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| About |
| “Finding Time To Be Great” |
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I wrote this book with the intention of promoting team
building, incentive programs and getting the most out of our players. I believe
we have all the cookbooks, cost control books, purchasing and front of the
house books a new culinarian could ever need. What our industry needs more of
is books on how to build your culinary team! Where do you start, how do you get
people to want to work with you, how do you recognize and reward your people,
how do you get your staff to want to do more than their job description?
I am at a very special time in my life where all of the
answers are coming together and making sense. I wrote this book to share the
programs, policies and procedures that are currently working for me now. I know
they work because they are currently in use. I hope you enjoy this book as it
has been exciting for me to see it all come together. Below, please enjoy the
preface to “Finding Time To Be Great.”
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Below, please enjoy the preface to “Finding Time To Be Great.”
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Make a difference in someone’s life starting today, it feels great when you do!
I hope you have a great day.
Happy Team Building
Charles M. Carroll CEC, AAC
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Well thank God! Someone has finally done it. A book, a bible,
a life’s journal shared by a real chef in today’s modern kitchen. Oh certainly
I, as most of you, have read volumes on the subjects of management, team
building, communication and other aspects of managing our environment and
teaching others under our jurisdiction to be great at their daily tasks.
However in my thirty years as a chef and culinary CEO never have I seen a book
on this subject written by an executive chef about the realities and challenges
facing us in our day-to-day activities.
It became apparent to me that most executive chefs,
regardless of stature, receive our education in management from the school of
hard knocks. It is pretty much determined for us by most culinary schools or
educational facilities that our role as cooks is to cook and it is only through
our on-the-job training that we eventually garner the skills necessary to run a
successful workplace. What a shame that this antiquated thought process is
still considered to be the norm as we enter the 21st century. Today’s chefs
manage a different workplace. Our kitchens look more like modern food
laboratories, staffed with employees ranging from entry level to MBAs,
multinational to homegrown, with religious preferences and ethnic diversity
previously seen only at the UN. Today’s chefs are asked to not only plan our
menus and deliver great visual appeal to the table, but also to communicate
company mission, direct sanitation and nutrition classes, understand world
flavors and ingredients and in our “spare time” inspire our team to be
motivated and innovative day in and day out. Imagine, all of this without
formal management training and no one in the wings to give us the support
needed to get us through the day.
Well, Chef Charles Carroll has answered our prayers and
delivered a masterful text to our desktops. Now it is up to us to open it, read
it and put into practice the SEF principle that Charles prescribes. Through
this practice, you will come to understand how great chefs fail because they
lack people skills first and basic managerial ability second. You’ll come to
embrace what one of America’s best chefs has generously shared from his twenty
years of practical, out-of-the-box thinking and experience.
I have personally known Chef Charles Carroll for over fifteen
years and he has impressed me more and more each year. He is a strategic
thinker, the epitome of “planning the work while working the plan.” It does not
surprise me that it is he who has taken the task upon himself to share with us
life’s little secret for a successful, professional kitchen driven by a team of
committed staff members who “get it.” In addition, Chef Carroll continues to
drop little gems of wisdom that should be evident to all of us, but through the
smoke and heat of the kitchen are often missed or ignored. You will also come
to see quickly that there’s no theory here; it is fundamentals put into
practice and the result shared in a way that’s never been told before. As an
added bonus, once you’ve read it, the book becomes your personal handbook for
success. It will prove to be a piece as important in your office as Escoffier’s
Cookbook, Herring’s Dictionary or Larousse’s Gastronomique. In addition, it
will be the perfect gift to your young apprentices or line cooks, or better
yet, to present to a member of your staff that has just endured a reprimand. It
reinforces the message that, “I care enough about you to give you the tools
necessary to learn from your experiences.”
Chef Carroll states in this book that, “Not everyone can be
great, but everyone certainly can be better,” and you will, too if you only
choose to follow the common sense practices outlined in the piece you now hold
in your hand. Congratulations Charles for a job well done.
Now, read and grow!
