How to use the CRM principles actively and with great effect in your Christmas baking:
1. How to Apply CRM Principles During Your First Preparations
1.1. Your Project and First Decisions
The pre-Christmas period demands that you take care of various preparations for Christmas on top of your everyday work. In addition, delicious baked goods are sought after. Now, your presence in the kitchen is required, no matter whether you get down to business there together with your family, your friends, or within a charity organisation.
Already your first considerations demand that you make decisions. With whom will you work together? What type of Christmas bisquits or other baked goods are you planning to make? What do you need to shop where, and how will you schedule your work?
1.2. Your Team and Further Resources
As you already know, you have got your team and further resources at your disposal. In your case, these are the possibilities to procure the ingredients, the ingredients themselves, and your fully equipped kitchen.
Skilfully, you use your team during the first preparations and discuss how to manage the first part of the workload. Who will buy what? Will you be needing additional equippment, you don´t possess in your kitchen? Who could bring it?
1.3. Automatically, You Apply CRM Principles in Your Preliminary Discussion
You decide jointly, what kinds of bisquits or fruit loaf you want to bake. Using closed communication loops , you repeat once more, what you have decided in order to make sure that you have understood correctly, and everyone means the same.
1.4. Shopping Lists and Recipes Resemble Further CRM Principles
With so many ingredients, which you have to purchase in certain quantities, it is, naturally, difficult for you to remember everything by heart. Hence, you write shopping lists, which you have at hand during your shopping tour much like Checklists . You can look items up at any time and make sure that you don't forget anything.
As you produce your collection of recipes, you are proud, and rightly so. Some recipes have been a success for generations. Other ones you have written down and refined yourself.
Your recipes aren´t mere lists. Rather, they contain additional work instructions. They are your Standard Operating Procedures, SOPs, so to speak, which help you to carry out all steps according to the guidance in the right order.
Even before you took your first step into the kitchen, you have made decisions, and put together your team, taken care of resources, and managed the workload, communicated, used checklists, and arranged your SOPs.
2. In medias res, CRM Principles in Your Kitchen
2.1. The Kick-Off
In the case we will look at here, there are now you yourself, a close friend of yours and several children gathered in the kitchen. With military precision, you organise the space first and make sure that everyone knows the work environment.
You arrange the ingredients and your equipment. Then, you discuss how to use which of the work tops, and where to put the baking trays, as well as the bisquit tins for your elaborate pieces.
2.2. Getting Started With a Well-Managed Workload
As you are going to make several types of bisquits, you discuss with your friend as teamleaders, who is going to make which of those. The children as your team members will assist you actively and take on all tasks, of which they are already capable. Whoever has a question, will ask those at any time, since you are a well-rehearsed and strong team.
2.3. How to Carry out Your Teamwork Safely
A long, but cosy afternoon within a familiar group in the kitchen is a safe thing, isn´t it? However, aren´t there the hot oven and baking trays? The pot with boiling water to peel the almonds? The food processor with perfectly sharpened blades to chop the nuts?
Together you agree on your safety standards. These include, for instance, that you not only switch off the food processor, but also disconnect it before anyone is allowed to reach into it.
2.4. Your Situational Awareness as an Important CRM Principle Is Required
As you are now baking several kinds of bisquits simultaneously as a team , your continuous situational awareness is required. Spacially, you have to keep an overview of what is being processed, or put where. As teamleadersyou monitor, what steps your team members are carrying out at the moment. Considering time , superb coordination is necessary.
You keep an eye on your resources, i.e. ingredients, recipes, as well as your equipment and apply all of those wisely. Last but not least, the children should not eat too much of the raw dough. To nibble on some of it is allowed, but no one should feel seriously sick.
3. Should We Really Add so Much Salt?
3.1. The CRM Principle of a Speak up Is Always Important
In the middle of the preparation of a dough, your friend stops herself and utters: "Here it says: "Two tablespoons of sugar comma salt". Do the two tablespoons really pertain to the salt, as well?" After this Speak up you first of all stop working.
3.2. As a Team You Solve the Problem
As a team , you ponder how plausible two tablespoons of salt in a recipe would be. In your opinion, the possibility that this may lead to a good result is limited. Therefore, you decideto add a pinch of salt first and then to taste it. You could still add more salt later if necessary.
The tasting reveals that you have solved the problem well having discussed it as a team , the dough is perfect as it is.
The original version of this episode had turned out less advantageously. When two students upon the instruction "two tablespoons of sugar, salt" in a recipe for a kaiserschmarrn (a sweet pancake dish) decided to use this quantity on both ingredients, their freshly baked, fluffy kaiserschmarrn was, unfortunately, inedible.
4. Flops, Failures, and Fumbles - How to Use CRM Principles Now
As your little daughter separates the eggs, one egg yolk falls into the egg white. Immediately, she visibly saddened reports her mishap and affirms that she did not do it on purpose. You calm your young assistant and tell her that it was right to let you know about it so quickly. Moreover, you tell her that you are not angry with herin perfect accordance with Just Culture.
After you managed to recover the egg yolk with a large tablespoon, you bring the cause of the mistake to light. Your daughter is not trained well enough yet to separate the eggs safely under the time pressure she just felt. You promise her to practise together with her the next time you bake a cake. For now, you assign an easier task to her, which is just as important, namely, to cut out the shapes of the mini gingerbread men.
5. Highly Concentrated at Work
5.1. A Sterile Kitchen?
You are in the middle of your project. On a tight schedule, you put new baking trays into your oven. After only ten minutes, other ones have to be removed from the oven, stored and then processed further. Still, you as a team work on different kinds of Christmas bisquits simultaneously.
Maximum concentration is the order of the day. Thus, you direct the Communication within your team entirely to your work. Right now, you have no time for remarks like "Have you seen the four metre tall Christmas tree, the Joneses have bought?"
You have almost established a "sterile kitchen rule" in analogy to the Sterile Cockpit Rule (during times of highly concentrated work only issue-related items are discussed and executed). Automatically, you refrain from other actions, which have nothing to do with the actual baking process, such as eating or talking on the phone.
5.2. Praise Does Not Belong to the CRM Principles (Yet)
Inspite of your concentrated work, you don´t forget to praise your team members, whenever they have executed a task well: "You have cut out the shapes of the mini gingerbread men beautifully. I am proud of you." You instinctively feel, how important this recognition is for everyone in the team . All members lean in even more.
6. You Are Enjoying Your Success - in the Truest Sense of the Word
Many working hours lie behind you and your team. Exhausted, but happy you are sitting around the dinner table. For dessert, a small plate of the freshly baked bisquits is served.
Almost automatically, a conversation about the afternoon starts, which almost resembles a debriefing of your jointly executed work. You remember, for example, the two tablespoons of salt with amusement and decide to explore such uncertainties always as a team in the future.
Once again, you praise your industrious companions, and rightly so, because you have every reason to be proud of your work!
7. I Wish You A Peaceful Christmas and See You Again in the New Year
After a long year, in which you have acquired much knowledge about CRM showing great diligence, commitment and perseverance, I wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. I am looking forward to inviting you again to read new blog articles.
You can find more blog articles at the bottom of my blog page.
Author: Eva-Maria Schottdorf
Date: December 11th 2021