Today I sat in a coaching and counseling session with human resources over a dishwasher with a bad attitude toward his supervisor. It ended in a shouting match. Manager yelling, employee yelling, everybody losing.
Afterward I pulled my chef aside and told him the one thing I wish somebody had told me twenty years ago.
Don't let the employee take your power away from you.
The second you raise your voice, you've handed it over. You've stepped out of the role of manager and into the role of a man who feels disrespected by another man. Now it's animal instinct. You're a man, I'm a man. You're a woman, I'm a woman. You disrespected me and I'm not going to take it. And now a workplace issue has been dragged somewhere it never needed to go.
Here's what people forget: you are not powerless. You are in charge. You don't need to be respected in the moment to be in charge.
You can say, calmly, "Hey man, clock out. Go home. I asked you to do something that's in your job description. I didn't ask you for anything crazy. You're not speaking to me with respect. We don't need to go back and forth. Take the rest of the day. Let's try again tomorrow."
And if he refuses? "If you don't clock out, I'm going to have security walk you off the property and take your badge."
That's escalation with a professional spine. Nobody yelled. Nobody got small.
A lot of kitchens still handle these moments with shouting. That's culture, and I came up in it. But I've said publicly that I want to leave this industry better than I found it, and that means I don't get to pretend a screaming match is management. It's a failure of training. Young chefs get their first management title, get tested by a coworker, and have no idea what tools they actually hold.
Time and place matters. In a restaurant, you can't always send your grill cook home at noon on a Thursday with a sauté station and an expo board waiting on him. You have to be savvier there. But on a big property with temp help and systems in place, there is no reason on earth to stand toe to toe with somebody over dumping the stock.
You have the power. Use it quietly.