Leading with Generosity

So, René made a great comment yesterday about MAD, starting first and foremost with craft. And so this is my craft. This craft, I suppose, of 20 years is a nice summary of what we try to do at Saint Peter and at Fish Butchery. Here's the video we knocked up earlier this morning. And it was really, I mean, it was wonderful to have the whole noma team at one point around me, which is why the video is probably slower than what it should be. We answered lots of questions, we had a lot of fun and we did that. This is something that takes a couple of hours and whilst I would love the time to share with you how I, you know, French the ribs of, you know, all of this. [Applause] Then it's nice to just share it with you. So, for me, 20 years ago, starting out in the profession, it was very much trying to position myself with great mentors, great leaders within the industry and, pardon me, Thomas, within the profession. And I had a gentleman who I worked with, Peter Doyle, who's brilliant. He prioritised yoga and surfing every morning before he came to the restaurant to put himself in a position where he was able to communicate very thoughtfully and generously with what he had to say. And he cared so much for our education as cooks. And that's why I loved working with him. He was a gentleman. We all learnt very good things from him at a captive age, you know, somewhere between 18 and 28 was the demographic within the kitchen. So, you know, we were sponges. Then, you know, working with Stephen Hodges at Fish Face, a little fish restaurant where I learnt the nuts and bolts of fish. Stephen, you know, Stephen, you know, Stephen, you know, challenging to work with, but again, somebody that was so technically correct with how he approached fish, fish cookery, fish processing. He taught me, you know, he gave me 35 years of information within the space of two, two and a half years. And I feel very grateful that he, you know, he could do that with me because there was a transient chef that moved through those doors seeking the party rather than maybe, you know, the education. And then had the great fortune of working with Heston. And being in the kitchen with Heston at the Fat Duck and having the privilege of every Thursday him coming and issuing the work and then checking the work was something that I'll always remember and cherish, I suppose. And the thing that I learnt the thing that I learnt the most from him was he always positioned himself in the room where he was able to contribute what lit him up. And he was able to contribute things to the conversation that no one else could see. And he was comfortable being, well, he was comfortable with knowing that the chefs in the room with him were actually probably technically better cooks. And he was fine with that. And I think that was what I took away from that experience. Then, when I'm 26, we opened Saint Peter and you're drawing on all of this information. And the thing that, you know, you're trying to do at that age is obviously impress everyone. You're trying your best to put your best foot forward, make it all work, make the numbers add up. You know, Julie and I are still independently owning and operating Saint Peter and Fish Butchery, which we're incredibly proud of. And, you know, Saint Peter will be 10 next year. And, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. And I think the information that you've been given throughout your younger years and the information that you put into your own head, the books that you read, you know, the hours late at night sharpening your knives and doing the blue collar work that's required to get you to where you're at. But can only take you so far. And I think I got to a point just around when COVID hit where I was pulling at the thread, waiting for some more information to come down out of my head and nothing came. And that bothered me because I was avoiding confrontation at all costs. I was ducking and weaving around the kitchen, around the restaurant, so much with just this anxiety that I wasn't going to be able to contribute to these cooks' professions. and where they were going and where they were going and what their growth looked like. And so I just kind of turned off a little bit. I just, yeah. And so then I realised in that point of having not set foot into fish butchery for six weeks because the anxiety had become too much to be able to deal with the confrontation of things that I just avoided for too long. And it really did, it bothered me a lot and I realised I needed to do a lot of work and so I read as much as I could about leadership. I listened to as many podcasts as I could. And whilst there's a lot of noise there, there was one that I was, you know, really happy to find. And it was Patrick Lencioni who did a podcast called the Working Genius Podcast. And he developed an acronym called WIDGET. So W-I-D-G-E-T. And it was something immediate and tangible and something I could write on a piece of paper and make sense of. And to go through this for you, W is for wonder. Somebody that sits and thinks, well, maybe if I move the oven from this side of the