Building your foodservice leadership credentials
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What makes an inspiring hospitality leader? What are the key skills you need and to what extent are these learnable vs innate? How important is mentoring in building leadership credentials and how do you find the right mentors for you?
To find out the answers to these questions and more, Foodservice Rep spoke to culinary leadership coach Glenn Flood, author of Secret Sauce: The Proven Recipe for Kitchen Leadership. This chef-cum-trainer has built his reputation on empowering chefs and hospitality professionals and he shares some of his insights in this issue’s Inside Foodservice.
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“Hospitality is such a humancentric game, and people who gravitate into its leadership roles as generally those who are a bit more comfortable or confident in dealing with other people – not just your staff but customers as well,” Glenn tells us.
Culinary leadership coach glenN flood
Balancing performance and people
“What makes a great leader in this field is the ability to balance performance and people – it’s about creating an environment where the whole team feels valued and motivated, because the energy in the hospitality environment is so important in attracting and retaining customers.
“It doesn’t matter whether it’s a fine dining Michelin-starred restaurant, a pub or café or even a canteen – if the staff are having a good time, their hospitable nature flows and the customer soaks up on that and the whole vibe is good. And when the customers are relaxed and the staff are on point they’re happy to spend because they feel they’re getting value from not just the food but the overall experience. And that’s the key point.”
Narrowing effective hospitality leadership down to key skills, Glenn says “top of mind would be empathy – the ability to really communicate clearly, to be emotionally consistent, to be resilient, because there are so many curveballs thrown throughout the day’s service and you need to be able to flow with that and still be able to inspire your team to perform. To use a sports analogy, it’s like being a good coach – you read the play, put the right people in place, tell them what they need to do at the time and then allow them to perform at their best.
“There are so many curveballs thrown throughout the day’s service and you need to be able to flow with that”
Importance of emotional energy
“I think the importance of the emotional energy side is often underestimated in foodservice – you know when it’s right and when it’s wrong, but to lead and talk and develop it is a skill in itself. When I really think about modern kitchen leadership and what people are looking for, it’s less about the commander in chief model and more about creating a culture or environment where the team can thrive.”
A strong advocate of mentoring in building leadership credentials, Glenn draws on his own experience of being inspired by multiple mentors over his time in the commercial kitchen environment. And, he says, even bad experiences with bosses can help you – by showing you what not to do.
“When I think of my mentors, a lot of names come to mind – and I always preface it by saying the best lessons are often the hardest. Sometimes you might work under a tough leader or someone who doesn’t resonate with you personally and that helps you work out how not to act – it’s a powerful lesson, even though it feels bad at the time. Other times you’ll be in the right environment with someone who just conducts themselves in a particular way that inspires you.
“I worked with Jamie Oliver back in the Fifteen days running his training program and he was such an authentic person – he was just the same whether the cameras were rolling or not. And that kind of consistency is really important. It can be hard when you’re in an environment where you’re wondering how the leader’s mood is going to be today – are they under pressure or are they relaxed? As a leader you’re always on show and the way you present yourself sets the energy and vibe for the rest of the team.”
Assisting without intimidating
Glenn also cites the example of Daniel Gamiche, a French chef who worked with Gordon Ramsay and Heston Blumenthal, and for whom Glenn worked at a Michelin starred restaurant in the UK. “The traits he exemplified in the kitchen were that of always being calm and approachable. He knew just what to say at the right time, he would never scold but would step in and take control if the standards weren’t where they needed to be, which was a show of his maturity as a leader.
“If a section goes down during service, you soon see who’s willing to step in and buddy up, who will coach and guide and who won’t”
“He used to love the menial tasks like cleaning the wild mushrooms, trimming the dirt off the roots – he’d stand at the front of the pass and do this during mise en place, but what he was actually doing was observing everyone going about their work so he could step in and assist when needed, support and guide at the right time, all without being too intimidating.”
That said, Glenn acknowledges that kitchens are structured in hierarchies for a reason – “there’s constant time pressure, which means no time for committee meetings or seeking consensus. I’ve worked for leaders who were super tough, ‘my way or the highway’ types – those can still be good environments to learn in, but maybe not for everyone. But the point I want to stress here is that it may be your technical cooking skills that get you promoted to a leadership position, but it’s your people skills which determine how long you stay at the top of the tree.”
