The Recipe: The Best Leaders Know When to Follow
I've never been much of a cook, and as someone who's always been solidly front of house, I'm probably the last person you'd expect to be obsessed with cooking shows. But it's true! Right now I'm watching Top Chef, Chopped Castaways, and 24 in 24, and I can't stop noticing something that has nothing to do with the food.
Every contestant on these shows is a strong leader in their real life. These are head chefs, restaurant owners, and culinary directors who run talented teams every single day. The ones who tend to go furthest in the competition are the most adaptable, and a big part of that adaptability is knowing how to follow.
When they're not in the designated leader role, the best contestants fall in line, support whoever is leading, and pour their energy into the team's success. They check their ego at the door and trust the process. The ones who struggle are almost always the ones who can't stop leading even when that's not their job. They redirect, they second-guess, they take back control, and the whole team suffers.
It's a dynamic that plays out in restaurants every single day.
Staff retention is one of the most persistent challenges in this industry, and one of the reasons people move on is that they never really get the chance to grow. We say we want to develop our teams, but when the moment comes to actually hand someone the reins, a lot of us find it incredibly hard to let go. We give someone a leadership opportunity and then hover close enough to undermine it. The team member never truly gets to lead, and after a while, they stop wanting to.
If you want to build real leaders on your team, it takes more than good intentions. It takes a willingness to follow their lead once you've set them up for success, and here's how that can look in practice.
Start by exploring their curiosity. Pay attention to what genuinely interests them and assign a project that connects to that energy, because motivated people lead better. Before they take the wheel, give them plenty of support and clear parameters so they know exactly what success looks like and where the boundaries are. Then step back and let them actually do it. And when I say step back, I mean completely. Finally, evaluate together afterwards and explore what worked, what they'd do differently, and how they want to grow from the experience.
The leaders who build the strongest, most loyal teams are almost always the ones who've figured out that following well is its own form of leadership. Stepping back completely requires a kind of confidence that doesn't come naturally to most strong leaders, and so does trusting someone else to drive when you know you could do it yourself.
If developing your team feels like something you'd like to dig into, that's exactly the kind of work I love doing with restaurant owners and operators. You don't have to figure it out on your own.