kitchen and put it here. It'd be a bit faster and we'd all be a bit more efficient. And then it's the vision caster, if you can think of that. It's the person who thinks beyond the trees. The I, the inventor, the invention. It's the person who loves the blank whiteboard and the marker and let me at it and I want to write my menu and I want to, you know, take this liver and I'm going to make the paté and I'm going to, you know, I think it'll work. And then you go and do it. It might not be perfect, but you've made it. And then the discernment, the D, it's the person in the room who loves to be asked for their opinion, who loves to, you know, here, taste this. And then they eat it and go, wow, that's amazing. What is it? And it's like, well, it's an ice cream we made out of ice. And they're like, whoa, super. It tastes delicious. How long did it take you to make? Well, it was a good hour or so of trying to extract this collagen out of the eye, but I think we've got it. And, you know, for that person who loves to be asked and they're able to, you know, with every confidence go, this is a great idea. I think we should do it. And because if you're the individual who loves the invention, who loves doing the work, you may not necessarily love the gut instinct aspect of that work. So you rely heavily upon the people in your team who are able to say, proceed or let's kill that because we're going to have to double the staff and it doesn't make sense. After discernment comes galvanizing, which is the cheer person in the room that goes, this is great. Everybody, come here, come here, come here, come here. Everybody, eat some ice cream. And they, wow, this is really great. What is it? It's fisheye ice cream. Let's, you know, and I think those people are rare. I think it's rare to have somebody who is your number one fan and wants everybody to get excited about this great idea. After that is enablement is E. And enablement is the person who loves to sharpen their knife. And I'm talking with regards to cooks here, so forgive me. It's the person who loves to sharpen their knives. It's to chop the onions. It's to do it better than I did yesterday. And to, you know, have your hands on it and do the work. And then finally, tenacity is the person who stands on the line, who expedites the food, walks it out into the dining room, puts the plates down, and does that last final element of service and says, here, we, you know, we made this for you. And the immediate remuneration of that aspect of the work is the guest going, wow, this is unbelievable. And then your cup's full. And this whole, you know, acronym and this wonderful kind of framework really, really helped me at a certain time where one of my team came to me at Fish Butchery and he had been there for some three months and we just thought he was a rock star. He was awesome. Sharper knives than everybody else. Uniform that was pressed better than everybody else. Just moved really well. And then he grabbed me and goes, Chef, can we have a coffee? And I'm like, great. Let's go fucking have a coffee. And we go and sit and we start talking. He goes, Chef, I'm going to finish up. I said, okay. Well, what happened? You know, we all think you're great. You're doing great. What is it? And then he said, you know, it's this great job. It's a really good opportunity. I'm going to go do it. And I said, right, do you mind if we just do this? And so I wrote Widget out on a piece of paper and I gave it to him and I said, can you work with me on this? Pick the two things from this list that give you the most amount of joy in your work. Then after that, pick the two which you're happy to do but you don't necessarily want to do all the time. And then the last two, just leave, just I don't want to do that, okay? Like I'm an adult, I'll do it. But also if I keep doing it, I'm not going to be happy. And so he went through and he did it. Turned out he was exactly the same as me in the sense that it was invention and tenacity. They're the two things that give me the most amount of joy within what I do. And what we had done is deprived this gentleman of any of that. He didn't invent. He didn't create. We didn't throw him the pen to write on the board. He was at fish butchery. He was scaling. He was gutting. He was wiping. He was, you know, saying hello to a guest from time to time but then back to drop the chips and do the fish and chips and, you know, do that work. And he was a soldier. We'd employed a soldier with a one-dimensional framework for him which was all enablement. And the depravity of not doing service and not creatively contributing to the work had then forced him to go and take a sous-chef role in another restaurant so that he could do what was going to give him the most amount of joy. And at this time then, this is the first time I'm using this vernacular, like I'm trying to make sense of it as we go. And then it kind of changed. When he looked at what was on paper and he worked out what was missing in his life, he started, he was in tears. And I thought it was really powerful at that point to ask him, like, how, like, what do you do outside of