To Aubrey’s list of the bad examples by TV bosses, and to those of you who submitted your own recommendations, the winner is,
Gordon Ramsay.
Guest post by Cloyd Hyten, Ph.D., CPT
As a dedicated foodie, watching Ramsay is both entertaining and frustrating. A highly skilled chef and restaurateur, Ramsay is perhaps best known for his angry verbal tirades on his staff.
While Ramsay is brilliant in helping failing restaurateurs overhaul everything from their menus to marketing, it is too often overshadowed by his uncontrollable rage and insults.
What went wrong:
Ramsay falls into the “Oops!” category of “promoting people nobody likes.” He is the very picture of what we call an “aversive control” style of management: rarely acknowledging good performance but pouncing on mistakes with brutal punishment and abuse. His abuse is perfect for TV, so over-the-top you can’t believe that anyone could be so offensive. Personal insults seem to be a standard, with name calling and threats of firing, all while his staff responds “Yes Chef.”
If he were a manager in a company making widgets, his employees would have all quit, filed grievances and lawsuits, brought a union in to protect them, and likely never given their best.
What to do instead:
You do not have to act this way to be a good leader, a celebrity chef, or a successful restaurateur. In contrast to Ramsay, there are other celebrity TV chefs that are very successful at creating willing followers. For example, Bravo TV’s “Top Chef Masters” pits two chefs – Rick Bayless and Hubert Keller – against each other, . Bayless and Keller guide their teams while soliciting and accepting their ideas, never raising their voices, and calmly dealing with a series of limitations the show threw at them.
Every organization should motivate employees in such a way that they are continuously looking for ways to do things more effectively and efficiently. Since the best indicator of what people will do in the future is what they have done in the past, ensure that managers are getting results the right way.
Cloyd Hyten is a Senior Consultant with Aubrey Daniels International. He brings a systems perspective to organizational safety. Cloyd has been in the field of performance improvement for over 20 years, with experience in training and consulting in a variety of settings experiencing performance problems or opportunities. Cloyd has a Ph.D. in Behavior Analysis, and taught in one of the nation’s best behavior analysis graduate programs for many years. While in this academic position, Cloyd started a consulting group that specialized in systemic solutions to help organizations ranging from professional service firms to manufacturing companies to medical clinics improve their performance.
In addition to consulting work, Cloyd has been a thought leader in the field, presenting papers at national conferences, serving on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Organizational Behavior Management, currently President-Elect of the OBM Network, and co-authoring a book on improving performance in work teams. Cloyd is a highly rated instructor, recognized for his knowledge of behavior analysis and his ability to communicate it to audiences in an enthusiastic and humorous manner.
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August 28, 2009 at 7:15 am
Rf. Ramsey’s Managerial style:
Admittedly his brutal methods are tailor-made for TV, but there is another side which relates to ‘real world’ results which has no bearing upon tv-ratings and other La-La Land metrics.
Has anyone bothered to review Ramsey’s retention rate amongst his own restaurant-empire?? I have heard that it is in the order of 85% range, and supposedly is amongst the highest in that industry. So where does that come from? Certainly not from rantings for the benefit of viewers.
Another aspect of Gordon’s, which he could probably do better to exhibit on-screen, is his passion for being passionate about the trade. When helping restaraunteurs he is forever searching for that drive they should exhibit in sourcing simple meals but with a total commitment to personal excellence as well. That, too, is a mark of leadership I think. So it is not completely fair to judge him by his abuse of power and other tv tricks to help win audience numbers.