In a post from last summer about the need for reciprocity rather than hierarchy in schools, I used Sydney’s idea of a “chill-archy” from Season 1 of the FX show The Bear, and I went on to muse that Season 2 could a great metaphor for school reform. Although I haven’t seen truly sustained reciprocity in action in public schools, I turned to The Bear‘s second season for inspiration, because they model the idea of embracing and investing in the authority of voices at every level in an organization.
As I gear up to finish the show’s new season, I’m pulled back to season 2 to finish my thoughts about how educators in any position (or really, anyone who works in a complex institution plagued by hierarchy) can draw inspiration from my favorite Chicago chefs.
Yes, Chef! Leading with a vision for growth
Yes, Carmy and Sydney are the most experienced, formally trained chefs in the kitchen. And yes, they are at the “top” of the hierarchy/chill-archy in the French brigade system that Carmy tasks Sydney with implementing. But they’ve also said they want to run this kitchen differently than all the other toxic, hierarchical kitchens they’ve known before. They want to be different, like so many educators yearn for a different approach to our complex and chaotic work.
So in season 2, Carmy and Syd set about doing things differently by investing in the people they have, regardless of how much or how little training or experience bring. Tina, Marcus, Richie, Ebra, and everyone else who works at The Beef are committed to the place because this place and these people have become their family. If Carmy and Sydney had wanted to start the best restaurant, they might have chosen to recruit their fellow colleagues from previous fine dining spots…but instead, they lead by showing that together you can gut an old spot with good bones and make it something new.
Like many so public schools, The Beef is under-resourced, broken, or literally rotten in many places, and they’re stuck in a continual cycle of playing catch-up and reactive triage. But, also like so many public schools, it is filled with people who care about the place, the people, the vision, and the work. As a young teacher, I thought the most important priority for education reform was recruiting better, smarter teachers. Higher pay, higher education requirements, and higher respect for the work, I thought, was the most important piece of finding the teachers we truly need in order to do the complex analytical and human work that teaching requires.
But Carmy and Sydney showed me that yes, more training, pay, and prestige can help a team grow, but that the people come first. Find the people with the passion and commitment to do the impossible together, and then leaders can train, guide, and collaborate to remake themselves and their team. Carmy and Sydney can take every individual team member’s different strengths and level up. They go to the next step, and then ask “What’s next?”, in the words of another of my favorite workplace TV shows. Invest, grow, level up. Then repeat.
Refining, strengthening, and gutting foundations
Sometimes investing in your people and saving the bones of a broken old spot means tweaks to a recipe, and sometimes it means knocking down a wall. Sydney and Carmy talk about the next steps for each person on their team, and they make different choices for each person, depending on their needs and interests. In some of the most beautiful, character-focused episodes of TV I’ve ever seen, we get to watch several team members on their leveling up journeys:
- Marcus goes to stage with one of Carmy’s colleagues and friends in Copenhagen, and his time there is about refining, deepening, and drawing out the skills and the passion for patisseries that he has already found and grown in himself.
- Tina and Ebra go to culinary school for a more foundational next level.
- Tina thrives with the discipline and high standards of professional culinary work, and she continues her growth and shines in her new role as sous chef.
- It turns out that culinary school wasn’t the right next level for Ebra, and but he eventually finds a place leading the OG take-out window. Ebra is important to the team, to the family of The Beef and then The Bear, and he reminds us that sometimes it takes a couple tries to find each person’s next level.
- Riche’s stage at Chef Terry’s restaurant three-star restaurant highlights that Carmy and Sydney’s fresh approach to leadership is about about family, about people, about respect. Ritchie might be annoying, distracting, and difficult, but he’s family, and Carmy knows that Ritchie’s passion and people skills can bring something important to family of The Bear. And after a rough start, Richie’s knocks down some pretty rotten pieces of his foundation so that he can learn to respect himself and the privilege of service. It’s the kind of internal gutting that customers might not see, but without it, The Bear wouldn’t be what it’s best version of itself.
