Construction Trailblazers: Paving The Way to Excellence

[00:00:00] So I have a guilty, guilty pleasure around watching competition shows, specifically cooking competitions. And today I want to share some of the lessons I've learned from watching Hell's Kitchen that I think apply so well to when we're building our own teams. Definitely don't want to copy all of the screaming that Gordon Ramsay does, but there's some interesting insights that you can gain from watching this competition show.

So welcome to Construction Trailblazers, Paving the Way to Excellence, the podcast where we cut through the noise to uncover what truly drives success in the building industry. I'm Samantha C. Prestidge, your guide in simplifying operations and turning dynamic teams into industry leaders. We're all about embracing people focused, tech forward lean practices that reshape the trajectory of a company.

for tuning in. Boosting revenue while freeing owners and teams from daily firefighting. So if you're [00:01:00] ready to create a team that consistently delivers success, then you're in the right place. Explore our past episodes at construction trailblazers. com and start your journey to excellence. All right. So like I said, I've got a guilty pleasure around.

competition shows. I love to watch Survivor and The Amazing Race, and I have learned to cook from watching Top Chef and MasterChef. I'm such a foodie, I feel like I am a judge on one of these shows whenever I go to restaurants. But one of my more guilty pleasures is watching Hell's Kitchen, because this is a show that is about food, right, but is more so designed for the dramatic aspects of its competitors and to really bring out all of the hell and glory that is Gordon Ramsay leading a kitchen.

So there's definitely some things that I do not recommend copying, like pitting team members against each other or screaming at them when you're upset, right? There's certainly things that we don't want to copy from Hell's Kitchen, but there are a few [00:02:00] things that I find fascinating and they're insights that we can.

apply to our own teams when we're striving for excellence and when we're trying to build people up. So the first thing that is obvious whenever you watch this show is that Gordon Ramsay has a limit. When a certain number of mistakes have been made, he has a threshold to his patience here. And when he sees that things are going south and people are not getting back on track, he stops everything.

They go to the back storage room and he asks, what is going on? So The way he does this, probably not how we want to do it with our team, because there's a lot of anger here. The point is, though, that when we notice things are not on track, when we notice things going south, we've got to pause and bring everyone together to see how we can get back on track.

We're pointing out like, hey, this is not meeting expectations. We know we're better than this. What is going wrong? And hit that pause button for everybody before we keep going with the same mistakes. You can see this in almost every [00:03:00] episode of Hell's Kitchen. When things go south, pause and figure it out.

The second thing here is that there is a demand for accountability. I hear accountability so much. So often in all, in any process interview, one on ones or management coaching sessions, there's always accountability and our team needs to hold themselves accountable and all this stuff. And a lot of people do struggle with accountability.

We've talked on this in some other episodes on how to create a culture of accountability. But one thing that is obvious from Hell's Kitchen is this demand for it. There are direct questions. That's who did this? Who messed up here? Why did you do this? Even though it's not a calm problem solving environment, there's still a demand for accountability that I think we can bring into our teams.

We can ask questions in a calmer way. We can have better conflict resolution skills here, a little bit more compassion when we're asking our teams the what, how, why, and all of those questions. But the fact that the questions are being asked in [00:04:00] the first place is something that we, that a lot of people need to strive to.

It's so easy for us to kind of complain about things, allow this gossipy culture to take place, or to say, well, I told him what the expectations were, like, I don't know why he's not meeting this, instead of having some follow up with our team members of like, okay, Hey, I said, this was the expectation. I noticed that we weren't able to do that.

Walk me through what happened. Why did this happen? Or we can go to the team and say, I noticed this problem. Who was responsible for this? How did this happen? So there's some common ways we can go about this, but asking the questions in the first place is something that we need to get in the habit of.

The third thing that we can learn from Hell's Kitchen here is. is how there is a demand for team decision making. This is a must. Even from the first episode in any season, contestants are asked to cook their signature dish and then the teams that were divided into red and blue teams, each team is asked to [00:05:00] then decide who has the top three dishes on each team to then present to Chef Ramsay.

