Over the holidays, my eldest son reintroduced me to the infamous television show, “Kitchen Nightmares”, starring world-renowned Chef, Gordon Ramsay.
Love him, or loathe him, it makes for quite interesting viewing.
The premise of the television show is that he goes into poor-performing restaurants, observes what they are doing, criticises them with zero empathy, and sets them straight around how they can make their establishment profitable again.
Some take on the feedback, some don’t, and a lot of it boils down (see what I did there?) to how the feedback is provided, but of course, the potty mouth Chef Ramsay, delivers his messages almost brutally, lacking compassion, and any shred of gentleness.
One episode, in particular, was about a couple running a restaurant that was unfortunately renowned for their customer abuse. Yes, correct- customer abuse instead of customer service. If a customer dared to provide feedback, sent a meal back, or complained about the food- they were openly abused. Not subtlety, but loud obnoxious behaviour that can only be referred to as abuse.
At the crux of the issue, feedback was not being provided to the chef featured in this episode, Amy. Feedback was being kept from her, so she did not have the opportunity to improve her skills. It appears that feedback wasn’t being provided because she would take any criticism or feedback very badly. So, people stopped giving it to her. When customers complained, she was astounded because she was not aware of how people really felt about the meals she was preparing, and also the treatment she was dishing out (there it is again!) to her team.
The television viewing was so bad it was good! I could not turn it off. As I was watching it, I was thinking about leadership nightmares, rather than “Kitchen Nightmares”. Those times when we have had a leader that we could not provide feedback to because of negative consequences that could arise. Maybe there have been times when we have not been open to feedback, when we have not been willing to consider our blind spots, when we have not had the confidence to be vulnerable, to say we don’t know, to be open to learning something new that could improve the way we lead. Our inability to receive feedback graciously, and to be curious enough to understand the feedback, can create a nightmare for others and ourselves.
Don’t be like Chef Amy. Be open to feedback.
Don’t be like Amy’s team who would not provide feedback. And don’t be like Gordon Ramsay who delivers the feedback poorly. Be gracious in delivering feedback. It will help others receive it graciously too.
Don’t create leadership nightmares. Create leadership experiences, where people remember working with you for all the right reasons, where you connect positively as two humans interacting, learning from each other respectfully, with kindness, empathy and compassion.
Rita Cincotta coaches, facilitates and speaks on individual and team performance, leadership development, resilience and new ways of working. She works with organisations to develop human centred solutions that help people and businesses to thrive.