Food Network Loser – A Case of “What Not To Do”

As an amateur chef, I am a big fan of the Food Channel. Although I’m less passionate about reality shows, I do confess to TIVO’ing the latest series “The Next Food Network Star” and watching it my family.

This morning we watched last Sunday’s episode and my daughter’s favorite contestant – Adrian bit the dust.This week’s challenge called for the contestants to perform their first 5 minute cooking demo for the camera. It was an unusual episode in that all 5 remaining contestants bombed horribly. Cut fingers, crying to go home, complex recipes no one would ever try themselves, and a myriad of other disasters. Alton Brown (one of the judges) lamented “can’t we just send everyone home and start again with new contestants?

”This sort of thing happens from time to time in the workplace. You may be a salesman and every one on your team misses their sales goals. You could be in engineering and your design team misses a new product release date, or you’re in manufacturing and your plant fails to make a production goal.At times like these, there are no winners, only losers. You just want to make sure that you don’t end up as the biggest loser.

Back to Adrian’s suicide play. At the end of the show they go around the room and critique each wannabe chef. As they often do, before they ripped Adrian’s performance apart, they asked him how he’d thought he’d done. This is when Adrian made his fatal mistake. He said “other than 15 seconds, I thought I did pretty well.”

He did not do pretty well, he was terrible, but so was everyone else. In fact, he may not have been the worst, but by soft peddling his self assessment, he guaranteed himself a ticket home.

The Food Channel judges and your boss both want the same thing — great performances from the people their responsible for. Failure is bad, but trying to sell a bad performance as “being okay” shouts out that you have low expectations for yourself and may not even know what a great job is!

No matter how you feel about a recent weak performance, if you boss asks for a self assessment, ALWAYS be your own strongest critic. You can’t do anything about bad results after the facts, but unless you want to be sent home like Adrian, make sure your boss knows that YOU KNOW you can do better next time.