NOT only Waiter, CHEF should also get the “Tip”!

Business Excellence Series Title - 5

A waitress at a Salisbury restaurant received $5,000 tip from a Massachusetts billionaire last weekend in a challenge among diners that is going viral. It was the last table of the night on Saturday for Jennifer Navaria, a server at Seaglass restaurant on Salisbury Beach, Feb2020

Customer leaves $5,000 tip for waitress, restaurant shares ‘thank you’ post. Post shared on Anthony’s At Paxon’s Facebook page, an Italian restaurant in Pennsylvania, US.

Reading above posts and considering that in restaurant waiter gets the tip with definite back-end contribution of Chef, is it fair that Chef does not get the “tip”. Knowing well that chefs are paid much more than the waiter and here the “tip” reference is not for money, but for appreciation and recognition, in a larger context.

Chef does all the hard work behind the scene, in relatively more hazardous environment, with knives and flames around, uses best of skills and innovation to cook the best dishes in a consistent and tasteful manner. Customer enjoys the dish, shares all his appreciation of the dining experience with the waiter and also happily pays him the tip, sometimes, quite handsomely. There are only very few customers, who go one step further and call the chef to share their appreciation with him. A similar phenomenon can be witnessed in many organizations as well.

In a three-member team of Mohan, Hari and Adi, Mohan is an extrovert person hardly taking interest in hard core project work, leaving all of it to other team members, and spends most of his time in interacting with the team manager as well as external stakeholders, to share general happenings, project progress and gain visibility. Hari and Adi are highly talented employees, working hard on the project in a focused manner for long hours, and spending some time on learning new concepts, self-development and innovations. While Hari and Adi do most of the intricate part of the project and prepare all presentations, Mohan is always the first one to share project progress with the manager and internal customers on regular intervals. He also takes extra initiative in delivering the presentation, already prepared by other team members.

In this process, Mohan grabs all the limelight and appreciation. During annual performance review exercise, Mohan not only receives higher ratings than Hari and Adi, but is also recommended for promotion.

Does that ring a bell – Waiter gets the “tip”?

Have you experienced a situation where you did all the hard work and someone else walked away with the credit?

This is definitely not an ideal situation and displays gaps in assessment process from Team Manager’s end, but it can be witnessed in many organizations. Does that make you think that it’s better to be a waiter than the Chef? I am sure while that may be the first flash of thought coming to your mind, this will not sustain and you would still prefer to be a Chef, which is definitely superior in job hierarchy (in a Job Evaluation exercise), requiring higher level skills, experience, demand from the role, responsibility, accountability, continuous learning and innovation.

In an organizational situation in general, it has been observed that while content is the key and has to be of high quality, packaging is also gaining importance and has become a critical aspect to be accompanied with solid content. Accordingly, professionals with high degree of technical and functional capabilities, need to focus on their soft skills as well, for all-round development.

To conclude, in hospitality industry while waiter gets the tip, discussions keep happening on how to make this system more fair, so that much deserved recognition reaches the Chef as well. In fact, some progressive restaurants clearly recognized this lacuna have started sharing defined percentage of sale as incentive with the Chef.

It has been noticed that many professionals strong in communication and presentation but with much less capability and contribution, end up taking advantage and move ahead of their peers who are actually making much higher contribution to the task and the organizational objectives.

The organizations need to strengthen their systems to avoid such unfair reward and recognition, as this weakens their overall team strength, thereby compromising long term advantage.

At the same time, every professional need to realize that while content is important, packaging is also very critical and they need to ensure developing skills in areas like effective communication, presentation delivery, inter-personal skills, stakeholder interactions and networking.

Looking at the larger picture, in organizational environment, it is critical to be both - a Chef as well as the waiter, and of course, to BE WARE of Mohans in your team, while you are the real Chef!

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