Authors: Dan Charnas
“Talk to me like you're texting,” LiPuma tells his students. “Because I have absolutely no patience for the
Gone with the Wind, Godfather II,
4-hour epic. Five words or less, tell me what you need. I'll start you with 10, but then you got to get it down to five so you can learn how to get to your point:
Chef, I need help straining the sauce.
”
Those seven wordsâperhaps two too many for Chef LiPumaâbalance the social and practical. They communicate a measure of esteem and pare away everything but the most vital information. They show respect and also respect for time, the chef's most precious resource. In the kitchen, extraneous information is exiled. Sometimes, chefs issue a blunt edict:
Get to the point.
Sam Henderson noticed this in her transition from the corporation to the kitchen, and welcomed the removal of what she calls the burden of being polite.
“There are very few industries like the kitchen where you just say what you need and what's on your mind,” Henderson says. “You don't have to be nasty or mean, but you get to the point. If
something's wrong, you say it's wrong. If you need something immediately, you say, âI need this now. I needed this yesterday.' You just cut the nonsense out because there's no time to tiptoe. Running an efficient and a cost-effective kitchen is just a monumental task. Being polite can be a waste of time. It actually gets in the way of your getting work done.”
While it's hard to imagine the self-effacing Hendersonâif she were to somehow find herself back in the corporate worldâtelling her coworkers to
just shut up and get to the point,
she nails the social whimsies of the office world. In the kitchen, work can be fun and social, but work time is
time for work
. In the office, inefficient, escapist, and self-indulgent communication devalues the very thing corporations are purchasing at high cost from their employees: their time.
In the last few decades we've seen chefs leave the kitchen and create their own corporations. In 1992, Eric Bromberg and his brother Bruce founded a restaurant called Blue Ribbon in New York City. By 2015, the Blue Ribbon Group comprised 19 restaurants with more than 1,200 employees in four cities. Bromberg the chef had become Bromberg the executive. But Bromberg took the lessons of mise-en-place with him. In the office he could boast of a marvelous retention rate: Of the 14 people who started with him in 1992, 11 remained after 2 decades. One reason for this was Bromberg's no-nonsense approach to interoffice communication.
“We never have meetings,” he says.
“Never?” I ask.
“Not in the corporate office,” he replies. “We go months and months without a meeting. I find meetings a waste of everybody's time. Once they're at work, they need to be working. We communicate in a constant flow of texts, [one-on-one] e-mails, and in-person interactions to directly solve problems. We try to have a personal connection with everyone. E-mails and general meetings are impersonal. You send [bulk] e-mails, they don't read them. I'll say, âTalk
to your people.' If I felt that someone was dynamic enough to carry a meeting, sure. But I'm not interested in group therapy sessions. We try to take problems out of a general forum and address them from top down, because every failure starts at the top, with me.”
Bromberg's anti-meeting, in-person policy might not work for many offices, but just as Sam Henderson's words about politeness illuminate a particularly wasteful aspect of office culture, so, too, do Bromberg's about meetings. For the most part, staff meetings in offices happen because they're good for the
boss,
not the staff.
Meanwhile, employees in the United States spend somewhere between 40 and 50 percent of their working hours in meetings that are estimated to waste $37 billion per year. A meeting of just a few managers can cost companies thousands of dollars per hour in salary. Meeting culture proves how common and acceptable tremendous, wanton time waste is in the world of the office. Chefs, once they establish their own corporate ventures, often have an unsurprising lack of tolerance for that kind of waste.
The office has much to learn from the professional kitchen: Don't act like you have all the time in the world, and that goes double for how you treat the time of the people who work for you. Endeavor to make the work lives of your employees, your colleagues, and your bosses easier, and the first way to do that is to treat their time, and yours, as a precious commodity. Strive, like chefs do, to work clean with communication.
The kitchen asks cooks to field a flurry of orders, confirm them, coordinate them with their fellows, and deliver them. This communication comes from only two sources: verbal or written orders.
Here's where it doesn't come from: phone calls, voice mails, text messages, video chat, e-mails, instant messages, shared task management software, Tweets, Facebook messages, FedEx packages, postal deliveries, and pop-in visitors.
In the kitchen, communication is complex. But communication in the office is far more complicated. Cooks have one stream of
orders; we have a multiplicity. Cooks cook and talk; we talk, write, call, draw, illustrate, calculate, sell, measure, stitch, and more. Cooks work in one place; we work in many. Cooks communicate frantically, but simply; our pace matches theirs, but our correspondence is much more complex. For cooks, when service stops, communication stops. For us, it never ends.
Given the tremendous differences here, I've wondered at times whether the kitchen provides useful guidance for effective communication on the outside. Again, I've concluded that the differences between kitchen and office actually
highlight
the usefulness of the thought form behind mise-en-place and call and callback.
â
Kitchens maintain one stream of information. Ergo, the fewer streams, the better.
â
Communication should be
clear, concise,
and
respectful.
â
Coworkers should have a
common language.
â
Communication should be confirmed with specificity, and reconfirmed when needed, for accuracy and memory.
The kitchen offers these universal principles for excellent communication.
CONSOLIDATE YOUR STREAMS
The proliferation of communication channels consumes most of our work life and mounts the most challenging obstacle to creating a functioning workplace mise-en-place. The best way to manage communication is to
contain
it. Though few of us will likely succeed in paring our communication channels down to one, we can do a number of things to reduce and simplify them. Options include:
Consolidate e-mail browsers and addresses.