Chef John D. Folse, CEC, AAC
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| FINDING TIME TO BE
GREAT |
| Preface |
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Okay, let’s get one thing straight, I don’t have a PhD, a
masters degree or any other title to indicate there is a ten year college
education behind my name. I am a Chef with an Associates Degree from the
Culinary Institute of America. I’m not going to show you bar graphs, power
points, scales, pie charts or even market studies. Hell, you may even find a
typo or spelling error in this book. You’re not going to have to run and get a
dictionary to look up big words though, but if you do, that means that I had to
as well, so it is only fair you do the same. There are thousands of books out
there if you want that kind of read. What is hard to find is an inspirational
and motivational book written by a chef for chefs that has tons of practical
ideas to use in a real kitchen. I wonder why that is? Are the chefs too crazy,
too stressed out, or do they just not have enough time? So, for those reasons,
I decided to share my thoughts with you.
This book will be worth your salary by the time you are done
reading it, and I will tell you why. I believe in the past twelve years the
culinary industry has flourished, acknowledging the chef and compensating him
accordingly. There are many reasons for this. The chef today is much more
visible, more in the dining rooms, dealing with the members and guest on a
regular basis, strongly involved with the growth of the property itself and not
just the kitchen. We have celebrity chefs, iron chefs, reality chefs, star
chefs, personal chefs, white house chefs and Olympic chefs. America loves the
cooking shows and follow cooking in the newspapers, television and radio. Chefs
are now in the “Front Row”, when in years past you would never see the chef who
cooked your meal.
With all these mediums, go a lot of responsibilities. It is
not only about the food anymore! Chefs are and will be forced to be more team
leaders and culinary managers. I believe in the past twelve years salaries for
the chefs have changed drastically. More and more great positions are opening
up with fantastic financial packages for the chef. Now, take a close look at
these jobs. What do you see? Why is the chef getting paid better today? More is
being asked of the chef, more responsibilities, more team building, more
management, more in touch with the front of the house. So how are you going to
handle this? What is your back ground that is so special that will allow you to
compete for these jobs? What kind of culinary management and teambuilding
background do you have??? Anybody? Well I did take a three week course at
school for management.
I believe this is where our culinary field is week. For most
of us, three weeks is all we have for management instruction. Think about it, a
two year culinary school offers one class which everyone hates, can’t wait to
get out of, it usually is during the first semester, students just want to pass
it, get on with it, so they can get into the kitchen and cook, am I right? As a
young person, all this management stuff doesn’t really make sense and seems
somewhat foreign. They are thinking it will be light years before they will
need to manage anyone. How do chefs today excel, move up the ranks and become
an executive chef and manager? Well, they go to school, get a line cook job,
work hard, get promoted to grill chef, sous chef and then one day become
executive chef. Wait a minute?? What happened to the management part? “Shoot,
what did they tell me during those three weeks I was in school…let me think.
Communication, listening skills, inventory, harassment…employee reviews..ah
damn I don’t remember.” I believe this is one of the reasons our field is so
far behind intellectually. Other professions go to school for four years and
take dozens of management classes, sometime not even knowing what there
selected field is yet. Granted the culinary bachelors program now popping up
more and more at culinary schools is a huge step for our field, and is a must
for all young people entering the culinary field today.
So, having said all that, this book, I promise, will be your
savior. This book is better than your management class because it is all real!
It is quick, to the point and REAL. There are a lot of great chefs in our
industry who are incredible cooks, but will never excel today at a major
property because their ability with people skills, there front of house polish,
their ability to build great teams, be a leader, manage and deal with our
customers, guest and members, Intellectually on a daily basis, does not exist!
Think about that for a moment, that last sentence should scare the heck out of
you! I’m going to help you! This book is the best tool you will ever have.
“I knew someone had to take the first step and I made up my mind not to move.”
