Culture Is Built in the Moments Nobody's Watching
There is a saying that has stayed with me for a long time. If they gossip with you, they will gossip about you. Simple. And the longer you spend in professional kitchens, the more you understand exactly how true it is.
Here is the thing about being the person someone chooses to confide in. It can feel like a connection. Like trust. Like they picked you specifically because of something between the two of you. And maybe that is part of it. But if what they are bringing you is a takedown of someone who is not in the room, that moment is not intimacy. It is a test. And what you do next says everything about the kind of operator, leader, or teammate you actually are.
I have been caught in the walk-in more times than I can count. Somebody comes in, the door closes, and before you can grab what you came for they are already unloading about someone on the team. When you are a peer it is one kind of fork in the road. When you are the one leading, the stakes are different. Because now you are not just deciding whether to engage. You are deciding what kind of culture you are building, right there, in a refrigerated box between the produce and the dairy.
I will not pretend I always took the high road. I have engaged more times than I would like to admit. And toxicity in a kitchen spreads fast. The part that gets you is that you do not always know you are part of it. You think you are just venting, just connecting, just being real. And then one day you realize you were the ember the whole time.
What I have come back to, over and over, is this: speak about people as if they are standing in the room with you. It keeps the line from blurring. It keeps you honest. And it forces you to either say the thing directly to the person or let it go entirely, which is almost always the better move anyway.
None of this means a kitchen has to be without personality or edge or the kind of humor that only makes sense to people who have worked a Saturday night service together. Camaraderie is real and it matters. But there is a difference between a team that laughs together and a team where some people are the punchline. One of those builds something. The other quietly dismantles it, one shift at a time.
You have probably eaten in a restaurant where you could feel it. The staff wanted to be there. Not because someone told them to smile, but because something real was happening between those people. They are firing you up about the food before you even order. They are checking in on each other mid-service without being asked. The chef gets a question about a dish and nobody flinches waiting for the answer. There is no hiding from the GM, no tiptoeing around the kitchen, no quiet dread underneath the surface. Just people who are locked in together, supporting each other in both directions, and you feel every bit of it from your seat. That energy does not come from a handbook. It comes from what happens in the moments nobody thinks anybody is watching.
I am far from a perfect example of any of this. I have been on both sides of it, the one who set the tone and the one who poisoned it, sometimes without even realizing which one I was being. But having lived both sides, you develop something. You collect the memories, the moments you are proud of and the ones you are not, and if you are paying attention they start to turn into empathy. And if every new operation I step into moves me a little further in the right direction, if the goal of building a place where people actually want to show up keeps sharpening with each one, that sounds like a pretty honest place to start from.
Next in the series: Feedback Is a Leadership Skill, Not a Personality Trait.
The conversation can start anytime. Reach out directly at reino@cruzexperience.com.
Let's build something unforgettable.
