9 The Creative Leadership Practices of Haute Cuisine Chefs

Isabelle Bouty, Marie-Léandre Gomez, and Marc Stierand

Introduction

This chapter aims at unveiling specific creative leadership practices that contribute to leading as Directing. We present some aggregate insights of our joint learning from researching the leadership practices of highly creative chefs, and offer a nuanced and contextual sensitive account of creative leadership in haute cuisine. We define creative leadership as the practice of “leading others in thinking innovatively together” (Basadur, 2004: 103) and understand ‘thinking together’ more broadly as a ‘knowing in practice’ (Gomez, Bouty, & Drucker-Godard, 2003), because in the context of haute cuisine, creative cooking may involve more than just the cognitive function of thinking (Glăveanu, 2011), as it also requires playing (Mainemelis & Dionysiou, 2015), touching, seeing, smelling, tasting, and hearing (Ewenstein & Whyte, 2007). From our numerous inquiries with some of the best chefs in the world, we assess that creative leadership emerges within and is a facet of the sphere of practices (Schatzki, 2001) and, consequently, as a practice, creative leadership is “something that is routinely made and re-made in practice using tools, discourse, and our bodies” (Nicolini, 2012: 2).

Whilst the socio-economic significance of creative leadership, in general, is widely acknowledged by the academic community (Amabile et al., 2004; Mumford et al., 2002; Shalley & Gilson, 2004; Tierney, 2008), the question as to what leaders can do in practice to enhance team creativity in context, however, remains an unresolved issue for two main reasons (Murphy & Ensher, 2008; Osborn, Hunt, & Jauch, 2002; Shamir & Howell, 1999; Shin & Zhou, 2003; To, Herman, & Ashkanasy, 2015). First, creative leadership research is really just beginning (Hunter, Thoroughgood, Myer, & Ligon, 2011; Vessey et al., 2014), and its theoretical foundation is disconcerting, lacking definitional clarity, nuanced theories, and contextual sensitivity (Mainemelis, Kark, & Epitropaki, 2015). Second, the samples used in most studies of leadership and creativity have been focused on leaders who consult their team on working more creatively in contexts that may not essentially depend on creativity. This brought forth theories that focus more on the average person’s engagement in a creative task rather than on the practices of highly creative leaders in work contexts requiring creativity (Dörfler & Stierand, 2009; Stierand & Dörfler, 2011, 2011, 2014; Vessey et al., 2014). So far, only very few studies have explored in a contextually sensitive manner what publicly recognized and highly creative leaders actually do to enhance team creativity and what can be learned from their practices (e.g., Epitropaki & Mainemelis, 2016; Stierand, 2015; Vessey et al., 2014).

We aim to help building a more robust theoretical foundation for creative leadership research and better understand the practices of highly creative leaders in work contexts requiring creativity. We contribute to this project in an inductive way by aggregating insights from our empirical research in haute cuisine kitchens. Haute cuisine is such a context that attracts the human intellect through esthetic and essentially non-practical means of expression (Hegarty & O’Mahony, 1999; Stierand et al., 2016). Most of this expression originates from highly creative chefs (Stierand, 2015) who claim their distinctive creative identity largely through recognition in the leading restaurant guides, the Michelin and Gault Millau, which are the institutionalized guardians of the field’s tradition of creative progress (Ferguson, 1998; Stierand, Dörfler, & MacBryde, 2014).

The creative leadership in this type of work context typically manifests as Directing for it is essentially about “materializing [the] leader’s creative vision through other people’s work” (Mainemelis, Kark, & Epitropaki, 2015). That is, the Directing leader is typically the ‘primary creator’, but may consider creative inputs from followers (Mainemelis, Kark, & Epitropaki, 2015). This has already been articulated by Bouty and Gomez (2010), who describe that top chefs foster creativity predominantly within the circle of their chosen sous-chef ‘chef mentees’ whilst leaving reproduction of their creations to their cooks. Stierand (2015) has added to this line of research by providing empirical evidence showing how ‘chef mentees’ often develop their creativity in a master-apprentice relationship in which they learn bridging the open-endedness of creative work and the social appropriateness of the final product.

