Blue Collar Rocket Science

Months ago, I proclaimed my next blog post would be on the Semantic Web. I started writing it, then things got a little hectic. It’s been a very busy and productive summer for me, with a lot of different strands coming together in interesting ways.

It’s made me thing that too often when thinking about all this media stuff that I do for a living, it becomes an abstraction. There are a lot of mental exercises one can do to figure out how to make a great user experience, or utilize social media to boost sales, or markup HTML to optimize semantic value. But on a base level, it’s not that different from any other job.

Back in college and right after, during the recession of the early 90′s, I used to pick up food service jobs. I’ve been a coffee barista, a pie slinger, and a prep cook. But more often than not, I was a dishwasher.

On Having Too Many Dirty Dishes

Dishwashing is the lowliest position in the kitchen, yet enlightened cooks understand that some nights it’s the most important. The pace of the dishwasher and the pace of the restaurant feed into each other. On slow nights, the dishwasher surfs on top of the orders, washing dinner plates or sauté pans as they fit into the dishwasher’s own rhythm. On busy nights, the dishwasher is controlled by the orders, and the orders are controlled by the efficiency of the dishwashing station. The machine is at maximum capacity, and so is the human.

This is when the bussers turn on the dishwasher. They go to get water glasses or silverware, only to find that there might be some clean, but they haven’t been stocked in the bus stations because the dishwasher has been too busy. The bussers, lowliest of the floor staff, complain about the dishwasher’s performance. They urge the floor manager to have it out with the kitchen manager. They watch the dishwasher disappear behind ever-taller piles of dishes and think how happy they are to be bussers, with their nice shirts and pressed pants.

In better-run restaurants, the line cooks, the highest status kitchen staff other than the kitchen manager, don’t yell at the dishwasher. I’ve even had it happen that the most junior line cook was sent to to help wash dishes. The line cooks knew the success of their night depended on the dishwasher’s success. A line cook at the dishwashing station only cleans what they need for their job, but when that means scrubbing gooey alfredo out of pans while the dishwasher loads glassware in a tray, that can get the kitchen back on pace, and everyone can work a little better.

Now, I’m not romanticizing dishwashing. It’s a dreadful job. I used to do it because it has a high turnover rate so I could always find an opening without having to look for more than a day, I could work evenings while going to school, I got free meals, and I learned more about cooking, which is my favorite hobby. But it was smelly, involved a lot of lifting, made my shoes rot, often ended with me alone mopping the floor at 2:00 AM, and didn’t pay well.

Who Will Scrub the Pots?

Far too often, I see senior managers who aren’t behaving like high status line cooks, helping out to ensure their own success. Instead, they’re acting like bussers. They want someone to fix the problem, but they won’t step in and get their hands dirty themselves.

Bussers want to look good. They face the public. They don’t want to set tables looking like they’ve just been in an overloaded dishwashing station. Helping themselves by helping the dishwasher is a major challenge to their self-image, and that self-image is what they think will move them to waiting, and maybe eventually into the big shoes of the floor manager.

Line cooks want to preserve the quality of the work. They know that ultimately, the fate of every restaurant rests on how well its kitchen performs. Many of them worked their way up from washing dishes, and they know how to do it. Helping themselves by helping the dishwasher is something they want to avoid, but if it needs to be done, they will do it.

Every restaurant needs both floor staff and kitchen staff. Think of them as “sales” and “production”

It would seem to follow that successful corporations would also need parallel hierarchies. But from the production side, it often looks like management only rewards the sales hierarchy. The company values are shown very clearly when someone is promoted, not for being a good dishwasher, but for making a PowerPoint presentation explaining “The Four Success Metrics for Measuring the Cleanliness of Dishes in an Enterprise.”

When these people tell the dishwasher that output needs to increase, instead of pitching in and helping, that’s when the status switch happens. A C-level manager standing in front of a department meeting and saying the wrong thing can become a complaining busser in the blink of an eye. I’ve watched it happen.

As a manager, I’ve tried to make sure everyone under me has what they need to work well. It’s a huge challenge though, and it can be hard to maintain. But when it comes down to it, I know my success depends on the success of those underneath me. And if I don’t know enough about how what they need to succeed that I could pitch in if necessary, then I make sure I get educated.

Maybe this isn’t the right approach for every person, or every business, but it works for me. It’s a startup mentality, but I’ve found it works equally well in non-startup businesses.