Read Work Clean Online

Authors: Dan Charnas

Work Clean (24 page)

In this work, the expediter draws on her sense of the restaurant's rhythms. She employs reconnaissance from the dining room to make decisions. She will use all her senses: mostly sight, but also sound, touch, smell, and taste.

“I taste food all night when I'm expediting,” Telepan says. His cooks do, too: spooning sauce into their mouths, tasting vegetables and starches. The tasting began hours and days
before
service, while they made the sauces and stews and other preparations with longer lead times. Telepan was experimenting with a new salad for the menu when he took some beets from a cook's mise-en-place. Telepan put one in his mouth. He could tell they had been in the cook's mise-en-place for longer than a day. Tamping down his anger, he found the cook, handing him a piece of freshly cut beet. “Taste that,” he said. And then he offered a piece of beet from the cook's mise-en-place. “Try that one. Now tell me if there's a difference.” Telepan teaches how to taste, but he still prowls the line hours before service to do his own tasting.

The expediter is not just an observer, but a coach. She must not only inspect, but correct. Sometimes problems come from improper technique: an ingredient thrown in a pan that's not hot enough, a piece of raw fish that hasn't been patted dry, inconsistent cuts of vegetable or protein. But more often mishaps arise from compromising one or more of the principles of mise-en-place.

QUALITY CHECKPOINTS OF THE KITCHEN

“I tell my cooks, ‘Don't try to get over,'” Telepan says. “Don't do something half-assed. Don't try to hide it. Because I'm gonna find out. I know that [dish] takes 4 minutes and it's only been 2; don't even put it up. I'd rather you take an extra minute [and] slow up service to get it right. But don't put it out, because that 1 minute you save in putting it out is going to become 6 minutes behind because you're going to have to redo the plate.”

Chefs teach self-critique

Cooks must internalize what they've been taught and learn how to evaluate their work in the way their chefs do.

“I tell new cooks, ‘Look at your station as if it's your restaurant and everybody is coming in to critique
your restaurant,
'” Telepan says. “‘You have to keep it organized and clean in the way you want your restaurant to be when you grow up to be a chef. So how you treat your station now is how your restaurant is gonna run. Now is the time to learn those habits.'”

Cooks cut corners because of laziness, or forgetfulness, or fatigue, or sometimes embarrassment at having discovered their own mistake. “I always say to them that it's worse for them to have me find out than to say, ‘Chef, I fucked up, I missed this, I gotta make it again.' I
love
that. Because it happens. In the kitchen, the machines are
human.

Chefs fix and use mistakes

Chefs transform failure into success by incorporating mistakes into their workflow—or rather, incorporating the solutions to prevent those mistakes. Thus cooks learn that failure is always an opportunity.

Thomas Keller of The French Laundry invited a four-star former chef from New York to demonstrate some classic French preparations for the chefs of his Bouchon restaurants. But surrounded by a crowd of young chefs, this great chef grew nervous
while cooking one of the most fundamental of all French preparations: the omelet.

“He totally screwed it up,” Keller remembers. “I had to do something.”

So Keller transformed the situation by having all the chefs make their own omelets. Now the lecture became a laboratory.

“It was extraordinary,” Keller remembers. What came out of the next 30 minutes was a technique to precook omelets for his Las Vegas restaurant, where they serve 600 breakfasts every morning. “The chef tasted it, I tasted it, and all the chefs tasted it, and we go,
Wow!
It looks beautiful. It's perfect. Out of somebody's mistake and somebody's embarrassment comes a technique that none of us thought about.”

Chefs calculate the cost of compromise

Chefs' standards can sometimes seem more for flourish than function. The value of a clean, white chef's jacket has little if any direct bearing on the presentation or taste of food. Yet wearing “clean whites” is a common standard. Why and when do cooks compromise? Thomas Keller explains by asking a rhetorical question.

“Are you willing to wear a T-shirt with a hole in it even when no one sees the hole?” he asks. “Yeah, maybe it's okay. Maybe it's the last day before I can wash my clothes. I've got six T-shirts and it's my sixth day and that seventh T-shirt has a hole in it. Am I going to get a new T-shirt or wash the other one? It's a compromise. We have to be available to and open to negotiating that compromise whether it's with ourselves or with each other. But the result of that compromise cannot affect in any negative way the result that we're searching for.”

