Photo credit: Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Adam Bryant conducts interviews of senior-level executives that appear in his “Corner Office” column each week in the SundayBusiness section of The New York Times. Here are a few insights provided during an interview of Mario Batali, the chef, cookbook author and television personality, has restaurants in the New York and Los Angeles areas, as well as in Las Vegas and Singapore, with his business partner Joe Bastianich. Yelling in the confines of a small kitchen, he says, simply isn’t necessary.
http://projects.nytimes.com/corner-office
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Batali: One of the big rules for our kitchens is that if you’re not close enough to be able to touch me, you can’t talk to me. A lot of people will yell across the kitchen because it’s just easier and faster. That doesn’t work with us, so our kitchens are smaller, and you need to talk in a conversational tone. If you can’t, you have to move toward me, because if you’re yelling at me, there can be problems understanding the nature of your message.
Bryant: The whole culture of yelling seems to be celebrated in some restaurants’ kitchens.
Batali: I worked with a lot of yellers over the years. My opinion is that yelling is the result of the dismay you feel when you realize you have not done your own job. Everyone in the restaurant business knows it’s not going to be busy at 5 p.m. It’s going to be really busy between 7:30 and 9:30 or 10, and then it’s going to taper off a little bit. And it is as inevitable as Christmas. So it’s the chef’s job to prepare the staff for what will inevitably come. And it comes every night, so it’s not like, “Oh my God, what happened today?” The reason the chef yells is because the chef is expressing dissatisfaction with himself or herself for not having prepared you properly. And then, of course, the obvious scapegoat is the person who’s the least prepared.
That said, if someone isn’t learning, my strategy for changing someone’s behavior has always been a stern, relatively direct conversation, sotto voce but within earshot of their peers — not mocking them, yelling at them or calling them names — and telling them exactly what I expect them to be able to do the next time we go through this. Their peers can hear it, so the message is clear to everyone.
Bryant: Other leadership lessons you’ve learned over the course of your life?
Batali: Well, one of the most important things is realizing you’re not the most important or the most intelligent person in the room at all times. And understanding that is a crucial component of the kind of self-deprecation that makes someone really good at understanding other people, especially when they’re faced with their own limitations and they come to you for help. It’s about being able to empathize and understand and communicate, even under stress, in a way that helps them solve a problem, as opposed to becoming part of the problem. The first day that a chef believes that he or she knows everything is the first day for the rest of their life that they will be a jerk, because you can’t know everything about our field.
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Adam Bryant, deputy national editor of The New York Times, oversees coverage of education issues, military affairs, law, and works with reporters in many of the Times‘ domestic bureaus. He also conducts interviews with CEOs and other leaders for Corner Office, a weekly feature in the SundayBusiness section and on nytimes.com that he started in March 2009. In his book, The Corner Office: Indispensable and Unexpected Lessons from CEOs on How to Lead and Succeed, (Times Books), he analyzes the broader lessons that emerge from his interviews with more than 70 leaders. To read an excerpt, please click here. To contact him, please click here.