New head chef threatens dismissal
Yesterday a new chef appeared and demanded my name. It was not till today when he called me out I discovered he is the new chief, although there are still two layers of management both above and below him. In a way it was nice to be able to discuss "career development" such as there is, but there were a couple of things he said that left an unsavoury taste. Firstly he told me that although he had not had a chance to evaluate my performance personally, he expected me to run the whole station from start to finish - which is actually what I have been trying to do from the start - but that if I did not do this then he would not hesitate to sack me.
This means that my job depends on the intermediate levels of management allowing me to do what I wanted to do if I am to keep this job, and I suspect that they will not give me much chance. For example today I was allowed to set up the station while the poisonous dwarf who normally runs the ramen station I am interested in was told to do my usual job which is easily the worst in the kitchen: coating semi-defrosted chicken breasts in egg, flour and panko. However after whinging about the job, and spending the entire morning completing ( I would have been given about half that time), she used her charms to get out of the prep area into the kitchen while I somehow got demoted back to prep.
The second grievance was that he alluded to negative reports from my previous managers. When I asked for an example he chose one that I could least relate to: that I forgot how to do stuff and had to be reminded. The problem is not so much remembering how to carry out menial tasks as the fact that every sous chef and chef has their own way of doing stuff and tend to impose this on you if it is not their way. I guess the root problem is that there is no manual for these tasks, but since there is no opportunity to raise this issue there is not much I can do. So much for the kaizen culture they claim to have adopted.
The great irony is that every time I get threatened with dismissal - and this is pretty frequent - is that this is actually a very attractive option for me. Not only are there many other similar jobs around, but they pay much more and I suspect they would come with much less disrespect. In any case I will soldier on and see if they will really carry out their threats. Perhaps they will if they can find a replacement, and rather ominously I saw a new hire arrive as my shift was completed.
This means that my job depends on the intermediate levels of management allowing me to do what I wanted to do if I am to keep this job, and I suspect that they will not give me much chance. For example today I was allowed to set up the station while the poisonous dwarf who normally runs the ramen station I am interested in was told to do my usual job which is easily the worst in the kitchen: coating semi-defrosted chicken breasts in egg, flour and panko. However after whinging about the job, and spending the entire morning completing ( I would have been given about half that time), she used her charms to get out of the prep area into the kitchen while I somehow got demoted back to prep.
The second grievance was that he alluded to negative reports from my previous managers. When I asked for an example he chose one that I could least relate to: that I forgot how to do stuff and had to be reminded. The problem is not so much remembering how to carry out menial tasks as the fact that every sous chef and chef has their own way of doing stuff and tend to impose this on you if it is not their way. I guess the root problem is that there is no manual for these tasks, but since there is no opportunity to raise this issue there is not much I can do. So much for the kaizen culture they claim to have adopted.
The great irony is that every time I get threatened with dismissal - and this is pretty frequent - is that this is actually a very attractive option for me. Not only are there many other similar jobs around, but they pay much more and I suspect they would come with much less disrespect. In any case I will soldier on and see if they will really carry out their threats. Perhaps they will if they can find a replacement, and rather ominously I saw a new hire arrive as my shift was completed.
posted by Tom Coady at 10:37 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home