230 | The Ripple Effect of Chef Attitudes on Kitchen Culture

Hey, chef, welcome back.

Have you ever noticed how your mood instantly affects the

atmosphere in your kitchen?

Ever walked in, stressed and seen your team quickly follow suit?

Do you question how your daily vibe might be shaping your team's

performance and overall culture?

Today we're diving into how your energy impacts your kitchen

more deeply than you realize.

I'll reveal how managing your own vibe can boost productivity, morale,

and create a culture of positivity.

We'll get to that in a whole lot more right after this message.

Welcome to Chef Life Radio, the podcast dedicated to helping chefs and culinary

leaders take control of their kitchens, build resilient teams, and create

a thriving career in hospitality.

I'm Chef Adam Lamp, your host, leadership coach, and industry veteran.

If you're tired of high turnover.

Burnout and the daily grind, you're not alone.

This podcast is here to give you the real strategies, insights, and tools you

need to lead with confidence, build a culture of excellence and craft a kitchen

that works for you, not against you.

Because the best kitchens don't just survive, they thrive.

Hit that subscribe button and let's get started.

The power of your energy.

Believe it or not, your energy sets the emotional and operational tone

of the kitchen directly influencing morale, efficiency and team cohesion.

Whether positive or negative, a leader's attitude and demeanor spread quickly.

If you ever enter the kitchen stressed, andm, patient, or frustrated, your

team will absorb that tension.

Conversely, walking in with confidence, focus, and a solution-oriented

mindset encourages a productive and positive atmosphere.

Team members subconsciously reflect their leader's energy.

A composed, upbeat leader fosters a kitchen environment where staff feel

more at ease, motivated and engaged.

On the other hand, a constantly agitated leader can create an environment of

anxiety, making mistakes more frequent and communication less effective.

Listen, service can be unpredictable.

Stress levels can spike unexpectedly, but a leader who maintains composure

and sets the expectation for calm, collected problem solving helps the

team stay focused under pressure rather than spiraling into chaos over time.

Over time, the cumulative energy a leader brings shapes

the overall work environment.

Kitchens that operate under constant negativity, experience

high turnover, lower creativity, and decrease trust among staff.

Meanwhile, kitchens led with consistent positivity and support, see stronger

collaboration, better retention, and overall higher performance.

Are you consciously choosing your energy or are you just reacting to the stress?

Have you ever been in a room, like maybe waiting for a meeting to start and you're

looking around and you can see that everybody's kind of down and the overall

energy of the room is just off somehow.

Right?

It's almost like a physical paw hanging in the room, a cloud over

everybody's head, and yet a positive person can walk into that environment

and within a few moments have people start sitting up paying attention.

All of a sudden people are smiling.

There's a great video I'm gonna link to in the, uh, in the show notes where this guy

walks on a bus and he starts laughing, and pretty soon the entire bus is laughing.

It's hysterical, man.

But that's how one person's energy can shift the entire room.

That's the power that your energy has.

And while negative energy can be infectious, good.

Positive energy can also be infectious.

Sometimes just gonna have to work a little bit harder to bust through those walls.

But eventually your positivity will start to affect everybody, even though

they might not necessarily admit it.

Listen, there's no horror story that I can tell you that will convince

you any more than you already know of how intense things can get in a

kitchen, and yet that is the precise moment when the intensity ratches up.

Calm is most needed.

Don't believe me.

Tell me what your blood pressure does after listening to this.

If you're anything like me, even if you're dead tired, when the

machine starts hitting you, perk up.

Listen, I happen to consider myself an expo master, and I spent plenty

of nights on the line, and it seemed like when the tickets started coming

in fast and furious, my energy would ramp up to match the speed at

which the tickets were coming in.

Yet, the quicker I called, the more mistakes were being made.

So even though my energy's way high, no one else can keep up with me.

And so that's the moment when I needed to take a pause, slow down,

get grounded, check everybody, look 'em in the eyes, call out their name

before calling out tickets and lead them through this particular rush.

With calm, certain grounded energy because it's not just about me,

it's about me leading the team.