work? And he said, well, at the end of my shift, I'll go to the supermarket. I'll buy things from the store and I'll take it home. And I will have worked on a menu throughout the day and then I cook it for my girlfriend. And I get her to tell me if it's good or not and I write and take notes and I sort it out. And then at the end of that, then I come to work and I do my job and I work through it. And then I got upset because, obviously, I never want to deprive anybody of being happy in their work. I think everybody in this room cares a lot about their teams. But oftentimes we don't, we haven't done the groundwork. We haven't done the fundamental basics of getting to know the people in your team or what makes them tick or what does indeed give them joy, which is why I felt this was a really important topic to want to share with you. So from there, having back and forth conversation that took all of 20 minutes and a piece of paper and a few tears, he then stayed. And he worked at Saint Peter. He left fish butchery, we moved him to Saint Peter. We put him into a role of invention and tenacity and he stayed. And from that moment, realising that it worked, then it was something that I implemented within interviewing and trying to get to know people. And now having a restaurant that I'm able to contribute to in Singapore and then a new restaurant now in the north of Australia in Queensland, to go through in that restaurant eight weeks ago that we just opened and go through each individual staff member and sit them down, just one-on-one, me and them, with a piece of paper with widget on it and work out what made them tick, you realise that you've got this breadth of talent within your team that some of them are lawyers, some of them are AI engineers, some of them are from all walks of life and have been there, done that and maybe some of them have never cooked before. But all of a sudden, you get a framework, you get an understanding about who they are. And you have no idea how powerful it is to realise that all they want to do is chop onions, that's all they want to do. Or all they want to do is just be on service. And when you've got a business like mine, which has Saint Peter, the showroom, the kind of, part of the whole puzzle where you are able to see the guests and communicate with them, or you've got, you know, the workshop, which is fish butchery, once you can start discerning where they should go, then people are better placed. I wanted to tell you one story about Saint Peter and where I experienced the most amount of personal joy within my work. It was three weeks after opening Saint Peter. There was a full restaurant. There was two cooks with me. There was three on the floor. And there was a line out the door. And it was about 20 past six in the evening. And I don't know whether it was, I think it was like this overwhelming sense of pride where it was, I was standing on the stove, there was six fry pans lined up, six fish weights above me, the six pieces of fish ready to go in. And as I put the first fish in and I reach up and grab the fish weight down, I kid you not, the whole room went quiet. And everything slowed down. Etta James at last comes on, which, romantic. And like everything just slowed. And it was the most incredible experience that I've ever had. I have no idea how or why it happened. But everything slowed. And all I could hear was the song and the lyrics in the song. And for the next 15 minutes, I was like numb but cooking. And everything was perfect. And I just thought to myself, this is fucking great. And I've finally got to a point where I'm really, really deeply happy in my work. And that feeling that I have is then what I'm chasing for others and what I'm seeking in Cook's careers and, you know, the responsibility that you carry as, you know, I just did the demo out the back, which wasn't really a demo. I was just doing my work. And then, you know, everybody comes around and is excited and wants to see it and they want to touch it and they want to be a part of it. And it's not to close off. It's to answer. It's to, you know, be excited with them. And so the topic of Build to Last, for me, is really about setting down the right foundations to communicate with our teams generously and with care and patience. Because, you know, if we don't know each other, it's very difficult to get them to walk a mile with you. So very grateful to Matt and very grateful to Renee for putting my name into a conversation to be with you today. And whilst it's not the nuts and bolts fabrication of fish and me getting all greasy up here with fish oils up my arm, it's a wonderful opportunity to share, I think, a little bit of a nugget that hopefully you can take away after this and truly put into application within your own space, be it in the wine world, in the service world or in the food world or anything, even parenting. I think it's incredibly powerful. So it's widget. Gentleman's name is Patrick Lencioni. And it's the Working Genius Podcast. If you want to jump on and have a look, they're not paying me yet. But when they do, no. But no, very grateful. Thank you. Thank you.