Tag Archives: managing

September 6, 2013 · 9:06 am

The Sous Chef

Foodie Friday! I’ve been watching Top Chef Masters (I know – huge surprise) again this season. The twist this year is the presence of a sous chef brought into the competition by each of the masters. For those of you unfamiliar with the pecking order in a kitchen, a sous chef is, literally, an “under” chef. They’re the number two person in kitchen. While the executive chef or chef de cuisine sets the menu, it’s the sous chef that make sure that menu is executed daily to the chef’s standards.  The sous chef also creates the daily specials but this is a real understatement of their responsibilities.  Frankly, the main task of the sous chef is to keep the kitchen from falling to pieces.

The competition this season revolves around how well the sous chef performs in a series of contests  among the other sous chefs.  A sous chef not doing well can dramatically impact the master chef’s chance in the main competition.  Conversely, their sous chef winning can give the master chef immunity from elimination without them having to lift a finger.  Pretty sweet when your subordinate can throw that kind of protective wrapper around you!  Which is of course, the business point.

Throughout my professional career I was blessed with incredible sous chefs.  Of course, in the business world they’re called something else – assistants, secretaries, whatever.  They made me look good when I was having a bad day, they kept me on task and on time, and when I wasn’t able to handle a task directly they had the knowledge and intelligence to step up and get things done as I would have.  In a kitchen, the sous chef’s role is to back your chef, no matter what, at least to the rest of the world. What we would discuss or fight about was for us and never (to my knowledge) made it to the rest of the staff.

The best assistants were of the rest of the team but not really in the rest of the team.  Everyone loved them but respected their positions as well as the fact that they could speak for the boss when the boss was otherwise occupied.   Why do I bring this up?

Too many executives underestimate the value of a great right hand.   It could be your assistant, maybe it’s another executive on your staff.   No matter what, every great executive I’ve known has someone who can stand in their stead and make sure things run smoothly until the boss can step back in.  If there is no one with whom you work that can do this, you need to do one of two things:  find someone, or get ready to get replaced.

Here’s to sous chefs everywhere – in kitchens and in cubicles!

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August 27, 2013 · 9:55 am

Take The Money And Run

TunesDay, and what better theme for a business-related post than the Steve Miller Band‘s Take The Money And Run?  Steve Miller is an interesting cat.  Unlike most rock stars, he’s always been the kind of guy you couldn’t identify in a lineup.  You can probably picture most of the other big-name artists of the 70’s and 80’s.  He might be a little harder to visualize.  The list of musicians who have come though his band over the years – Boz Scaggs being the most notable – include members of Journey, Santana, and others.  The band came out of the Bay Area music scene in the late 60’s and is still with us today.

His song about Billy Joe and Bobbie Sue is about two kids who decide to rob a house, possibly killing the owner in the process.  They evade the law and get away singing “Go on, take the money and run.”  The story is in complete contrast to the light music – let’s listen and see:

There is a business point here.  Too many businesses think as do Billy Joe and Bobbie Sue.  They’re not particularly concerned with what’s right, only with themselves.  They practice the Golden Rule: he who has the gold rules, and once they extract it from their victims, they’re gone.  That tactic worked once for these kids and it won’t work much more often for a business.  One bad customer experience can haunt a company forever (just ask United Airlines about guitars).  An American Express survey found a couple of years ago that people tell an average of nine people about good experiences, and nearly twice as many (16 people) about poor ones.

You don’t need to take the money and run as a business.  That same survey found a large majority of people (70 percent) are willing to spend an average of 13 percent more with companies they believe provide excellent customer service.  In other words, your customers will GIVE you the money if you do right by them, and they’ll keep coming back.

While it makes for a clever little tune, taking the money and running is a bad business idea.  You agree?

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August 7, 2013 · 10:14 am

If You See Something…

I don’t know about where you live, but those of us in the New York area are hit on a regular basis with a message that “if you see something, say something.”

say something

(Photo credit: istolethetv)

It’s in the subway, on trains, on bus stops, and on mass media. If you believe the reports, and I do, those sorts of actions have prevented some nasty incidents over the last decade.

I got to thinking about that the other day from a bit of a different perspective which of course then led into some business thinking. We all know a person who displays symptoms of things not being right in their lives. Those symptoms could come in the form of substance abuse or a big weight gain. Maybe their personality has changed – gone from light to dark. If you care about that person, you probably think about a way to say something that asks about what’s going on. It’s hard – people have feelings, after all and they are probably just as aware as you are of what they’re doing. Probably more so.  The ensuing discussion can be hard for both of you.  Sometimes it can derail a friendship.  More often, it begins a healing process, but only if you care enough to say something.

The same is true in a business.  The symptoms are different, obviously.  Unhappy team members, a faltering bottom line, processes that are inefficient.  Those things won’t fix themselves until someone cares enough to say something.  Oddly, the people who are best equipped to do that are often the youngest or newest members of the team.  They approach the business with few preconceptions and “new eyes.”  The problem is that they tend to hold their tongues believing that it’s their newness or lack of knowledge that makes them see the flaws rather than the familiarity of the day-to-day that’s blinding everyone else.

I always demanded that new hires speak up.  I reminded them of their special status – everything is new – and that they should ask about anything that didn’t make sense to them.  If they saw something, they were to say something.  If their supervisor or I didn’t have a good reason for the way things were, we needed to do the hard work of introspection.

Hopefully you’d never let a friend in pain stay there alone once you see the symptoms.  You can’t let a business remain there either.  Say something – everyone will be better off.  Agreed?

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