new ways. Then you’re on your road less travelled by.
Winning In New Ways
You're on a less effective path when you take the road that your patterns, habits and choices dictate. In the restaurant industry, leadership often takes the Road Way Too Often Travelled. Way too often.
We’re dealing with paradigms that have a long and hallowed history both front and back of the house. And these are paradigms, or honestly managerial templates, that are no longer the best way to go.
Leadership and culture have always been of interest to me. I worked with some extraordinary leaders in the kitchen. No matter how you judge a chef, on technical merit or Yelp reviews, I don’t care.
I had the privilege, early on, to work with chef-leaders. These professionals believed that we need human beings to be more human. They trusted that to be human reflects back on those we work with and we can surely taste it in every dish.
What makes these chefs shine in my personal and business life is their leadership acumen. And their attention to functional acumen in those around them. That is, coaching people up until they’re proficient in a particular functional area. Then getting the hell out of their way.
The best chefs from whom I learned the best leadership lessons, were women in the LGBTQ community. I learned so much and was given to so generously by Chef Helen back in SoHo and Chef Ellen Smith, of Telephone Bar & Grill. I had the privilege of working with Ellen in the East Village for 4 years and 9 months.
I know my culinary roots and they were cultivated by powerful women.
And when I transitioned to non-profit work, Ms. Cathy Freeze was a force for coaching, delegating, creativity, and responsibility.
In graduate school there was Dr. Suzanne Midori Hanna, who modeled mentorship and inclusivity. In psychiatric care, there were too many technicians and nurses.
The overarching principle was that of integrity. The grit came later. My experience has been that leaders can model integrity but grit is on you. Grit comes out of your individual experience as you develop a mindset for growth.
Listening to "System" by Black Uhuru While Writing
There’s a super entrenched model in kitchens of a culture by regime led by a kitchen tyrant, said with a proverbial grain of salt.
Grain of salt because there are kitchens operating on a level that I compare to Major League Baseball. You can play in the park on Saturday all you want but if you want to play in Yankee Stadium or Fenway, don’t take anything personally.
Kitchens deal in paradigms with a dependable, traditional foundation. Brigade de cuisine. Old school? Yeah. I have respect for it and wearing a white chef’s jacket, with or without my name on it, means something to me. If that makes me old school, I’m fine with that.
The way high-end kitchens producing high-level results work is often within the framework of this kitchen brigade system. It’s a system with an underlying philosophy and a list of expectations, procedures, and results.
And then we grow as professionals. We gain an awareness of the role of structure in creating the conditions we face. By structure, I mean that we start looking at the organization we work for and we look at our own patterns. We come to the recognition that there are powerful laws of systems operating that we are unaware of.
Leadership by unchallenged patterns runs like malware in the background of your operation. The toxic culture it produces disrupts your business and harms your revenue. It’s a trojan horse that masquerades as legit, then wrecks your reputation.
Whether the disruption comes via SOPs or a lack there of, high staff turnover, poor communication, low empowerment levels, poor morale, low empathy and accountability, or whatever it is that’s down your particular road―your getting pummeled. By the culture you established and your own leadership style.
Culture is not about establishing a ruling or prevailing system—that’s the definition of a regime. Culture is the quality of a business that focuses on the development and improvement of human beings in their work and in their lives.
In systems thinking, we look at how systems work over time and within their context. And we look at human behavior and human experience in these systems. So, do that. Look at the last 6 months of your operation, the last 90 days.
.
Look at what’s going on with the people working for you. Look at how you and they are spending time and prioritizing tasks. What does a work day really look like for everybody? What are we doing this for? How much toxicity are we tolerating and to what purpose?
You’re who you are. Look over the last quarter, or as long you can handle, and checklist your authenticity.
❍ Your engagement.
❍ Your creativity.
❍ Your Emotional Intelligence.
❍ Your connections to others and how you contribute to connections between people.
❍ Your experimentation and self-expression and how you give such opportunities to others.
❍ Your challenges that stretch you and your team, and how you grow yourself and others as a result.
❍ Your energy and how you manage it and not other people’s.
❍ Your vulnerability in freely giving and seeking help.