Team creativity, the process by which people jointly work together in a team to produce novel and useful output (Amabile, 1988, 1996; Oldham & Cummings, 1996; Woodman, Sawyer, & Griffin, 1993), has therefore a long tradition in haute cuisine. Moreover, today, top chefs also frequently collaborate with creative professionals from other fields—for example, industrial design (Svejenova, Mazza, & Planellas, 2007)—who have different knowledge and skill sets (Paulus & Nijstad, 2003; Reiter-Palmon, Herman, & Yammarino, 2008; West et al., 2004), and together may produce a higher level creative synthesis (Mainemelis, Kark, & Epitropaki, 2015) with a strategic dimension (Bouty & Gomez, 2013) that goes beyond the development of a creative dish, focusing more on the creative progress of cuisine at large (Svejenova, Mazza, & Planellas, 2007).

The creative process, however, has long been viewed as asocial and individualistic, led by a lone effort of personal creativity (Jung, 2001; Runco, 2007), and it is only very recently that research findings consistently suggest that effective leadership can significantly proliferate team creativity and, as a result, enhance the creative output produced by a team (Lingo & O’Mahony, 2010; Stenmark, Shipman, & Mumford, 2011; Thomson, Jones, & Warhurst, 2007). Shalley and Gilson (2004), for example, note that leaders who engage in supportive high quality exchanges with their team members increase team creativity. Furthermore, Amabile et al. (2004) showed that team members perceive leaders to be supportive through both their instrumental (or task-oriented) and socio-emotional (or relationship-oriented) behavior. Whether team creativity is fostered or hindered, is therefore determined by how well leaders can motivate team members and nurture a work climate that is conducive to team creativity (Anderson, Potočnik, & Zhou, 2014; Heinze et al., 2009; Hunter, Bedell-Avers, & Mumford, 2007; Stenmark, Shipman, & Mumford, 2011; Tierney & Farmer, 2011), and how well leaders can mobilize individual, organizational, and institutional forces in the overall creative process (Bouty & Gomez, 2015).

Our analysis is inductively based on our long-standing empirical investigations in the life-world of haute cuisine. This study is based on reflexive interpretation in a data-driven perspective as defined by Alvesson and Sköldberg (2009: 283), which grants particular weight to the capacity of researchers highly acquainted with their empirical field to construct new interpretations (Alvesson & Sköldberg, 2009: 313). The first- and second-named authors have conducted in-depth longitudinal studies of several two and three-Michelin-star restaurants, their chefs, teams, and organizations; the last-named author has been a chef in haute cuisine and explored, together with various collaborators, the creative process of over three dozen Michelin-starred chefs and half a dozen expert chefs carrying titles such as ‘Meilleurs Ouvrier de France’. Only because we were able to go in between the leadership practices of creative teams in haute cuisine, either through insider interviews (Stierand & Dörfler, 2014), or through case studies, observation, and interviews with chefs and their teams (Bouty & Gomez, 2010, 2015; Gomez, Bouty, & Drucker-Godard, 2003; Gomez & Bouty, 2011) were we able to unearth how creative leadership practices are made and re-made (Stierand et al., 2017). We completed a reflexive transversal analysis that allowed us to compare our cases and group similar elements regarding Directing as creative leadership that we synthesized into three practices. As a matter of fact, the output of our joint learning from researching highly creative chefs is that they direct their team through enabling (configuring the creative space to set the conditions of creative work), orientating (managing creative work to keep it abounded and focused), and complying (assessing ideas to select those that fit), that we detail in the following pages.

1. Enabling: Configuring the Creative Space

Chefs first direct creativity by enabling it: they make it possible and sustained. In other words, creativity in high-end restaurants is not merely based on serendipity, even if this dimension is not absent. Chefs and their teams work long hours and within this sustained rhythm of activity, they need to organize creative work. A three-star chef assesses,

Enabling creativity pertains to several aspects, among which the configuration of creative space, by granting time and space for creative work. Chefs favor specific occasions for individual creativity: quiet hours in the morning or between sittings in their personal offices as well as outside of their restaurants, in cafés, farmer’s market, or gardens, for example.