And the only way I can do that and be successful is by staying calm, trying

to be the center of the hurricane, the eye of the storm when everything

else is going around and my cooks are looking at me for some type of

emotional cue, and I can be grounded, all of a sudden they get grounded too.

Mistakes lesson, the stress lessons.

They know that they're in good hands and that I am not gonna

lead them off the cliff in a rush.

I was recently on the Culinary Mechanic podcast with host Simon Chuka, and

we were talking about this exact same thing, and I related a story when I

used to work at this movie theater that had a full service restaurant, the very

first time it actually happened in the United States in Boca Raton, Florida.

Movie Code Premier.

And the thing about that was, is that everybody had somewhere to go.

People would sit down, they'd start pressing the server, Hey,

listen, I gotta get to my movie.

And that would cause a great deal of stress.

And also this thing about time compression.

So 7 7 15, 7 30.

Because there's an eight o'clock show, everything starts going crazy

and then it would drop down 8 25, 8 30 because now it's between shows.

And then the room would open back up again and it got to the point

where at the height of the rush when things are peaking, listen, I've

got two expo, six food runners, and I've got 10 cooks on five stations.

And I would sit there and I would wait for the machine to just spit out onto the

floor because everybody needed a moment.

Jeff Simon was so great because he related a similar story in which he concocted

this particular strategy where he would get a busboy to go get glasses of water

and come back and he would hand glasses of water to everybody and just wait.

Everybody take a drink.

Just be calm, take a breath.

And the thing that amazed me is that he, he told me in

that moment what he was doing.

Actually, I. Peel back the covers as he was returning humanity back to his cooks.

So they went from being a machine, being a cog like, shit,

man, I can't keep doing this.

I'm not a goddamn machine.

To take a breath, have a glass of water, understand that you're human being

and you can only go so far, so fast.

And I thought that that was brilliant.

Acknowledging the humanity.

Viewing your associates as more than a pair of hands, as more than you

know, just a body on a station, like acknowledging the fact that they're

human beings and you can only go so far.

You can only push them to a certain extent.

And Simon made another point when he was talking about the fact that like you get

up to this particular point of energy and you can only sustain it for about.

40 minutes, an hour maybe, where it's peak production, peak execution.

And if you don't take a break, if you don't offer somebody to return

back to themselves as a human being, then everything goes sideways.

Does that land with you?

You remember the days when you were just a cog in the machine and everybody

was on you just to keep producing?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Why should we expect that from others when we couldn't even fucking stand that shit?

Now we're at the portion of our show.

When I say something that all of us know to be true, but very few of us are willing

to say out loud, here are the consequences of your fucking negative vibes.

I. Listen, negative leadership energy can create a toxic work environment,

diminishing morale, performance, and overall kitchen culture.

Yeah, we know that.

And yet sometimes when we're in the midst of our shit, we can't pull ourselves

out far enough to actually see ourselves the way that we're presenting ourselves.

It's this idea of being present again, reduced morale and team engagement.

A negative leader fosters an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty.

When team members feel unsupported, undervalued, or micromanaged, they

disengage from their work leading to lower overall enthusiasm and job satisfaction.

And oh my God, haven't we all been there?

Question is why do we continue to propagate that?

What?

Because, you know, we do, as we were told, as we are taught, as we

are shame trained and conditioned.

Higher mistakes in turnover, chronic stress and negative reinforcement create

an environment where employees operate out of fear instead of confidence.

Mistakes increase due to anxiety and high turnover becomes inevitable

as chefs seek healthier, more positive work environments.

There are only two things to consider.

Is it the person running the system or is it the system?

And too often we wanna shit on the person who's running the system instead of doing

the deeper work, which is like, do we actually fucking know what we're doing?

Are we setting that associate up for success?

Does he have the tools, the knowledge, the time to understand

what's actually required of him?

Or do we just need a fall guy?

Nine times outta 10.

It's been my experience that we have the right person in the wrong job

because we didn't think deep enough about which skillset would be best for

which job and undertaking that work.

That's a leader.

What the fuck, man?

I didn't know I was the problem, but apparently I was.

And so it's incumbent upon me to try to figure out some way,

some way of being different.

In my day to day such that I can actually foster a thriving kitchen

environment such that I can become the preferred employer on the block.

