3 Principles for Young Chefs

Becoming a chef, being promoted and rising the ranks is an amazing feeling. It comes with a sense of pride and accomplishment to have a new opportunity, a new title, and a bigger salary to have a better quality of life. Being recognized and promoted for all the hard work you did is validating for time spent working toward a goal. You earned it and you deserve to be proud.  

But going from cook to chef takes years of hard work to get beyond the inevitable learning curve. When you rise to a higher level, you find yourself at the starting line once again as soon as you take that promotion. You immediately face a vast new set of great challenges and opportunities that are coupled together.

There will always be new concepts and technical things you’ll need to learn on an intellectual level. There are thousands of ideas that you’ll need to consider over the course of your career. Some will get you through a period and then go away, others will stick with you, and you’ll create your own principles along the way too.

The principles below are core fundamentals that you really want to drill into your mind because they are foundational for building an environment that allows everything else to grow. They pertain to you, your team and how you work through challenges. Consider these the root cause principles that you can build upon to have a successful career.

Principle #1: Be dedicated and committed through adversity

If cooking is fun, then professional cooking is hard, and being a professional chef is harder. Becoming a chef is not a lighthearted endeavor and requires you to be physically, mentally and emotionally resilient to the constant challenges involved.

This is the first principle because it’s almost always the first shock to the system for young chefs. Passion is wonderful until there are operational issues, a guest is unhappy, and the P&L reads like a horror script. Problems feel like they pile up. The pressure does not stop. Ever.

So, you must become stronger. The upside here is that chefs who can effectively manage the stress and expectations of the job, who learn the core understandings and functions quickly, are then able to take full advantage of the opportunities of being an executive leader. It’s the ability to adapt to the pressure and succeed when the odds are against you, that allows you to ascend each level.

Much of the learning and growth in your career is earned by thinking and feeling your way through times of adversity, processing many conflicting details quickly, mostly intuitively, without getting an immediate outcome. The patience required makes it that much more challenging. But, when the adversity does subside, you will fall back onto what you paid forward. Just remain committed and dedicated, because if you quit, you get nothing.

There will be problems, issues, miscommunications, mistakes, and all sorts of things you’d rather not deal with, but know that there will always be solutions, and you can persevere through anything if you stand committed and dedicated to your team and yourself.

The success you want is just beyond the adversity you’re facing. Passion gets us in the door, but commitment and dedication win the marathon. Don’t allow your passion to be destroyed because of difficulty. Know that its normal to feel overwhelmed and you will get so much better at managing what seems chaotic as you gain experience. Stick with it.

Principle #2: Act like the chef you want to become

There’s a place for everyone in the hospitality profession. This is both an opportunity and a warning, because if you don’t decide how and where you want to be, you could very well end up someplace you never thought you’d ever be, with no way out, and it happens all the time.

There are various levels of fine dining restaurants, hotels, taverns, bars, bistros, etc. Greatness can come in many forms. There are excellent, high-quality places no matter what category you’re working in. But there are also many terrible places to work, with low standards, zero ethics, bad pay and that just generally suck the life from you.

If you focus on being the best you can be, you can achieve anything in this business and everything that comes with it. But, on the opposite end of that spectrum is the chef who never truly focused, and just like the melting ice cube, can’t seem to regain form. Your habits determine where you go, so make sure they’re aligned with where you want to be. You’ll get what you pay forward.

Act like the chef you want to become. What is this person like? How does this person behave, perform and communicate? Do they work clean? Do they have integrity? Are they ethical, knowledgeable, highly skilled and professional? Excellence isn’t bestowed upon anyone. It isn’t magic. It’s a result of being greater than easy circumstances. When you choose to be your ideal, by your example you encourage your team to be great too.

Decide how you want to be, because eventually we become the sum value of our cumulative decisions and actions. This is unavoidable. Decide your habits now so that you don’t have worry about it later. There are so many excellent chefs out there to learn from and use as inspiration for what’s possible. Aim high for this and commit to being the best you can be, all the time.

Principle #3: Be people focused and obsessed with team building

The restaurant business is a people business. Your task as a leader is to see yourself as the key to the success of your team, and everyone around you as key to yours. Like a straight line from culture to results, people determine the quality of your service, product, sales and everything else.

This goes far beyond being nice and treating people well. Your job isn’t to make people happy, but to help them succeed. You must also have the courage to be firm, honest, and even disliked during the calculated process of pushing someone else to improve for their own benefit. Stretching can hurt, but if you’re fair and respectful, they’ll stay with you a long time, because they know they can trust you.

Being people focused means you are equal parts empathetic and developmental. That you can properly evaluate someone and then help them improve with teaching, patience and respect when they try and fail. When you do this, you gain everything. It’s the key to the low turnover and high morale that creates greater standards, better guest experiences and stronger sales.

Let’s not pretend this is easy. In fact, it’s the hardest part of leadership and takes the most time and effort. This can even be frustrating and painful depending on the skillsets involved (including yours). But your efforts will be rewarded with a consistency and stability that will set you worlds apart from others who are unwilling to do it.

This new level becomes a foundation for opportunities, instead of playing whack-a-mole with problems as the revolving door for staff spins off its hinges. In this you choose to be a mentor, not simply a “boss”, because when someone is on your team, they are choosing to trust you with their careers, consciously or not.

Invest your time into your people and focus every day on building the best team possible. When you do this, work becomes easier because you maintain a team of trained people who know the ropes, making everything more controllable.

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At the end of the day, don’t allow the job to consume you and always focus on the good as well as the improvements you need to make. Know that if you follow and build upon these core fundamentals you will succeed.

It may feel like more pressure, because there is much more pressure, but eventually you become stronger and smarter with experience and skills that nobody can take from you. You can have an amazing career and achieve great heights.

Just make sure to enjoy it and have fun along the way too.