Chefs also set the conditions of creative teamwork: they confine it to the restaurant’s kitchen and separate it from other kitchen activities, set it up aside of the rush periods and service time. Besides, enabling creativity involves selecting whom to involve into the creative process. Chefs perform creative work both with external and internal partners, whom they select and do not mix with each other. Partners for individual creative brainstorming are for example other haute cuisine chefs, painters, designers, and other artists whom chefs work with because of personal affinities and friendship: “I would not say we have chosen each other. Rather, we found each other” says a three-star chef about his external creativity-mate (a scientist for that matter). They keep these actors apart from those involved in creative teamwork, whom they also carefully select. Most chefs pick their sous-chefs and some station chefs to participate to creative teamwork, a type of work that is not based on open contribution by any cook; who can contribute is the chef’s decision. This reflects the highly hierarchical and formal organization of haute cuisine kitchens in which chefs have prominence and unquestioned authority over their sous-chefs, who themselves command to station chefs, who are eventually also of differentiated importance, with the meat and fish stations traditionally more valued.

Last, enabling creativity involves proposing products, tools, and spurs for creativity. We recorded that these stimuli are selected and proposed exclusively by chefs, especially for creative teamwork. As chefs confine creative teamwork to the restaurants’ kitchens, some of the creative resources are limited to those available in these kitchens: existing equipment, appliances, and products. In this perspective, the way kitchens are organized and equipped play a significant role. We also observed that chefs select additional elements, products, and ideas to be introduced into their kitchens. For example, one of them brings selected vegetables and herbs from his kitchen garden in addition to those daily delivered. Chefs’ choices vary according to their individual tastes, inclinations, current interests, and to organizational considerations. Chefs can select regional ingredients in coherence with the location of their restaurants or with the region they originate from. Besides, these ingredients need not be sophisticated or expensive; they rather have caught the chefs’ attentions because of their taste, austerity, or meaning. Chefs also bring various sources of inspiration for creative teamwork in the form of music, drawings, and literature. One of them for example uses notes, pictures, and sketches he took and drew when traveling around the world to evoke an inspiring expression or a color that moved him and that he wants to convey in his cuisine.

Besides, chefs de facto exclude various elements from the creative space they so configure, such as the experience and sensitivity of other cooks (those who do not participate to creative teamwork), and other products than those selected. These restrictions create constrains that manifest as positive influences over creativity in haute cuisine restaurants: “I always thought that the more limited the means, the stronger the expression” says a chef. Another three-Michelin-star chef explains,

Altogether, chefs direct creativity through enabling it by configuring the creative space in many regards, from the spatiotemporal conditions of creative work, to the actors involved, and the products and sources of inspirations that are mobilized. However, since each of these elements largely involves individual appreciation by the chefs, each chef configures unique conditions in his restaurant and at a given moment.

2. Orientating: Managing Topics and Themes

Chefs also direct creativity by orientating creative work as it happens in the creative space defined, as well as in more mundane everyday kitchen work. We observed that quite often, when chefs and their teams work on a new dish, most chefs do not properly participate to the trials: they explain their ideas, sometimes work on a very first draft, and then let selected cooks at creative teamwork. For example, a chef explains,

In particular, we observed that each creative development brought about by a team member is systematically considered with reference to the chef’s idea or to the themes and topics the chef wants central in his cuisine. The following excerpt recounts a creative teamwork session in a three-star restaurant:

Orientating creative work, as it appears in this illustration, is implicit and latent though highly salient in creative work as it happens. Creative work is permanently driven back to the matter of being faithful to the spirit of the original signature dish, though without reproducing it. Furthermore, orientating creative work generates exchanges and debates within the creative team, as is further exemplified by a dialog between a chef and his sous-chef over a lobster dish:

The dialog carries on with questions about ingredients and their preparation, and the chef and his sous-chef progressively agree on ingredients, techniques, and visual effects. The chef concludes, “The important thing […] is the extent to which [the sous-chef] knows how to ask, […] was moving along with me, and even prompting me along with a real line of questioning”.

As illustrated earlier, through orientating creativity, chefs channel work but also challenge those involved (including themselves) to go further with their efforts and confront their contributions on a topic. It keeps creativity abounded and intense though focused.

