Narrating U

I put pen to paper and started this exercise by brainstorming all the reasons I decided to return to school. Once I had a mess of words I organized them into some common themes and choose a few to focus on. My greatest motivation is to learn more about leadership and grow my personal management skills so that I can lead an amazing kitchen. I work with a lot of young students (ages 14-22), individuals who are just entering the workforce for the first time, that come from a variety of backgrounds. This creates many exciting challenges.

Currently I have my menu set up with the following sections:

• Heart of House: The heart of a restaurant is the kitchen which is why its called the Heart of House. I want to investigate the environmental issues that affect Heart of House leadership that are specific to the restaurant industry.
• Engagement: An issue everywhere. How do you keep youth excited about cooking food for people they will never see? How do I engage prep cooks that don’t even make a full plate of food?
• Motivation: What incentives can I provide as leader to improve job satisfaction? What motivates employees to stay engaged?
• Development: How do ‘B’ players become ‘A’ players? How can I train more efficiently? How do I promote a culture of growth and continuous improvement?
• Real Life: This might seem out of place but one topic of conversation that comes up daily in the kitchen is “real life”. High school students are always bringing up things like “once I have a real job”… I will show up on time… I will do my responsibilities better… I will be happier… It will be different. I try to find ways to focus on showing them that there are lots of skill that can be learned in an after school job and applied later in life.

For now I’ve decided to go with a simple concept and use the menu to organize the blog posts. Then I can use tags to further break down the concepts as time moves on.