3 top chef skills that can help any executive become a better leader

My work in the retail businesses of corporate America isn’t confined to those at the top of the C Suite. I also team up with emerging leaders who need support from a gut check partner as they build their careers. Often the advice I give isn’t based on what I observed within their industry but comes from what I learned while hanging out with top chefs in professional kitchens. During my decades as a food writer, I witnessed how some of the country’s best chefs ran their restaurants. Their executive skills ranged from managing diverse employees and delegating for maximum effectiveness to balancing creativity with cost effectiveness. Here are three master chef kitchen practices that can help anyone become a better leader. Top Chef Skill 1: An Experimental Mindset The best chefs have experimental mindsets, constantly researching and sketching new dishes, discovering new ingredients, and checking out other restaurants. To create value and identify opportunities, business leaders must do the same. This is especially true for those who want to demonstrate career-boosting initiative and bold thinking. Cultural taste is a shifting landscape. It pays to invest the time and energy required to observe the drivers and influences in the world around us, because that’s where innovation is. Making the best use of culinary developments isn’t all that different from capitalizing on commercial trends. Like chefs, business leaders must consider the dynamics of the marketplace before they can determine where the next big opportunities lie. Skill 2: Clean As You Go The first thing you learn in a pro kitchen is to clean up as you go. This is a “closing out” process that frees you up to focus on the new work in front of you, instead of wasting time working backwards. In corporate leadership, I urge executives to apply the “clean as you go” principle to communication with their staff. When leaders don’t respond in a timely manner to emailed questions or concerns, their silence is confusing. Employees have no choice but to become second-guessers, which undermines confidence and ultimately damages performance. It also makes employees reluctant to share their ideas or feedback, which then cuts the leaders off from the people who report to them, destabilizing productive interaction. Because nothing happens in a vacuum. Skill 3: Think Small It’s a culinary adage that success in the kitchen is the result of many small things done right. A great dish might be a chef’s original creation, but it requires the labor of many others in varying tasks as mundane as picking leaves from fresh herbs or peeling and chopping garlic. But under the direction of a master chef, even this background prep is done pridefully and to perfection because the staff is always given the opportunity to taste the result of their united efforts. In any business, leaders should aim to instill a similar sense of collaborative purpose by building an environment in which their staff understands that achieving big goals depends upon the successful completion of smaller everyday tasks, no matter how routine those tasks may seem. And while people aren’t always able to taste the result of their connected labor, under inspiring leadership, they will feel it. That’s putting kitchen wisdom to work in the C Suite.