Going back to his sporting analogy, Glenn says “as with any team, it can get quite brutal – if you don’t gel with the team you get found out quickly; if a section goes down during service, you soon see who’s willing to step in and buddy up, who will coach and guide and who won’t. And when things go south, it’s the customers who suffer at the end of the day.
You’re only as good as your weakest link
“So you need to know your craft and hold your own and there’s a level of confidence that goes with that. But any leader needs to bear in mind that you’re only as good as your weakest link – the customer won’t care that the larder section or the grill went under during service, they won’t say ‘Oh, Glenn had a bad day on the pass’. They’ll just say ‘I won’t go back to that restaurant’. A good leader needs to be mindful of all that and make sure they’re thinking holistically. Hospitality is 100 per cent a team game, from the head chef right down to the person running the food out to the table and the person doing the dishes – everyone contributes to the overall experience.
“It’s a two-way street, you need to trust your staff and they need to trust you”
“It’s physically impossible to do it all yourself so trust is critical and it is earned, it can’t be demanded – and it’s a two-way street, you need to trust your staff and they need to trust you. A good leader needs to work closely with their less experienced staff to build up their confidence and trust that he or she has their back and if things go sideways will step in and guide them through to the level when they can take over again and do it their way. If you try to do it all yourself, that just leads to burnout.”
Glenn recommends people looking to build their leadership credentials seek out mentors who can support them in their journey. “Start by identifying what are those core capabilities you want to build - what are your gaps, where do you need to expand? It could be your technical expertise in a particular discipline, it could be around building a commercial mindset, it could simply be the balance of how to regulate your emotional energy and be consistent.
“Once you’ve identified what you need, ask yourself who in your network has access to that. If you don’t know what you're asking it can be hard to tap someone on the shoulder and say can you help, but usually the mentors are way closer than you think. And a good mentor won’t necessarily give you direct answers but may guide you to ask better questions – they may give you an alternative perspective, like a mistake you don’t need to make because they’ve already made it and you see how they dealt with it, and that can assist on your leadership journey.
“Ideally hospitality leaders should aim to have multiple mentors across different stages of your career, because your mind is growing and expanding and learning is always ongoing. As you start getting more senior, you need to surround yourself with other like-minded individuals in the same field, and those opportunities come through trade events, competitions, putting yourself outside your comfort zone to gain access to a different calibre of individuals. And while you need to be respectful of the mentor’s time, you also need to be confident enough to ask them to tell you about this or that – if they don’t want to, they’ll just say no.
Practical tools to build confidence and self-belief
Last year Glenn was inspired to write Secret Sauce: The Proven Recipe for Kitchen Leadership in an effort, he says, to “bridge the gap between technical mastery and leadership capability and give leaders the practical tools to build their confidence and self-belief.
“I had been thinking about a book for many years and it was born from three decades of working in kitchens and hospitality operations”
“I had been thinking about a book for many years and it was born from three decades of working in kitchens and hospitality operations, both high performing and struggling ones. I saw so many talented chefs fail in their roles because no one had taught them the skills of how to lead people – often the chef is simply the last person standing when the previous one left or resigned or was burnt out, so they’ve been put there by default, they’re in charge of a high pressure environment, maybe even a multimillion dollar operation, and their job is to pull consistency out of what is effectively chaos. Immediately it becomes not about your technical ability to cook but about how to influence and align your team to get the best results.”
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The book includes lots of stories from Glenn’s personal experience. “I talk about the four areas of kitchen mastery – there’s the commercial and financial side of cooking, there’s safety and hygiene, there’s the process-driven side, and then there’s the quality and creativity side. Those are the four keys you need to master to be effective as a kitchen leader.”
Glenn has designed the contents as a practical handbook at sous chef level: “It was written for emerging leaders, but the feedback I’ve received so far is that it’s resonating across all levels. There’s a mise en place section at the end of each chapter which summarises the key principles and sets out a few activities and tasks for those who want to drill deeper. Basically I’ve written the book I needed as a chef ten or 15 years ago!”
Copies of Secret Sauce are available from Glenn’s website www.glennflood.com
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