Because chefs know that compromise sits on a slippery slope to chaos, they're cautious and calculating about the compromises they make.

If perfectionism is the quest for quality at the expense of delivery, then settling for less is the quest for delivery at the expense of
quality. Excellence itself is a compromise between the two: quality delivered.

Chefs and cooks live in this difficult dynamic from dish to dish. Every single plate must embody that balance. The greatest gem of their hard-won experience is the ability to discern that tipping point. They know when they're “phoning it in,” and they can tighten things up. They know when they're being too precious and can let things go.

OUT OF THE KITCHEN

Most corporations evaluate their work on a large scale—whether on the factory assembly line or in the quality assurance process at a technology business.

The kind of evaluation we speak of here, however, is small-scale, personal inspection—not the insipid, impersonal self-evaluation questionnaires distributed by many human resources departments—but personal examination of our own individual product or service, whether as small as an e-mail or as big as a book.

Outside the kitchen we ostensibly value coaching, but we don't take its implications seriously. Most corporate or creative professionals don't have the equivalent of a chef who cares about their education or their growth. For example, it is one of the central tenets of the professional kitchen that, after an apprentice gives a chef several years of hard work, the chef himself will make calls and send that apprentice off to work for another respected chef to continue to learn and build her résumé. It's hard to imagine such a thing in the corporate world. Nor do we have the counterpart of the expediter. An assistant or secretary can act as a traffic cop for scheduling, but few in the working world have such a luxury; and, anyway, an assistant is not a mentor. Managers can function as expediters for their staff, but in the corporate world many managers perform only half of the expediter's function: They're good at critiquing work but horrible at timing the workload so that their crew doesn't get overwhelmed. In academia, teachers are sometimes
observed by colleagues, administrators, and students to provide feedback; mostly, they are measured by test scores, a dubious determination of the
quality
of their instruction. Hitting a numerical target for any profession may be no better indicator of quality than an athlete who wins a point despite bad form. Those who work with words lack editors. The classic newsroom, with its layers of oversight, is disappearing. For most of us, spell-checker is as good as it's ever going to get.

We need in our world of work the means to evaluate our own work and that of others. We need the means to refine our methods and product, and to incorporate the knowledge gained from our failures. If we don't have mentors, the responsibility falls on us to create a personal culture of checks and balances, of inspection and correction, so we can
work clean
with feedback.

The best kitchens are schools, the best chefs are teachers, and the best cooks are students.

EXERCISES: SKILLS TO LEARN

SET STANDARDS

Chef Thomas Keller asks: What are your standards?

We must answer this question before evaluating our work because our inspection will only be as accurate and effective as our vision of excellence is clear. A vague vision will yield a nebulous result.

To shape your own idea of mastery, address the following questions:

1.
Who is your model or mentor for the work you do? What is it about her work, process, or demeanor that compels you?

2.
What is an example of an ideal product or service for the kind of work you do? What are the qualities that make it so?

3.
What are the habits that help you achieve your standards?

4.
What are the habits that hinder your progress toward those standards?

5.
What are the environments that assist you? What are the environments that impede you?

6.
What are the external rewards or consequences you desire or expect from the impact of your work?

7.
In what aspects and under what circumstances are you willing to compromise your standards? What aspects are you not willing to compromise under any circumstances? What trade-offs are you willing to make?

Grappling with these questions will equip you for the next exercise.

MAKE A QUALITY CONTROL CHECKLIST

Based on what you've discovered about your standards above, use the checklist technique you learned in
The Second Ingredient: Arranging Spaces, Perfecting Movements
to evaluate a work product you create or a service you do. This checklist should not simply measure results. For example, if you are a salesperson, you may indeed feel that the only box that's important to check is the one beside the question “Did I make the sale?” Your checklist should reflect only the factors you can control. A checklist measures your actions, not that of others. A checklist measures
meticulous execution,
not perfection.