3. Complying: Assessing Ideas

Last, chefs direct creativity, as they are the only ones validating (or not) creative ideas and trials. They specifically assess and bound creative ideas so that they comply with their unique cooking style and with the restaurant’s position and conditions. To do so, chefs continually appreciate the ideas, trials, and propositions with regard to a variety of elements. In the first place, chefs grant major importance to keeping their personal cuisine style central to creative ideas at the restaurant. Talking about the creativity of cooks, one of them, for example, states, “If they wish, they too can become composers themselves, once we have jointly set bounds to that together. Then can express their own know-how and sensibility while keeping to my story”. The unique ‘story’ or cooking universe of the chef is one of the criteria against which creativity is assessed. This dimension is especially salient when chefs weigh how new dishes interact with the overall menu and evaluate general coherence. A menu “tells a story”, explains a chef. “Dishes on a menu are like pebbles in a Japanese garden”, says another one. “It’s a complete universe”, indicates yet another one. In this regard, chefs direct creativity by assessing whether a novelty will fit in. Their personal style and almost artistic expression is at stake in this regard.

Directing creativity through complying also pertains to assessing ideas against other, more external, though no less important, elements, such as the fit between novel ideas and the restaurant’s location, its clients, the physical disposition of the kitchen, and the structure of the organization. For example, one of the chefs we studied disregarded some creative ideas because they encompassed technical elements that created too many difficulties in the small kitchen. Another one insists on the necessary coherence between food and location at his restaurant: “We are in a garden here; we’re in a former greenhouse. Although we do not cook vegetarian cuisine, we must serve vegetables; otherwise, it makes no sense”.

Most important, because restaurants are also businesses, chefs assess creative ideas against their potential: will they be acceptable or regarded as too wild by prospective diners? Chefs always keep in mind their business responsibilities. “They [employees] count on me” explains one of them. “It’s tough. We have an haute cuisine house, a business to run for a living”. Creative dishes show by definition some degree of novelty, but largely remain within the bounds of the type and degree of novelty that the clients of the respective restaurants expect. Chefs tacitly understand and perceive these boundaries; they integrate them throughout years as part of their expertise as they survey empty (or not so empty) plates at the end of meals, interact with dining-room staff, and even go around the dining-room to enquire about diners’ opinions. This tacit understanding is constitutive of chefs’ creative leadership within kitchens: clients both expect and bound creativity. Not fully directing creativity in this regard comes at the price of losing clients, as a now well-renowned chef experienced a few decades ago when his clients became reluctant to taste and pay high prices for a cuisine they deemed too innovative for their tastes, and he eventually went bankrupt. Another chef confessed that he kept in mind that his customers expect “moderate extravagancy” and somehow restrained creativity and the newness of eventually selected ideas. In other words, the chef decides on which ideas cultivated in kitchens during creative sessions will be integrated in restaurants’ dishes and the menus, and, equally important, which will not (at least not directly). To direct creativity in this regard and assess whether ideas comply with these constrains chefs sometimes simply turn themselves into diners at their own restaurants: between sittings, they seat at a dining room table and go through the eating experience in context as would their clients. This can generate a variety of consequences from simply abandoning or validating an idea to pointing at directions for further creative efforts and adjustments. Actually, chefs’ complying practice is not limited to a final stop/go in a linear process. Rather, and as one dimension of their creative leadership, it occurs at any moment in creative work.

Concluding Discussion

This chapter contributes to illuminate what leaders can do in practice to enhance team creativity in context and to advance our theoretical understanding of Directing as creative leadership practices. We depict how highly creative leaders have their vision materialized through other’s work (Mainemelis, Kark, & Epitropaki, 2015) and highlight that even though leaders rarely perform the necessary legwork of creative production themselves, they strictly control it to be in line with their overall creative vision. We suggest that creative leadership manifests as Directing in haute cuisine restaurants through three facets: enabling, orientating, and complying. Each dimension regards distinct yet related aspects of creativity. These results are summarized in Figure 9.1.

