A Leader’s Guide to Cooking Dinner
Why I want to be led by more chefs than cooks.
In which I discover my son’s leadership potential.
My boy Charlie is a manager.
It says so on his LinkedIn profile.
But two weeks before lockdown he did something that made me think, ‘I’d love to be led by someone like you.’
We’d been out for a few beers to catch up and he said, ‘Dad, come back to mine for something to eat before you get the train.’
Now I am a man who loves a take away pizza. But as a devoted home cook I adore someone who will take the time and effort to put something on a plate in front of me.
We went back to Charlie’s flat and that is when his leadership potential showed itself.
The leader-chef shows his hand.
The big difference between my kitchen and Charlie’s is that he doesn't have a bookshelf groaning at the rawl plugs with a British Library of recipe books.
As we stood in front of his open fridge Charlie surveyed the scene.
Three chicken thighs that needed using today. A yellow bell pepper. A couple of onions. Some tomatoes. A bag of birdseye chillis. Two potatoes. A lime. Some kale that looked like it was days away from the compost. And a healthy assortment of garlic, fresh ginger, lemon grass, lime leaves and bottled condiments.
‘Right Dad. This starts in Colombo and heads east until I think we’ve arrived.’
And then he began.
Onions, garlic, ginger and lemongrass went into some oil.
Then he added a Sri Lankan masala mix he’d made (recipe below) along with turmeric and salt.
In went the chillis along with shredded tomatoes to create a base.
Then he found a tin of coconut milk and threw that in before adding the lime leaves.
A quick taste and he decided some fish sauce and the juice of a fresh lime was the answer.
We were already way past the Andaman Islands and heading for Phuket.
Then he diced the chicken and potatoes and added them to the gently bubbling cauldron.
Some sushi rice was put on to boil as we continued our global wander and a final cold beer was poured.
Ten minutes before serving time he added the chopped yellow pepper. And a final flourish of kale brought us back to the UK.
30 minutes from start to finish and I had the most delicious plate of food in front of me as I looked with pride at my boy: the leader.
Are you a cook or a chef?
I know plenty of people who when faced with that situation would have bought a take away pizza rather than risking disaster.
And I would never judge them.
And I also know people who would have looked at those ingredients and thought, ‘I don’t think Nigella, Jamie or Rick have a recipe for that. I’ll order the pizza anyway.’
Those are the people I call cooks.
They are telling themselves the story that they need to follow exact rules and as long as they do so all will be fine. They are managers really.
But Charlie is what I would call a chef.
He looked at what he had and thought, ‘What can I do with this?’
He trusted the basic principles of cooking, his skills and his knowledge of what works well together and came up with something extraordinary.
This for me is leadership mindset. It’s daring within parameters.
As Max Dickins in his brilliant new book ‘Improvise! Use the Secrets of Improv to Achieve Extraordinary Results at Work’ says, when you ‘improvise within these broad walls [of experience] the results are all the better for it.’
But choose your moments wisely.
Now I’m not for a second saying that leaders don’t need to follow strict procedures at the moments when the stakes are high and there are tried and tested ways to get to safety.
No Michelin starred chef is going to start throwing random things together in the middle of service on a Saturday night.
And I’m sure that if Charlie had been entertaining his girlfriend’s parents for the first time he would have been nose down in a foolproof copy of Marcella Hazan.
But this wasn't one of those times.
He had the space to trust himself and dare.
And as a result he discovered a new way that may well be useful when he has to surprise an important guest with something they haven’t seen before.
He was a chef and a leader.
My challenge should you choose to accept it.
Are you a chef or a cook? A leader or a manager?
What story are you telling yourself?
When can you find those times to trust your skill and experience and come up with an improvised solution that will surprise everyone?
You never know; it might go down in the books as standard procedure developed by you.
Charlie’s Sri Lankan Masala
4 tablespoons of coriander seeds
3 tablespoons of cumin seeds
2 tablespoons of black peppercorns and 2 tablespoons of uncooked rice
1 tablespoon of nigella seeds.
3 teaspoons of cloves
1 teaspoon of ground cardamom
1 teaspoon of fennel seeds
Grind all of this with a pestle and mortar or in a coffee grinder. Charlie used a couple of tablespoons of the mix in our curry.