The items on your checklist should:

■
Be actionable

■
Measure quantity or quality

■
Fit on one page

COUNTING MISTAKES

For 1 day, keep a tally of all the errors you make, whether great or small, whether personal or work-related. And for each of the errors, write the consequence or result beside it.

Your entries could be as mundane as “Mistake: Forgot umbrella. Result: Had to run back home to get it” or as significant as “Mistake: Misjudged distance to car in front of me. Result: Hit car.”

At the end of the day, for each item, write one action you could have taken before the mistake to prevent it or make that error less likely.

The point of this log is not guilt or embarrassment! Quite the opposite, the process of logging mistakes empowers us by cultivating the following:

■
An awareness of how common error is

■
A habit of linking error and consequence

■
An understanding of how we can reduce or prevent mistakes

KITCHEN PRACTICE: TASTE TEST

The next time you serve a meal to one or more friends or family members, ask them to write down their feedback on a piece of paper. Tell them that you are looking specifically for things to improve and that they shouldn't be afraid to be honest! Then, later that evening, read the feedback. Note how it makes you feel. Then translate that feedback into an Action list for the next time you prepare those dishes.

Encouraging and receiving feedback is difficult but crucial to becoming a better cook, a better professional, and a better person.

HABITS: BEHAVIORS TO REPEAT

MAKE FIX-IT CHECKLISTS (OR FIX YOUR CHECKLISTS)

Chefs transform failure into success by recognizing mistakes and fixing them. Chefs do this by adjusting their recipes, whether for a dish or a process.

Outside the kitchen each of us keeps a mental, internalized recipe for the work we do. But in circumstances where we regularly make mistakes, sometimes we need a physical, external recipe to guide a course correction. We can respond most powerfully to error in our work by creating and fixing checklists.

The next time you err at work in a way that makes you cringe, write it down just as you did in the “
Counting Mistakes
” exercise. Then during your Daily Meeze determine one or several steps you could take to avoid the mistake again. If you have an existing checklist for the procedure, incorporate the change. If you don't, create a new one. Even if you only use the checklist temporarily—until you've incorporated the behavior—this tool can become a place into which you put your mistakes and also a productive channel for your emotions about those mistakes.

USE THE BUDDY SYSTEM

Wherever possible, grab a second set of eyes and ears for your important work. Cultivate relationships with people who can give you fresh perspective.

Bosses.
Many managers love to teach; a few have no real investment in coaching and just expect you to do the job they're paying you to do. If you have a manager who appreciates when you ask for help, avail yourself of that opportunity.

Mentors.
Even champions like you need coaches. But too many people approach mentors as “role models” or “connections.” The kind of relationship we are encouraging you to cultivate is with someone who can truly evaluate your work from time to time and show you how to better evaluate your own progress.

Colleagues.
From critiquing and troubleshooting projects, to meeting regularly to discuss your progress toward perfecting old skills and learning new ones, a trusted colleague can be a vital ally in the workplace.

Employees.
You can train a good employee or assistant to be an extra set of eyes and ears to keep you on track and help you quality-check. Chefs are constantly teaching their skills to the people who work for them, and if you have an assistant, he will become better as you trust him more with this kind of work.

SELF-EDITING TECHNIQUES

When measuring our own product, we need to get a bit of distance from our work, in any way we can.

In
The Artful Edit,
Susan Bell recommends a series of methods any writer can use to gain perspective on her own work. These methods, slightly modified, can be used as perspective-gaining tools for many different creative pursuits, to help you take off your creator's cap and put on your editor's hat.

Change your environment.
If you're looking for different perspective on your work, change the place in which you review it. For
folks who write on a computer, an example of this would be printing your work out.

Bring different senses into the mix.
If you create something to be read with your eyes, for example, evaluate it by listening with your ears. One example for a writer would be reading your work aloud, slowly, or in a foreign accent.

Create an inner dialogue.
Assume the identity of someone else who might lend some needed perspective to your work and have an inner dialogue with him. How might he evaluate your work?

You can also avail yourself of software, apps, and services to check the quality of your work. Virtual assistants can also be helpful provided they have the right skills. For writers, Hemingway evaluates your work for clarity and brevity. Grammarly and Ginger are also powerful tools.

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