When leaders cultivate high levels of authenticity, they springboard themselves and their teams over day-to-day hurdles. They build efficacy. This efficacy gives your business a real advantage.
I hype this stuff because of the ultimate goal. Our team must grow into the same kinds of relationships their leaders have.
The same relationship with the food. The same affinity for the products. The same attention to the menu. Connection to the guests. Connections with each other. A culture that makes your restaurant vivid for every one.
In this post-Food Network world, it’s imperative that your restaurant provides an experience. Your team will focus on your guests when you appreciatively focus on your team.
We want every guest to experience food and service on such a level that no amount of money could ever pay for it. And we want our team motivated for the guest experience, passionate about service.
They'll take that path when they’re influenced, inspired, and incentivized.
If it’s about maintaining a regime instead of an enriching culture, if we’re redefining words like family and team to mean investors and groupism, then we need to reassess.
Your current system, that depends on hierarchy and your inner circle for trust, is suffocating your business.
One of the things that Chef Ellen Smith did was to take on a pattern of robust hiring practices. She hired the right people very consistently and then got the hell out of their way. That Brit pub, located at 149 2nd Avenue, was around for 20 years.
I started 2 months after Telephone first opened. I worked with Ellen Smith for almost 5 years because she gave me free rein.
Ellen encouraged me to express myself and to good purpose. It was a very rich growth experience for me.
Both on the job and in my life, Telephone affected my biases and patterns. There was even an intervention, I kid you not, about my harsh and iron-handed bullshit. What resulted was one of the best value exchanges I ever engaged in with an employer.
One night, the owner came in and true to his pattern, Rudy went straight to the kitchen. Kitchen, dining room, and then maybe the office.
I was putting up the night’s first pasta special when he came in.
He looked at the pasta in the window. “That isn’t English.” It was squid ink linguine and a Thai-inspired coconut milk curry fruitti di mare.
“No it isn’t," I said. "The specials aren’t usually.”
“Why? It’s an English Pub.”
I knew where I worked and where I worked was a pub with a Thai restaurant, that had just opened, right next door.
I said, “Rudy, I’m taking my girl out to dinner tonight. She wants Thai food but I want a burger, and Telephone is serving this. So, I will get my burger and pint of ale. Pretty cool, ah?”
He smiled and walked out of the kitchen.
I started walking in every day with shopping bags and a trail of receipts. With plastic bags up and down my arms, I came in with Sahadi’s, Raffetto’s, and product from all over Chinatown.
Our biases and patterns can be changed. We can grow our family to be inclusive so everyone is a stakeholder. With a real voice, rather than exclusion and groupism, employees who are less than conforming can now be contributors. They grow into assets in your restaurant’s success.
Without my Telephone experience, I never would have gone out on my own. I would not have filled in gaps of knowledge and technique. I would have never gone to culinary school, nor would I have taken the risks that I took.
Persistence and perseverance are admirable traits. It’s worth persevering to establish a culture and environment that sustainably encourages the best that can be.
It’s not just about the fundamentals, about how to hold a knife, but how to hold yourself in your life.
Building relationships, communicating, teaching and coaching ought to be among the hallmarks of your company’s leadership and culture.
Then you’ll find yourself and those you lead on an entirely new path. Your’s will be a business that’s correcting it’s course. All because you started to question your current pet theories. The one's about hierarchy, fear, and control.
You got all authentic with new methods and went all expansive on everybody. Pretty cool, ah?
You’re challenging your thought process. You’re winning in new ways and letting human beings be more human.
It doesn’t matter if you’re offering burritos and tacos on a food truck. It doesn't matter that you're serving wagyu beef and caviar. People come in expecting an experience. If your leadership and culture aren’t imparting growth experiences, no one's getting an experience.
Do what resonates, not what enervates.
Do what fosters creativity. Do what enhances engagement. Do that which is productive and purposed for leadership.
Begin every day with the motivation to learn, grow, and expand leadership competencies. Be more human, with willingness. See what happens when you leave a piece of yourself―your soul, creativity and love―in your work.
*author's note
21 hours after posting this blog I've changed the title. It was "Your New Leadership Style―Winning In New Ways," which was a terrible headline. I almost ran a contest for best title then I just changed it. Stay tuned. I may change it again.
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―PK