by Dan Charnas
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.
OUT OF THE KITCHEN
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.
■Kitchens maintain one stream of information. Ergo, the fewer streams, the better.
■Communication should be clear, concise, and respectful.
■Coworkers should have a common language.
■Communication should be confirmed with specificity, and reconfirmed when needed, for accuracy and memory.
The kitchen offers these universal principles for excellent communication.
EXERCISES: SKILLS TO LEARN
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.
KITCHEN PRACTICE: COOK WITH SOMEONE
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.
■When your partner calls, call back with specifics.
■Share space by alerting each other with kitchen vocabulary: “Behind!” “Hot!”
■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.
HABITS: BEHAVIORS TO REPEAT
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—a simple reply to acknowledge receipt of a piece of communication (“Got it!”)
2.Routing—a reply to delay, direct, deflect, defer, or refer the sender or issue in question (“Will reply by tomorrow.”)
3.Simple answer—requiring nothing more than a yes, no, or a specific piece of information (“I will meet you at 5:00 p.m.”)
4.Detailed answer—any 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.
USE ACTION LANGUAGE
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 thread—an extended back-and-forth conversation—or 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.
A chef’s reprise: Heard
For 5 years while he built the restaurant into one of Philadelphia’s hottest, Rob Halpern lived at Marigold, and not in the metaphorical sense, either. Halpern slept in a small room upstairs not much bigger than a closet.
One day in 2014, however, the chef decided that his work there was done, and that he and his fiancée were getting married and moving to California. With that, Halpern left. Tim and Andrew bought Marigold from him for somewhat less than Rob’s asking price of $300,000 and renegotiated the lease.
One year after my first visit, I dropped by to see how things were going.
Tim and Andrew promoted Keith to executive chef and kept as many of the crew as they could after a pause of several months for renovations. They simplified the cooking, removing most of the retro references and nitrogen-powered items on the menu. They focused on a more classical approach while retaining a bit of Halpern’s whimsy. They simplified the stations; at the new Marigold, everyone was encouraged to be a “roundsman,” meaning someone able to cook every dish on the menu if called to do so. And they simplified the communication, too. Gone were the references to obscure white male progressive rock artists. Gone were the annoying little sticky notes that Rob used to leave for them on their stations: “This could have been cleaned better.” They did keep the reference to the pass—the place where waiters picked up food from the hot line—as “Station Four,” even though there wasn’t a Station One, Two, and Three, nor had there ever been.
Keith’s cooking kept the good reviews and customers coming in. But the new chef had to swallow one bitter pill: It was he, and not Rob, who had actually prepared that truffled crab macaroni and cheese that won Rinna Diaz’s heart. The guys in the kitchen break Keith’s balls about it all the time. Just think, Keith. If Rob hadn’t taken credit for it, Rinna could have been yours. Instead, it’s Rob in California and Keith at Station Four.
At that very moment, Rob Halpern was likely enjoying the sunshine on his 30-acre almond orchard outside Paso Robles. Outside his 1,600-square-foot home, chickens were probably poking around in the soil among his persimmon, peach, and pear trees. He might be driving to the farmers’ market, or else to the winery or retreat center where he was serving as exclusive chef for special events. And when Rinna returned from her job as an operating room nurse, they’d drink wine.
Back in Philadelphia, Halpern’s old crew had no clue. “I think he has some land,” Keith said. “He told us potentially he was opening a farm.”
Is he gonna cook? I ask.
They shake their heads. They haven’t heard.
Recipe for Success
Commit to confirming and expecting confirmation of essential communication. Call back.
THE NINTH INGREDIENT
INSPECT AND CORRECT
A chef’s story: The laughing coach
The critics agree: Bill Telepan can cook.
Frank Bruni, a writer for the New York Times, shrugged when he first entered Telepan’s eponymous restaurant after it opened in late 2005. The food press heralded Telepan for his seasonal cooking at fancier digs like the Judson Grill in Midtown; this new place, Telepan’s first as an owner, was humble, tucked away on a residential side street on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. “An oddly configured series of rooms,” Bruni wrote, “created from the joined first floors of adjacent townhouses.” The menu looked “prosaic.” But in his 2006 review, Bruni described being startled, again and again, by unpretentious food that burst with flavor, “none of it precious but all of it vibrant”—a vegetable bread soup, a juicy fillet of salmon, smoked trout on little blini pancakes. The food, Bruni enthused, “shuns trickery and puts its faith in fundamental virtues: its freshness; the pureness or punch of its flavors; the skill with which it’s been cooked.” Other reviews, like the one in New York Magazine, found fault with the restaurant’s decor and pricing, but conceded there was “no doubt about Telepan’s talents as a chef.”
Of course, Bill Telepan didn’t actually cook his food. As a chef-restaurateur, Telepan’s job now was to look at his food. All the dishes were his recipes, but other hands made them, hands trained by Telepan. He watched his food and his crew as they cooked it, listened to his customers and critics after they ate it, and made adjustments.
Telepan resembled his food: brilliance in an unassuming package, his refinement evolved by watching, listening, and adjusting along his own journey from the kitchen of a New Jersey deli into what Bruni called the “top tier” of New York chefs. He had come from a working-class family—his dad employed at a General Motors plant, his mother doing odd jobs. He started cooking in high school, ending up behind the grill at Garfunkel’s—what Telepan called a “glorified TGI Fridays”—but left the restaurant to go to college. When Telepan became bored by his classes and missed the kitchen, the chef at Garfunkel’s drove him up to the CIA and gave him a tour. In his 2 years at the CIA, Telepan’s world and palate sprung open. He trailed at Charlie Palmer’s River Cafe, and soon Palmer introduced Telepan to the man who would become his mentor, Alfred Portale.
The Gotham Bar and Grill was only 3 years old when Telepan arrived, but by that time Alfred Portale had transformed it from a mediocre restaurant into one of the most important in the world. According to Ruth Reichl—one in a line of New York Times critics over the years to give Gotham a coveted three-star review—Portale and crew “figured out how to make Americans feel at ease with fancy food.” At the forefront of “New American Cuisine,” the diminutive Portale liked his food tall, and, though exacting, remained as composed as any of his famous plates. Telepan recalled: “It was a busy kitchen with 350 to 400 covers a night at a very high level of service. So everybody had to be
on. But Alfred wasn’t a yeller. Alfred would get disappointed in you.”
Telepan worked on Gotham’s line for 3 years, left for a time, and returned as Portale’s sous-chef for 4 more years. The gangly Telepan—a Jersey kid prone to sudden bursts of full-body laughter—contrasted with the quiet, restrained Portale. He emulated Portale’s dedication to ingredients, to uniformity, and crucially, to his role as chief inspector. Portale himself didn’t make the food. The cooks did. Portale taught them how, inspecting and correcting their work until they got it right. Portale could do this because, unlike other chefs of his stature, he stayed in his restaurant, at the pass, the last line of defense of his three stars and his standards. To this day he stays. “I like it better when I’m there,” Portale says.
The standards and refinement rubbed off on Telepan. And when his turn came to teach people how to cook his food, he followed Portale’s example by constantly watching and training others to watch. At Telepan’s restaurant, he always put three sets of eyes on every dish that went out: the cook’s, the expediter’s, and the head food runner’s. Usually Telepan expedited, but when he stepped away, Darwin, his longtime back waiter, stepped in. After 8 years Telepan built a two-star restaurant with a rock-solid crew who cooked his food well. He had gathered great customers, a mix of regular neighborhood folks, foodies, and theatergoers for nearby Lincoln Center. He decided to open a second place.