The toughness paradox

Why the strongest person in the kitchen is the one who can be seen to struggle

In a study that followed 2,398 Americans from 2001 to 2004, the best outcomes belonged to people in the middle: those with a moderate history of difficult life events. They reported less general distress, fewer problems functioning day to day and fewer post-traumatic stress symptoms, and they rated their lives higher than people with no such history and people with a very heavy one (Seery et al., 2010).

It looks like proof of the old saying that whatever does not kill us makes us stronger, and the university behind the study framed it that way (University at Buffalo, 2010). But the result was shaped like a U. On one side, where there was no adversity at all, outcomes were worse. On the other, where there was a great deal, they were worse too. The lead author was careful to say the data cannot establish causation; they are consistent with the idea that a moderate dose of adversity can contribute to resilience (University at Buffalo, 2010).

The authors also looked at how people reacted to recent adverse events, and those with a moderate history were affected least (Seery et al., 2010). For a restaurant that is tempting, because it resembles learning to run a service: the first wrecked Friday is a shock, and the later ones hurt less. It is an analogy, though, not a finding.

That single letter holds the argument I want to unpick. The first position says: be tough, hardship will make you stronger. The second says: be vulnerable, or you will break. The third, which hospitality knows best, says: be tough and never show what it costs. I think the third has the weakest foundations, and I will try to show why using three authors who rarely share a table: Taleb, Brown and Camus.

Antifragility

Nassim Nicholas Taleb opens Antifragile by noticing that we lack a word. The opposite of fragile is not resilient, because the resilient merely endures and stays as it was. Something that improves after a shock needed a name of its own, and Taleb coined one (Taleb, 2012). He defines it as a convex response to a stressor, with a qualification that popular summaries drop most often: over some range of variation (Taleb, 2012).

That range is the heart of it. Beyond it, what used to strengthen starts to damage. Seery’s curve is an empirical version of the same intuition: dose matters, and zero is as poor a starting point as excess. I am joining theory and data on my own responsibility here, because Taleb presents antifragility as a mathematical relationship and not as a result drawn from studies of people (Taleb, 2012).

The hospitality way

Hospitality has its own story about hardship. A team at Cardiff conducted 47 interviews with chefs in elite restaurants and described abusive behaviour as something built into the geography of the kitchen: isolation, invisibility and a sense that the rules of the outside world stop at the door. They treated this behaviour as a ritualised part of the community around which the kitchen organises itself (Burrow et al., 2022). Interviewees described kitchens as isolated, alien places, and also as places where nobody outside is watching their hands (Cardiff University, 2022).

The same community has another side. One of the authors pointed out that the sense of belonging lets these chefs remain productive and committed despite very hard conditions (Cardiff University, 2022). So toughness in this picture is more than a character trait. It is a ritual that binds people together. A ritual, however, says nothing about whether anyone learns from it.

Picture a Friday at 7 p.m., a full dining room, tickets on the pass. The cook on the grill can see he will not make three orders at once. In Kitchen A he says so aloud, the chef reshuffles the sequence, and two dishes go out on time. In Kitchen B he keeps working in silence because “we don’t complain here,” two dishes leave late, and the chef learns about the problem from the floor. Both kitchens are tough. Only one of them knows what is happening on the station. This is an illustration, not a study result, but it shows the mechanism I mean. By the way, it also fits a narrative regarding psychological safety which I wrote previously.

Vulnerability as operational information

Brené Brown defines vulnerability as the everyday experience of uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure (Brown, 2012). She challenges the belief that it is weakness and argues that it leads most directly to courage, engagement and connection (Brown, 2012). From the pass, her definition sounds oddly technical: uncertainty is “I don’t know if I can make it,” risk is “if I say so, I look weaker,” and exposure is “everyone will hear.” That translation is mine, not a quotation from Brown.

The closest concept in organisational research is psychological safety. Amy Edmondson defined it as a shared belief among team members that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking (Edmondson, 1999). She studied 51 teams in a manufacturing company and found that psychological safety was associated with learning behaviour, and that learning behaviour in turn mediated between safety and team performance. The surprising part: team efficacy, the belief that “we can handle it,” was not associated with learning once safety was taken into account (Edmondson, 1999).

The study concerned a factory, not a kitchen, and appeared in 1999. Still, the result matters to us, because in a kitchen team “we can handle it” is often the slogan of the day. Edmondson’s data suggest that a team’s confidence alone does not make it learn. People also need to believe they can show a mistake without being punished.

A team learns from stress only when it has a safe place to talk about it. Stress supplies the material, and safety lets the learning happen.

Work without the pose

In The Plague, Dr Rieux treats the sick through the whole epidemic in a quarantined city. When someone calls him a hero, he replies that heroism is not the point and that the only way to fight a plague is common decency. Asked what he means, he says that in his case it consists in doing his job (Camus, 2002). In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus ends the essay by asking us to imagine Sisyphus happy (Camus, 1991).

I read these two images as a portrait of toughness without a pose. It rests on work done properly and on accepting that tomorrow starts again. It does not pretend the weight is light. That is my reading, and Camus, who was not writing a management handbook, would probably have disliked its being used as one.

The toughness paradox

Why do I consider the third position the weakest? It demands two things that exclude each other: that the team learns from pressure, and that nobody says the pressure is too high. Learning from a mistake begins with the information that the mistake happened. If that information costs too much, people will delay it, and in the logic of Edmondson’s model that means less learning (Edmondson, 1999). This reasoning is mine; it does not follow directly from any single study cited here.