I don't have to put an ad up because people are lined up outside, but they

can only do that if the street knows that I treat people well, and if I'm feeding

them my shit, that's not gonna happen.

The hardest part of leadership is taking the shit and holding

it such that it doesn't affect anybody underneath you emotionally.

Like, listen, there's processes and procedures that need to be changed.

Get that totally cool.

But when it's about trying to take the crap outta somebody, then it's your

job to take it to hold it, and then the question becomes, what do you do about it?

Like how do you exercise that energy out of your body?

Because if you don't, that will continue to reside in you and curdle

such that now all of a sudden you are pissed off all the fucking time.

I. I remember so clearly a pivotal moment in my career when I bounced into the

GM's office and I was so fucking pissed.

I was angry at my cooks.

I was angry at my sous chefs.

I was angry at the people who came in, and I blurted out this job would be

so great if it wasn't for the people.

And she, she laughed at me, said like, which ones?

And I said, all of them.

And she let me rant and rave for minutes until I dropped in the chair completely

exhausted because I had nothing left.

And she sat there for about five minutes and she looked at me and

then finally said, Adam, don't you see the God in what you do?

I'm like, fucking, what do you like?

What do you mean?

And she said, Adam.

Look at our society.

Look what's happening.

You go to the gas station, you don't go inside, you pay at

the ATM, you go to the bank.

You go to the ATM.

You don't go inside.

She said, our society is become more and more fractured and less connected.

Don't you understand that what you do is a great excuse for people to come together

and be in relationship with one another?

Maybe they haven't seen each other in years.

Maybe it's only been months, but what you do provides them an

opportunity to gather around a table and be connected to one another.

And after I heard her say that, I settled back in my chair and I thought, wow.

Uh, not only am I a lot less pissed, but I'm kind of fucking

feeling sheepish right now.

Like I thought it was all about me.

But what she did is she shared a different perspective with me in that moment.

I could see myself within what she was talking about, and I understood that being

in service, like in this community, I.

In this brotherhood and sisterhood of chefs, culinary professionals,

our first foundational principle is to be in service to others.

Whether you like it or not.

If you don't like it, cool, get the fuck out.

But if you are, just understand that what we do facilitates conversation,

and that is probably the most important thing that any person can do Now

in this society, it's not through the phone, it's not through text.

We get people around a table.

That's where fucking magic can happen.

So overstating the obvious, one of the consequences of negative

vibes is long-term cultural damage.

A consistently negative environment leads to decreased trust

between staff and leadership.

Eroding the sense of camaraderie and shared purpose within the kitchen.

Once negativity takes root, it becomes difficult to shift back a positive

culture without intentional intervention.

And oh my God, haven't we all fucking been there?

The problem was, is there was never intentional intervention.

It was always about a poster on the wall or something that came from upstairs.

It was never a, it was never a co-creative process about.

Who the fuck we are and who are we moving forward?

How do we serve our customers?

How do we serve our associates?

Like can we engage one another in a fruitful conversation about what it

looks like moving forward together?

Listen, your vibe creates your tribe.

A kitchen led with negativity breeds discontent, but a kitchen led with

optimism, fosters growth and success.

I, I don't know how other way to put it, man.

I mean, it's that simple.

And yet all of us have experienced this, but very few of us have been on the edge

where we could actually influence it.

And that's where we convince ourselves that we don't have any power.

And what I wanna say to you is it doesn't matter about it.

Fucking tag doesn't matter about your hat size, doesn't matter anything.

You can influence the people around you.

Immediately by your presence.

Now, what are you gonna do about that?

The choice comes down to whether or not you're gonna be a victim of your

circumstance or whether you're gonna understand that at some level you made a

choice and you accepted your circumstance.

Cool.

What that does is it empowers you to understand that you

can make a different choice.

If it's not the place that you wanna work at, you can choose another.

If you're okay with that choice, cool, be there fully.

If not, know that you can choose other, if you remain a victim of your circumstance,

whether it's because of money or benefits or whatever, the golden lasso, the, the

parachute, whatever, it's just a choice and you can choose again tomorrow.

