Culinary Team Building
In the Press
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Cooking & Teambuilding: A Perfect Pairing

Team building and cooking are remarkably similar activities. Both require the participants to utilize creativity and experimentation inside clearly defined boundaries, and also emphasize working towards a desired result. The kitchen is a familiar environment; so familiar, in fact, that participants often forget they are in a team-building or learning environment.

Some of the benefits that teams experience:

•  Celebrate a successful team effort through preparing & enjoying a delicious meal
•  Identify team strengths and areas for improvement
•  Relate learning to on-the-job relationships and interactions
•  Establish strategies for addressing key issues
•  Recognize individual roles and behaviors and how to maximize each other's strengths
•  Learn what makes great teams great ~ and how to heighten your team's performance

A team-cooking program meets the objectives of employers by creating an environment in which participants are moved toward a spirit of cooperation, meanwhile being thoroughly entertained and stimulated by an interactive experience.

Excerpted from “A Recipe for Team Building that Works!” by David Goldstein on NewEnglandCorporateEvents.com, April 2003.

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Kitchen as Neutral Ground for All Levels

Karen Barela, director of marketing for Cooking School of the Rookies in Boulder says culinary team-building provides exercises that offer a beginning, a middle, an end, and a celebration ~ all in one day. The tasks have enough complexity to require people to think creatively, test boundaries, and work together towards a common goal ~ the same strategies people need to use in the workplace. The kitchen is neutral ground, a leveler among all associates, which helps improve communication, she said.

At the Greenbrier in West Virginia , General Mills' Margaret Heery, national accounts manager, said her group of about 20 people found their culinary exercises to be “the best team-building event we've ever done.” The edible product was something everyone could consume and talk about over good wine and conversation. Discussion centered on the menu, the preparation pitfalls, and the things they learned in the doing ~ a metaphor for problem solving on the job.

Excerpted from “Get Cookin',” Ruth A. Hill, Successful Meetings Magazine, March 2002.

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Workplace Traits can be Observed in the Kitchen

According to a recent report in The Wall Street Journal, the latest hot spot for corporate team building isn't a lakeside cabin or luxury hotel. It's the kitchen!

Corporations are now taking their management teams to cooking classes in the hopes of fostering better team building. Think of all the parallels between growing a company and baking a cherry cobble: The need for trust and communication, the need to delegate, the desire to produce a first-rate product and the fact that sometimes the heat gets to be too much to bear.

According to the Culinary Institute of America, these are some of the workplace traits one can learn from studying an employee's kitchen habits:

•  Someone who does not read the recipe through is a not a good strategic planner.
•  Someone who prepares all of the ingredients is more practical than visionary.
•  Someone who balks at holding an onion is reluctant to tackle new things.
•  Someone who arranges a dish artfully is customer-oriented and thinks about how a product will be received.
•  Someone who produces al dente risotto is a good planner and multi-tasker.
•  Someone who whips their own cream or makes their salad dressing is independent.
•  Someone who washes the dishes is a team player.

Excerpted from “Chopping Onions in The Workplace” The Des Moines Business Record, August 7, 2000

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Building Stronger Relationships

Who says too many cooks spoil the broth? Not the 11 office supervisors at the law firm Bingham Dana, who just participated in a “Corporate Culinary Team Building Workshop” conducted by Loyalty Factor, a Boston consulting firm.

The goal of the session was to have the supervisors, who are not lawyers, build stronger relationships in casual settings, said Dianne Durkin, president of Loyalty Factor, which has offered cooking workshops since April. “People said to me, ‘What I learned about these guys I would have never learned in the office or in a sit-down dinner, because we usually talk business,” she said.

While the workshops are held in kitchen, they ~ like many programs meant to foster bonding among co-workers ~ are intended to build workplace skills. “Preparing a gourmet meal is similar to running a company or a department,” Ms. Durkin said. “Everybody's doing their own thing, but in the big picture everyone comes together to build success.”

The team from Bingham Dana put together a French meal for itself featuring filet de boeuf . It was 15 minutes late. “Dessert was taking longer in the oven,” Ms. Durkin explained.

Still, the group members, who came from offices in Boston , New York and Washington , say they now have better ties, said Toni Belding, director of operations at Bingham Dana. “I have a very strong team,” she said. “It was a way of building further on that and integrating some folks from other offices who we've been dealing with for many years but some of whom we have never met before.”

Excerpted from “When You're Cooking More Than a Meal” by Aaron Donovan from the New York Times, July 22, 2001.

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