Teaching the Ways
The internet was pissed after I made a video all about a sliver of a moment, of a micro-action, of a line cook’s day: cooling something down.
We’ve all had those projects on the prep list for the day: a slow-simmered stock, a painstakingly made sauce, a velvety smooth vegetable purée…in my case, it was a garlic chive oil.
Considering it’s bright green, I look at it as a component that benefits immensely from cooling down quickly…not to mention the guidelines that health and sanitation departments put on restaurants and the scale that a lot of you folks operate at.
The TL;DW of the video is: exactly how much faster is a metal container (versus a plastic one) when cooling something down? Spoiler alert: it’s literally 2x faster. If I didn’t stand there stirring the plastic one, the delta would have probably been even larger.
I look at this result and I was STOKED to have that math. Now I can use this data to teach!
But as the internet does, I was pretty surprised to see some of the comments:
“They teach this in 4th grade!”
“Everyone already knows this…”
“Why are you explaining insulated vs conductive materials?”
Don’t get me wrong, I’ll take the boost in engagement any day of the week, but what really struck me about these comments was the prevailing culture of “If I know something, everyone automatically knows/should know it too”.
I might be reading into things, but this type of rhetoric is almost undercut by this air of: “…and you’re an idiot if you don’t know this or try to teach it to new people”.
We, as an industry, gotta stop that.
I was putting together a deck for Repertoire this week and I landed on a pretty surprising stat. Depending on where you get your numbers, less than 35% of hospitality professionals get a degree.
That means nearly 2 out of every 3 people in a restaurant have just been learning as they go along. They’re picking up knowledge from experience.
Combine this with the varied learning styles that everyone comes equipped with, and you’ve got an environment that depends on information transfer.
Plus, everyone’s got a different “way” of doing it. Insert meme of “this is how we did it at my last restaurant”
To me, there’s zero downside in teaching the "ways" in as many "ways" as it takes until someone learns it.
I made the garlic chive video because “here’s how to cool your mise en place down twice as fast” gets a certain type of person more excited than “here’s a demonstration of how the thermodynamics of conductive materials function using stainless steel and lipids”.
Now, could I have positioned the point of the video a bit better? 100% - that part’s on me, my bad 🤷♂️
But if we continue to bash education, make motivated/engaged team members feel guilty for being hungry for more knowledge, or fail to pass along what we know to the next generation…we might deserve what the “doom and gloom” people are saying about the hospitality industry.
I look at those pessimistic and cynical comments and get even more motivated to show up and work on this.
Here’s how you can use this information:
If you’re even 6 months into your career, you’re above the bottom of the ladder. Try and see how much you can “absorb” from the folks 1-2 rungs above you by asking pointed questions about what they're working on, and ask yourself how you can be a responsible steward of the learnings you possess and share with anyone that’s below you on that ladder. It’s never too early to teach.
Ask yourself: can I teach this? A fantastic test of your level of understanding is being able to distill it into a lesson that can be repeated by someone else. Even if you’ve done something a million times, if it’s all muscle memory for you or all-in-your-head, chances are you could deepen your knowledge of that skill by attempting to teach it. Plus, it’ll feel awesome to help someone!
Try it another way - if you’re banging your head against the walk-in door because someone isn’t wrapping their head around a concept or skill, take a step back and try it from another angle. If you haven’t been using any numbers in your explanation, add some. If everything you’ve been communicating has been auditory, take some pictures/videos of you doing it on your phone and show that instead. Ask the person, and if they say they learn by doing, walk them through a hands-on trial of that project and give feedback along the way.
To those of you that are doing this already for your team mates on the day-to-day, I’m giving you a round of applause 👏🔃 the kudos is well deserved, and I know you don’t get enough of it - keep up the strong work!