Many of us maintain multiple e-mail addresses. If you can't reduce the number of accounts you use, forward your e-mails to one address or program your browser so that you can check multiple e-mail accounts in one place.
Reduce the number of social media and communications services you use.
Services like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn keep us connected and entertained. But the more we use them, the more channels we leave open for input. It's better to maintain robust activity on two or three accounts than dabble with a dozen. As for the apps, services, and software that you use to record your thoughts, notes, and tasks, discipline yourself to use only one or two programs, thereby limiting the number that you have to check.
Redirect voice mail.
Some services transcribe voice mails into text. Your outgoing message can ask callers to send messages to you via e-mail instead of leaving a message. Or you can simply turn voice mail off.
Discourage communication on particular channels.
You can send auto-replies from particular e-mail addresses, or you can not respond to or check messages on selected social media services, so folks who attempt to contact you through them eventually get the message that it's a dead end. When an important person regularly uses a channel that you don't, that's the kind of situation that forces you to use a service even when you've tried not to. You can, of course, ask that person to contact you on another channel, depending on your relationship. Corporations, for example, may insist you use their chosen services. That's even more reason to restrict where and when you respond in the personal realm.
Establish forwarding and alert mechanisms.
Many social media services can send you an e-mail alert when you receive a message, so you don't have to take the extra step of checking that Web site or app. Third-party services can consolidate messages for you. Your e-mail program and many social media services can also alert you to communication from selected people or on selected topics. The point is to give yourself fewer channels and fewer reasons to check them.
The next time you cook with a partner, don't simply chat: Confer about splitting the work and tell each other what's happening as you cook. Use your kitchen communication skills.
â
When your partner calls, call back with specifics.
â
Share space by alerting each other with kitchen vocabulary: “Behind!” “Hot!”
â
Make requests (“When will the spinach be ready?”), and answer them with times (“Two minutes!”).
You might be surprised at how regimented, specific communication imparts mutual trust and makes the experience of working together efficient and pleasurable.
CONFIRM ESSENTIAL COMMUNICATION
Not all communication requires callback, but essential communication does.
Here's why: According to a number of studies on corporate e-mail, recipients interpret e-mails correctly only 50 percent of the time, while believing they interpret them correctly close to 90 percent of the time. The same divergence occurs with senders. Another
study found “a link between e-mail misunderstandings and egocentrism,” meaning that senders aren't concerned enough with how their messages are being understood.
Confirmation is only the first of four levels of callback.
1.
Confirmation
âa simple reply to acknowledge receipt of a piece of communication (“Got it!”)
2.
Routing
âa reply to delay, direct, deflect, defer, or refer the sender or issue in question (“Will reply by tomorrow.”)
3.
Simple answer
ârequiring nothing more than a yes, no, or a specific piece of information (“I will meet you at 5:00 p.m.”)
4.
Detailed answer
âany reply requiring more than about a minute of your time
Consider confirmation as the easiest option, and routing and providing a simple answer as the most efficient, because these get the item off your plate. If there isn't time for a detailed answer, the item should ideally be routed to your Action list and/ or calendar.
Who and what you deem “essential” is up to you. In general, consider the following
hierarchy of relationships
in your communications triage, with “1” being the most important:
1.
Managers, partners, clients, teachers, family
2.
Employees, colleagues, friends
3.
Vendors, solicitors, acquaintances
Also consider the following
hierarchy of issues:
1.
Health related
2.
Financial
3.
Managerial/administrative
4.
Creative
5.
Social
Confirmation need not be immediate, but it should happen within a time frame that works for you and your relationships. Though many workplaces expect replies from within minutes to an hour, in most close work relationships, 24 hours is a reasonable time to allow someone to get back to you, or for you to get back to them.
In all this communication, the good habits of active listening and mirroring will go a long way to keep your relationships solid and your communication tight, help you remember essential actions, and put a lot of the small but deliverable process work behind you.
We can't control others' communication behavior, but we can influence it by setting proper boundaries and rules of engagement, and by developing and using action language: a persistent effort to distinguish discussion on one hand from requests for action on the other.
Action language helps in meetings where people need to make those distinctions. Direct those around you to those requests by asking the right kinds of questions:
What's the consensus here? What's the takeaway? What's the next step? Who needs help? How can I help?
Action language helps in e-mail as well. Often you will find yourself engaged in a threadâan extended back-and-forth conversationâor find yourself included in one and completely lost. Again, the right questions can constrain the conversation to the essentials. You can, in a particularly long e-mail thread, call for the equivalent of an “all day,” something like:
Apologies. I am having a hard time deciphering this long thread. Can you outline the original issue here and tell me what you need?
When requests aren't clear or complete, you can create forms, which regiment what others need to give to you. These can be a time-saver for both you and the person making the request provided that your form is easy for the other person to complete and that you act on it promptly.
Be careful. Forms, like meetings, measure authority in the corporate world. To those with even a bit of power, they can become a power trip if unchecked. Chef Thomas Keller disdains forms in all forms, especially when a member of his executive team creates a new one for his kitchen staff.
Don't do this to them
, he tells his corporate executives.
They're working 12 hours a day. They're in the restaurant at 1:00 in the morning. They come in at noon. The only reason you're here is because there's a kid working in the restaurant at midnight when you're in bed. Don't make their job harder. Your job is to make their job easier.
You
fill out the form. That's your job.