Cooking Classes for Team Building
Cooking by yourself at home can be a very gratifying solitary experience. However, in a restaurant environment, no cook functions alone, and team building comes with the territory. Cooking classes that focus on a cooperative line cooking environment build the rudiments of a strong and successful team from the ground up. Fostering friendly competition between teams can ratchet each team's smooth communication and operation even more strongly.
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Learning Cooking Skills
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Cooking is a hands-on experience. That, coupled with learning and honing new skills, fosters an environment where classmates work together. If those classmates are members of your team, team building happens in an organic and unforced way. An added bonus may be that some team members may naturally emerge as leaders, mastering skills and helping other students along as a matter of course. Knife skills, basic cooking techniques and mastering the flavor profiles of different international cuisines may be some of the skills offered by local institutions that offer group cooking classes.
Kitchen Work
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Working in kitchens under pressure forces a team to emerge, even among people who might not necessarily get along socially. A common goal must be accomplished or else the entire team suffers. An opportunity to work as a team in a kitchen under some sort of pressure can build the sort of skills needed for an effective and smooth-running team outside the kitchen as well. When a breakfast, lunch, dinner or special event service goes smoothly, the entire kitchen feels a sense of elation. When it goes badly, everyone pitches in to try to bring the situation back on track. An element of pressure can also build split-second decision-making and adaptability skill sets among employees.
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Competition
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If possible, an element of friendly competition amongst teams in a cooking class can introduce the pressure needed to truly make teams gel. Unless they are for a grade or certification, cooking classes in general do not offer the kind of pressure that restaurant work provides. However, forcing teams to try to outdo one another at a smoothly orchestrated series of kitchen tasks may do the trick. Try a skills relay after basic knife skills or cooking techniques have been taught. Chopping onions into a fine dice, julienning carrots and jointing whole chickens can be as competitive as hitting baseballs or shooting hoops.
Transferring Skills
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A relay requires similar cooperative skills as cooking on the line in a professional kitchen. If person A completes the task quickly and well, person B has an advantage when starting his task, and so on down the line. This same mentality can easily transfer to a work atmosphere, where team members must all complete their assigned tasks in the appropriate amount of time so that the team, as a whole, can benefit. Additionally, communication is imperative when working in a busy kitchen. Knives, hot pans and other dangers lurk behind every missed communication, so one of the first things taught in cooking school is to always communicate. Make sure whatever class you choose incorporates this essential skill, too. The importance of good communication is quickly learned when weighed against the threat of imminent danger.
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