You can make a different choice.

Listen, talking about you as a leader, I'm talking about you as a person.

I understand that leadership energy is a choice and cultivating a

positive work environment starts with intentional habits and behaviors.

What I'm trying to suggest is that well, fuck it.

I'm not suggesting, I'm just gonna tell you right out loud.

If you're not into it, don't be there.

Get out.

Nobody's telling you that you have to do that.

You don't have to be with that employer.

You don't have to be with this particular, you know, career field.

And that's cool.

Nobody's gonna fucking judge you.

Like I get it that you put a lot of effort, you put a lot of money,

school and all that kind of stuff.

One of the best things that I ever did was take a break.

I actually walked away from this industry twice.

In the time that I was gone, I learned skills.

I accept myself intentionally on, not necessarily how I could be a better

chef, but how I could be a better person, how I could be a better leader.

And I guess this is where I wanna lead the conversation.

Leadership is a choice and your energy is a part of that.

Cultivating a positive work environment starts with

intentional habits and behaviors.

I. Listen,

if you wanna develop emotional awareness, we should all recognize how our

moods and reactions impact our team.

The only way to do that is with regular check-ins that can prevent negativity

from spreading from one person to another.

We can also set the tone from the start.

I can arrive at work with a clear positive mindset.

I can set the foundation for the day's service.

When I enter the kitchen with confidence and enthusiasm, I can

establish the emotional standard.

Listen, small gestures of appreciation, acknowledgement of hard work,

and celebrating team successes reinforces morale and motivation.

You and I know that it's the thing that kept us going.

Finally lead with composure.

Maintaining a calm and solution-focused demeanor, especially in high

pressure moments, helps keep the team grounded and confident.

Listen, leadership is a choice.

If you choose that, then understand that there are certain requirements.

So here are your action steps for this episode.

One, identify your emotional triggers and develop strategies

to manage them proactively.

Number two, set a daily intention for the energy you

want to bring into your kitchen.

Write down your intention daily.

It only takes a couple minutes to sit there in your journal and write

down what intention are you bringing.

I will be calm, I will be present.

I will be X. The fact is, intention is everything.

We can either be conscious or unconscious in the way that we

go about our business action.

Step number three, regularly create space for open communication.

Those, uh, daily standup meetings, team check-ins, pre shifts.

Simple one-on-one conversations.

To maintain a positive kitchen atmosphere.

It also gives you the opportunity to redirect any negative energy

that someone else is bringing.

Someone shows up on the line and you can just tell they're not on their game.

That's the time to approach.

Okay, got a couple minutes.

Just wanna check in with you and then check in.

What's happening, what's going on?

You're not your same bubbly self.

Anything I need to know about ever.

Cool.

Everything cool at home?

Taking the time to understand where they're at emotionally is very often

the only thing that people need in order to shift their energy.

But you have to be the one to initiate.

Great leadership isn't about skills.

It's about consciously managing our energy.

It's the hardest work we'll ever do, and it's the most rewarding.

If today's conversation resonated, take a moment to reflect on the

energy you bring to your kitchen.

Leadership isn't just about directing a team, it's about inspiring them.

Make a conscious choice today to lead with positivity and intention.

Take a moment to ask yourself, how do you want your team to

feel at the end of a shift?

Do you want them to feel drained, frustrated, and on edge, or do

you want them to leave feeling accomplished, valued, and

motivated for the next service?

It all starts with the energy you bring.

Take a deep breath before stepping into the kitchen today.

Set the tone, uplift your crew.

And remember you control the vibe more than you realize.

Until next time, stay tall and frosty, and don't forget to lead with your heart.

That's a wrap for today's episode of Chef Life Radio.

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Remember, leadership isn't about perfection.

It's about progress.

So take what you've learned today and apply it in your kitchen,

your team, and your life.

Chef Life Radio is more than just a podcast, it's a movement.

The focus is no longer just on career survival, but on transforming leadership,

creating sustainability, and ensuring chefs can build kitchens that thrive.

Remember, the secret ingredient to culinary success isn't just in

the food, it's in the leadership.

Keep learning, keep growing, and as always.

Lead with the heart.

See you next time.