Here is the thesis in one piece. Toughness understood as the ability to bear load and profit from it requires what the culture of toughness usually forbids: exposure. Taleb says gains from stress are possible, but only over some range. Edmondson shows that a team needs safety in interpersonal risk to learn. Brown describes that risk as vulnerability. The toughest team is not the one that shows nothing, but the one where a problem can be named before it becomes a breakdown.

Takeaway for restaurants and hotel F&B

The points below are my conclusions from the research above, not tested procedures.

• Separate a dose from a permanent state. Load with a start and an end, such as a service, a banquet or a stock-take, is different from a constant sense of threat. Seery and colleagues did not study work, so we do not know the right dose for your team. After an exceptionally heavy weekend, plan a lighter Monday instead of cutting the rota further.

• Give people the right to say “I can’t keep up,” and show what happens next. Reordering tickets or sending help from the next station is an answer. Mockery ends the conversation. In Edmondson’s model, structures such as coaching by the team leader mattered too (Edmondson, 1999).

• Expose yourself first. At the pre-shift briefing, say which of your decisions from yesterday did not work. The team will read what is normal here.

• Take five minutes after service. One question: what in the process failed. No names.

• Bring the kitchen into view. The Cardiff authors see this as a way for violence to be noticed and held to account (Cardiff University, 2022). A manager on the pass and an open door are a start.

Criticism

Taleb is theory, not measurement. Antifragility is, for him, a mathematical relationship and not an empirical finding (Taleb, 2012). Carrying it over to the psychology of a team is a metaphor. 

Brown rests on qualitative research. Daring Greatly is a popular book built on grounded theory, which the author describes in an appendix (Brown, 2012). That method is good at surfacing mechanisms, but by its nature it cannot establish scale or causation.

Seery shows a correlation. The authors acknowledge the data do not settle causation (University at Buffalo, 2010). They studied major life events in the general population, not workplace load, so moving the result into a kitchen is my inference. A U-shaped curve also gives no threshold you could recommend to anyone.

Edmondson studied a factory. It covered 51 teams in one manufacturing company in 1999 (Edmondson, 1999). The mechanism is plausible in hospitality, but this particular study was not carried out in a kitchen.

The hospitality evidence is mixed. In a survey-and-interview study of chefs, bullying behaviour was experienced mostly by younger, more junior chefs, and verbal bullying, the most commonly reported form, had no effect on job satisfaction or organisational commitment. The authors read such behaviour as a cohesive element of kitchen culture (Alexander et al., 2012). That is a serious counterargument to my thesis, though commitment is not the same as mental health or learning. The Cardiff interviews, for their part, concerned elite restaurants (Burrow et al., 2022), so it is unclear how much applies to independent venues and hotel F&B.

Camus gave no instructions. Rieux says decency means doing his job, then adds that he does not know what it means in general. Hayden Kee notes in the description of a lecture on The Plague that “doing one’s job” does not add up to a general ethic (Kee, 2021). I can read the kitchen through Camus, but I cannot derive management rules from him.

The selection of sources is mine. I chose studies that fit the thesis. Another author could show that a culture of toughness works better than I assume here.

Conclusion

Return to the U. A team that never touches difficulty sits on the left of the curve. A team with endless difficulty sits on the right. The middle is populated by people who carry a load with a beginning and an end, and who have a place where they can say so. Neither a pose nor indulgence will build that middle. A leader who is first to say something did not go well will.

References

1. Alexander, M., Maclaren, A., O’Gorman, K., & Taheri, B. (2012). “He just didn’t seem to understand the banter”: Bullying or simply establishing social cohesion? Tourism Management, 33(5), 1245–1255. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2011.11.001
2. Brown, B. (2012). Daring greatly: How the courage to be vulnerable transforms the way we live, love, parent, and lead. Gotham Books.
3. Burrow, R., Scott, R., & Courpasson, D. (2022). Where “the rules don’t apply”: Organizational isolation and misbehaviour in elite kitchens. Journal of Management Studies, 59(5), 1103–1131. https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12759
4. Camus, A. (1991). The myth of Sisyphus and other essays (J. O’Brien, Trans.). Vintage Books. (Original work published 1942)
5. Camus, A. (2002). The plague (R. Buss, Trans.). Penguin Classics. (Original work published 1947)
6. Cardiff University. (2022, January 17). Working in isolated environments enables culture of bullying among elite chefs, research finds [Press release]. https://www.cardiff.ac.uk/news/view/2596370-working-in-isolated-environments-enables-culture-of-bullying-among-elite-chefs,-research-finds
7. Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999
8. Kee, H. (2021, March). Dr. Hayden Kee on Camus’ The Plague [Event description]. University of Prince Edward Island. https://upei.ca/events/2021/03/dr-hayden-kee-camus-plague
9. Seery, M. D., Holman, E. A., & Silver, R. C. (2010). Whatever does not kill us: Cumulative lifetime adversity, vulnerability, and resilience. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 99(6), 1025–1041. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0021344
10. Taleb, N. N. (2012). Antifragile: Things that gain from disorder. Random House.
11. University at Buffalo. (2010, October 15). Study confirms: Whatever doesn’t kill us can make us stronger [Press release]. https://www.buffalo.edu/news/releases/2010/10/11868.html

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