There are some times in a professional kitchen when it feels as though everything has decided to go wrong at exactly the same time.

You know the ones.

The sort of service where you are already behind before the first ticket hits the pass. Where the staffing plan has disappeared, the equipment is misbehaving, the phone won't stop ringing and somebody is asking you a question that would normally be perfectly reasonable but, at that particular moment, feels like the final straw.

I wrote about one such time in THINK LIKE A CHEF: How to Play Guitar & Save the World.

It was a 200-person wedding reception.

And before the guests had even properly settled in, the kitchen was already in trouble.

The head chef called in sick.

The air conditioning failed.

The wedding cake arrived damaged and melting.

Then, just to make things more interesting, a pipe burst in the preparation area and started flooding the kitchen floor.

And the person who normally dealt with the major crises — the general manager — was sitting in his car, unable to face what was happening.

At that point, there was a choice.

People could stand around waiting for somebody more senior to arrive.

They could start blaming the circumstances.

They could argue about whose responsibility each problem was.

Or somebody could start making decisions.

That person was Sarah.

She was 26 years old, a sous chef, and only the third-highest ranking person in the kitchen.

On paper, she wasn't the person in charge.

But leadership isn't always about who appears at the top of the organisational chart.

Sometimes leadership is simply what happens when somebody looks at a deteriorating situation and says:

"Okay. Here's what we're going to do."

The first thing she did was stop looking at the whole disaster

This is something that working in kitchens teaches you very quickly.

When everything is going wrong, trying to solve everything at once is usually the fastest way to make things worse.

You have to break the problem down.

What is dangerous?

What is urgent?

What can wait?

What is still working?

Who has the skills to deal with each problem?

And what absolutely has to happen for service to continue?

Sarah didn't have the luxury of fixing the entire situation.

She didn't need to.

She needed to identify the next useful decision.

The menu could be simplified.

The damaged cake could be salvaged.

The flooding could be contained.

People could be moved into positions where their skills were most useful.

The team could be given clear instructions.

The guests could be kept informed.

One decision led to the next.

And gradually, what had looked like one enormous disaster became a series of smaller problems that could actually be dealt with.

That distinction matters.

Because when people are under pressure, they often think leadership means having all the answers.

It doesn't.

Sometimes leadership means being able to identify the next question.

Kitchens are very good at teaching prioritisation

A professional kitchen is an interesting environment because there is almost never enough time to do everything.

You are constantly prioritising.

A table has been waiting too long.

A steak is ready but the vegetables aren't.

Someone has called in sick.

The dishwasher is backed up.

A delivery hasn't arrived.

A customer has an allergy.

Something has broken.

Someone is asking what is happening next month.

And somewhere in the middle of all of that, somebody still expects dinner to come out of the kitchen looking exactly as it should.

You learn that not every problem is equal.

Some things need attention immediately.

Some things need to be monitored.

Some things can wait.

And some things simply aren't important anymore.

That last one is particularly important.

Under pressure, good leaders are often not the people who do the most.

They are the people who know what not to do.

Authority and leadership aren't the same thing

This is one of the ideas that sits at the heart of THINK LIKE A CHEF.

We often assume that leadership comes automatically with position.

Chef.

Manager.

Director.

General Manager.

Chief Executive.

The person with the title must therefore be the leader.

But anyone who has worked in a serious kitchen knows that it doesn't work like that.

When service is going badly, people naturally look for the person who can make sense of what is happening.

That might be the executive chef.

It might be the sous chef.

It might be a section chef who has been doing the job for twenty years.

It might even be the person who has only been there six months but happens to understand the piece of equipment that has just failed.

Leadership can move around a room.

The person with the authority may not always be the person with the answer.

And sometimes the person with the answer doesn't have any formal authority at all.

That's why I think kitchens are such interesting places to study leadership.

They strip away a lot of the theory.

When the printer is screaming, the fryer is down, three tickets are hanging and a wedding party is waiting for dinner, nobody particularly cares about your leadership philosophy.

They want to know:

What are we doing next?

Calm is contagious

There is another lesson hidden in situations like this.

Panic spreads.

So does calm.

A leader doesn't necessarily need to have everything under control.

They need to give the people around them enough confidence to believe that the situation can be controlled.

That can be as simple as speaking clearly.

Giving one instruction at a time.

Putting the right person on the right problem.

Removing unnecessary noise.

Not shouting simply because the situation is stressful.

And making decisions when decisions need to be made.

The people around you take their emotional cues from you.

If the person leading the kitchen starts running around shouting, blaming people and changing their mind every thirty seconds, the entire operation becomes harder to control.

But if somebody can stand in the middle of the chaos and calmly say:

"This is the problem. You're dealing with that. You take this. I'll handle this. We'll review it in ten minutes."

Something changes.

The situation hasn't necessarily improved yet.

But the people have.

And once the people become organised, the situation usually starts improving with them.

The goal isn't perfection

One of the biggest mistakes we can make when looking back at a crisis is judging ourselves against the original plan.

The original plan has gone.

It doesn't matter anymore.

The question is not:

"Can we still deliver exactly what we intended?"

The question becomes:

"Given what has happened, what is the best outcome we can still achieve?"

That is a very different question.

The menu might have to change.

The timing might have to change.

The presentation might have to change.

The priorities might have to change.

That isn't failure.

That's adaptation.

And adaptation is one of the most important skills you can develop in any high-pressure environment.

This is why I wrote the book

After around forty years working around professional kitchens, I've become increasingly interested in what those environments teach us about people.

Not cooking.

Not recipes.

Not food.

People.

What happens to us when the pressure increases?

How do we communicate when there isn't time for a meeting?

How do we make decisions when we don't have all the information?

How do we keep people moving when the original plan has collapsed?

How do we recognise when somebody else is better placed to lead?

How do we prevent pressure from becoming panic?

And perhaps most importantly:

How do we keep functioning when everything around us is telling us that we shouldn't be able to?

Those lessons don't stop being useful when you leave the kitchen.

They apply in business.

They apply in management.

They apply in emergency situations.

They apply in boardrooms, cockpits, hospitals, workshops and command centres.

They apply anywhere human beings are expected to perform while things are going wrong.

That's what THINK LIKE A CHEF: How to Play Guitar & Save the World is really about.

It's about the mental habits that develop when you spend years working in environments where the pressure is real, the consequences are immediate and there is rarely an opportunity to simply stop and start again.

Because eventually you learn something very simple.

When everything goes wrong, you don't necessarily need the person with the biggest title.

You need somebody who can look at the situation, take a breath, work out what matters and make the next useful decision.

Sometimes, that's leadership.

And sometimes, that's enough to get everyone through the night.

THINK LIKE A CHEF: How to Play Guitar & Save the World is available now.*

https://shorturl.at/KbeU