In this chapter, we identified the existence of these three practices, yet did not address the interrelationships among them. How do the three practices of enabling, orientating, and complying intertwine into Directing remains to be further explored. As represented in Figure 9.1, the three dimensions of creative leadership do not form a linear progression: complying is not the validation that terminates creative work; rather, it is mixed with orientating and enabling in an intricate way. Enabling, orientating, and complying appear concomitantly along the numerous loops and fuzzy moments of creative work. In addition, we see no reasons why these interrelationships should be stable; they may well evolve through time. In the same vein, the respective weight of each practice in the making of Directing certainly changes over time, in coherence with the evolving focus and activities of restaurants over the year. For instance, when the kitchen team is involved in the creation of new dishes for the upcoming season, pressure can be higher on enabling and orientating.

A process ontology may help in better capturing these dynamics. Hence, we argue that the creative leadership practices of enabling, orientating, and complying can be regarded as entities of the leadership structure of Directing. We also experienced this empirically when we investigated the creative process in the kitchen using different research tools for these three entities appeared to us as stable effects of the creative process, not in the sense of a ‘solid rock’ (see Dörfler, Stierand, & Zizka, 2017: 3), but more of a ‘standing wave’ (see Rescher, 2000: 13). That is, like any reality, the kitchen reality “is deemed to be continuously in flux” (Chia, 1995: 579) and therefore future research needs to get to the “emergent relational interactions and patternings that are recursively intimated in the fluxing and transforming of our life-worlds” (Chia, 1995: 581–582). Exposing the many interlocking micro-practices of creative work can provide a more nuanced yet also more essential understanding of creative leadership. As the passionate researchers of the creative process and the world of chefs that we are, we discussed over and over again how we could best go about exposing these leadership micro-practices. The only answer we have so far is that we also need to allow our research process to be in flux in order to capture the ever-becoming nature of creative process as already investigated (Bouty & Gomez, 2015) and its associated leadership. Both those practicing creativity and us researching it are faced with the reality that our theoretical knowledge of creativity, our knowing of how to create, and our knowing of how to be creative is constantly in a process of becoming (Dörfler, Stierand, & Zizka, 2017; Stierand & Zizka, 2015).

Figure 9.1 Creative Leadership as Directing

In addition, we realized with hindsight that the only reason why we were able to untangle and make sense of our rich and thick data was that we recorded, not necessarily in a structured but rather in a systematic way, the antenarratives we listened to and were engaged in during the data collection. According to Boje (2008), “antenarrative is a relational process that potentially will make future sense and eventually lead to a retrospective narrative collapsed into beginning, middle and ending” (Stierand et al., 2017: 3). In the context of chef’s creativity, we therefore define antenarrative processes of creative leadership as intuitive and tacitly operating micro-practices aiming to direct others in bringing order to the messiness of creating (see Stierand et al., 2017). Hence, we argue that antenarratives of creative leadership are indispensable for our understanding of the usual narratives of creative leadership that frequently are post-factum reconstructions and recollections of a much trickier and more complex practice (see Stierand et al., 2017).

In conclusion, our insights are deeply grounded in the particular field of haute cuisine. In haute cuisine, creativity is a core stake and manifests in many aspects of work (Bouty & Gomez, 2013, 2015; Stierand, Dörfler, & MacBryde, 2014). Chefs play a key role, keep the whole creative process under control, and claim their distinctive creative identity. As a matter of fact, haute cuisine provides a particularly rich context to identify Directing as creative leadership. In other creative industries where creative identity claims are not as strong, Directing may not be as important as the other two creative leadership practices, or may simply not be as visible, and the balance between enabling, orientating, and complying may also differ. For example, enabling may be open to a greater number of actors in the organization, whereas in haute cuisine it is fully controlled by the chef. The way the practices are materialized into specific activities may also well differ. For example, chefs permanently orientate creativity by intervening directly and continually, whereas in other fields, creative leaders may control as directly but in a discrete manner. Future research will be beneficial to illuminate these nuances. In haute cuisine restaurants, leading creativity as Directing is also particularly salient and, as we outlined earlier, high-end restaurants form an empirical field well suited to investigate this facet of creative leadership. However, how Directing interweaves with other facets of creative leadership—namely, Facilitating and Integrating—remains an open question that further research could fruitfully address, in general, but also with regard to the three specific practices that we highlighted.