-Rosa Parks
My mission in writing this book is to inspire you to be
great, to inspire you to go the extra mile, to inspire you to use some of the
ideas in this book and adapt them for your own operation, whether it be a
kitchen, a warehouse or an office. To build a great team, to inspire you to
develop a mission statement for your kitchen, guiding principles which your
team will live by, develop incentive programs, find ways to inspire your staff
and help them realize their own goals. You will read about some really great
ideas in this book and you will say, “How can I possibly find the time to
implement all these programs?” I have been an executive chef for twenty years
and for the first time ever I think I have come up with the answer. It’s not
brain surgery, just a matter of thinking outside of the box. You have to find
the time to be great! The secret is scheduling, empowering and following
through. Ok, so here is where I give you some brilliant formula studied by
Princeton Professors (what was that teachers name in the Beautiful Mind, played
by Russell Crow?), anyway here is the formula. Are you ready… S-E-F… that’s it,
SEF! Scheduling, Empowering and Follow up. Isn’t that brilliant? Believe it or
not, it can be that simple.
In this book, you will find scores of practical ideas that
you can use. This is exciting to me, good solid ideas you can immediately start
using today. That is something I look for every day, something solid I can get
my arms around, so I can make an intelligent decision and move forward. If I am
successful, you should be able to get your arms around a bunch of ideas. There
is no book with all the answers. You are reading a book written by a chef in a
live, incredibly busy Country Club. This is not a piece of fiction; these
programs are currently in operation at the River Oaks Country Club in Houston,
Texas. Is it the “Best” kitchen program in the United States? I don’t know. Can
it be better? Absolutely. Does it work? You better believe it does! That is
what drives me. No one showed me how to build it; no one told me that this is
how you should do it. I looked for one, but could not find a book written by an
experienced chef discussing these programs, and that is what makes this book so
exciting to me.
It is my hope that you keep this book handy in your office.
My hope is that you constantly refer to it when you need a reliable guide or a
useful form that will make your job easier from a professional in your field.
In my opinion the culinary team building concepts found in this book could
change the way we build our culinary teams, policies and procedures in the
future. Think about it, you start a brand new job today, what steps are you
going to take to build your team? What book do you have that helps you create
your culinary mission statement, your guiding principles and your leadership
team? Better yet what culinary team building book do you have that shows you
how to get the most out of your staff and your leadership team? Yah, sure we
have cook books, we understand the brigade system, we know how to set up our
Garde Manger and Saucier Station but how do we get our staff vested into this
powerful culinary team? How do we inspire our staff to want to do more? I’m
going to help you with all of these questions. I’m going to help you!
You are reading about all my trial and errors. Real life
stuff, not some hard to believe Fortune 500 company with trillions of dollars
teaching and sending their suits to camps on how to act and beat into them the
mission. I am not going to tell you inspirational stories that have warm fuzzy
endings that by the time you get back to your kitchen you will have forgotten
them. I’m going to give you real life practical ideas for you to start using
today. This book is written by a chef. If I can do it, you can too. If you can
get one thing out of this book that improves your operation or way of life, I
will be very happy indeed. I have read many books on team building, and many of
them are great books. The problem is that you go back to work with no solid
“programs” to put in place. That is what makes this book special. If you are a
student, you are reading it at a great time as you can start these practices
now and hit the ground running when it is your turn to supervise or lead a
team. Share it with your current chefs, they will be grateful. If you are a
chef in charge of a kitchen, now is your time to be great!
“Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individuals from
the successful one is a lot of hard work.”
- Stephen King
We have a program in our catering office that I created to
help sell our functions to the members. It is an awesome program with over 600
digital images that I will talk about in more detail later in the book. Anyway,
we have been using this since 2002; four years later, I still can’t find anyone
else doing this. I asked my boss one day, I wonder why nobody else has adopted
this program. I have toured hundreds of people through the system. He said, “I
know why Charles, it is too much work.” It increases sales, blows away the
members and has improved consistency in the kitchen. What more do you want! The
moral of this story is, if it were easy, everybody would be doing it! Many of
the concepts in this book are simple concepts. That does not necessarily mean
they are “easy” to implement. So, if you are lazy, stop reading now, sell the
book on eBay and take a nap. I don’t think you are going to though, because you
bought the book and hell; you are already on the ninth page! Not everyone can
be great, but most can be better than they are. You are getting this
information right off the line!
Let’s get started.
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