So right off the bat, there's decision making within the team on, hey, Who is most likely to win? What is best for the team? And then as the competition continues, we do get a little bit of Survivor esque voting here where you then have to vote who you recommend to leave. Ultimately, that decision is up to Chef Ramsay.

It's not like in Survivor where most number of votes goes home, right? But there's still this shared decision making of, okay, what is best for the team? What are we trying to accomplish? What do we want from the team? Who are our strongest team members? And outside of that, whenever they're not voting to get people out, when they're in the kitchen, the teams that win are noticing, okay, who's going down?

Who needs help? How can I help them? Like, yes, at the end of the day, I want to win this competition, but in this meal service right now, I want my team to win. So how can I make sure this person doesn't sink the ship? [00:06:00] So there's this, there's team camaraderie that is demanded for you to have any chance of winning the competition.

The fourth thing is that it is absolutely obvious when ego starts to ruin things. So thank you to the editing team and the production team at Hell's Kitchen because there is an emphasis on who is saying what and when those egos are taking priority for someone over good food. When they don't want to listen to someone else who's saying they need to fix their food because they.

Don't want to hear it. They have this arrogant confidence about them, and it is so obvious when that arrogance and this ego starts to either ruin things for the whole team, or at least ruin things for their dish, and they end up putting up bad food because they didn't take a step back to humble themselves.

And if we know. anything about operational excellence and team building and really great cultures is that there is absolutely no room for egos. There's definitely room for [00:07:00] confidence. There's room for learning. There's room for you to be excited that you kicked ass at something. There's room for, and space for confidence, but there is no space for egos that syncs a team quicker than anything else.

And you can see it so obviously. On these competition shows when someone's ego is getting in the way of the team or that individual win. And the fifth thing that we can gain from watching Hell's Kitchen is looking at the finalists. So taking a step back from how the kitchen is run and. How these teams tend to win or lose, and we look at the individual finalists, because at the end of the day, only one person is winning.

This is not a team win kind of show, it is one person is taking home the prize. So let's take a step back and look at that individual stuff for a moment. When we look at who the finalists are, there's always one finalist from each team, from the red women's team and the blue men's team. And those finalists are almost always people that were [00:08:00] calm in the beginning of the season, where in the first few episodes they were observant, they were trying to bring some rationale to what was happening, and they didn't really get into the drama.

And later in the seasons, whenever there was drama, they got into some things because they were passionate. Like, these are chefs at the day. Restaurants and industry. Kitchens are a rather intense place. It does take some ego. It does take some intensity and strength to do well in this industry overall.

But for the most part, the people that won these shows did not really get into the drama. They did not get into screaming matches with people. They generally had control of their emotions. And when they allowed their passions to really flare. And so. They go through the majority of the competition, just describing what they are in control of, what they're hoping for, being very intentional and observant about things, focusing on the team when that's required, and then focusing on individual confidence when that's required.

And that is [00:09:00] something that we can, All take no matter what level of an organization we're in, whether we are a frontline employee, or a mid or senior level manager, or an executive, no matter what level of an organization you are, or what stage in your leadership journey you're at, this is something that we can all do better of is going through a process or a project or strategy meeting with way more intentionality, more humility, more More confidence when it's called for, but still that team camaraderie and customer centricity.

And that's what's going to get us to the finish line. That's where we're going to start to find success and results with our team. So I know that Gordon Ramsay is not always the epitome of what a really great servant leader looks like because we often see him in these very intense roles. tense, screaming match type of, moments in these shows and cooking competition show is not something that you would normally go to for some leadership or team [00:10:00] management skills.

But I find this show so fascinating because there are a lot of things about how teams are formed and the storming period and then the results with a team that you can see. See in every season of these shows. So if you enjoy competition shows, I highly recommend watching Hell's Kitchen. Just skip forward through the screaming matches, if that's not your jam.

Um, and hopefully you can take one of these five things or all of these five things and start applying them a little bit more in your team and how things are run in your team. All right, thanks for joining us on another episode of Construction Trailblazers. If you have a story about your own guilty pleasure or success that you found in your team, then I would love to hear it.

Please connect with me on LinkedIn or email at hello at constructiontrailblazers. com and I'll see you next time.