Working in a school that take’s Carmy and Sydney’s approach to investing in their people would include differentiated professional learning and building-based (and even discipline-based and classroom-based) problem-solving—rather than the constant hamster wheel of once-size-fits-all approaches like buying new materials, paying educational consultants for new initiatives, or rolling out new edicts intended to align (but that often flatten) improvement efforts. Working as an instructional coach, I feel privileged to get to work with individual teachers every day, asking the question, “What might it mean to level up for you—today, for this class, with this student?” to guide our work. I yearn for a systems-level approach to educational reform that asks this question, rather than continuing the pattern of handing down panaceas and prescriptions.
Leadership, humility, and how to avoid ending up alone in the fridge
While Carmy and Sydney are investing in their team, they are also building their own leadership partnership. They both have the training, the skills, and the vision, but they have their own baggage to work through as well.
- Sydney is struggling to work through her past failures: her impatience and her ambition have led to past flame-outs in previous restaurants and in her catering business, and she doesn’t want that to happen here.
- Carmy is used to going it alone as well. He’s an artist with a volatile combination of skills, vision, ambition, anxiety, and traumatic past. He needs to learn to lead without carrying all the responsibility himself, to let people in, to let them truly be a team and a family who carry to vision together.
In the final episode, Carmy makes his next level or work clear when he gets stuck in the fridge and nearly self-destructs. At the busiest moment of their first real night of service at The Bear, he slowly but violently melts down because it becomes clear to him that everything is his fault: he didn’t fix the refrigerator door, and now he has abandoned his team and will cause their failure. Alone in the fridge, he doubles down on his lonely quest for perfection: he has to focus completely on the restaurant and there’s no time for “distractions” like his girlfriend. He’s literally banging his head against the wall, blaming himself for everything and vowing to never rely on others again. The irony is that he can’t get out of the fridge alone.
Carmy’s frantic, lonely anxiety feels familiar to me: I recognize the feeling that comes with having big dreams, big ideas, a vision for how things could be. And when there’s a setback, when I make a mistake, or when others don’t share vision or sense of urgency, my shoulders rise, my heart races, and like Carmy, I trap myself in my mind with things I couldhaveshouldhave done betterdifferentfaster.
But in this sense, Carmy and I are poster children for how strengths can become weaknesses when taken too far: how passion, curiosity, diligence, and skills can become, if taken to their extreme, an obsessive perfectionism that separates us from our team and family members. Locked in the fridge, Carmy forgets that he’s not alone. He can’t imagine that his team could go on without him—not because he underestimates their abilities, but because he overestimates his own responsibility. He can’t see it, after a moment of panic as Carmy’s absence sets in, his team levels up. Sydney and Tina recalibrate, and Richie steps up like never before, and no one in the front of house knows that their leader is down for the count.
Avoiding arrogance through human grounding
Although I’ve never thought of Carmy as demonstratively arrogant, despite his mad skills, numerous accolades, and amazing vision, I do see how he claims too much responsibility for himself in a way that separates him from his work family. I recently learned that the word “arrogant” comes from a Latin word meaning “to claim for oneself,” and Carmy definitely claims too much weight, responsibility, and guilt for himself. That’s not a traditional swagger or conceit that I usually associate with arrogance, but it does have the similar effect of separating himself from other people.
I hope that I avoid the swagger version of arrogance in my own life and leadership, but I do share Carmy’s tendencey to translate his skills and knowledge into an unhelpfully obsessive and solitary perfectionism. And so I’ve also been thinking a lot about the word humility, which I think of as the opposite of arrogance. For me, humility has connotations of meekness, generosity, and deference, so I was surprised to find that it’s etymology comes from the Latin root humus meaning earth or ground.
Reading that etymology was an epiphany for me: when I get obsessive and stuck in my own vision of the perfect educational system, I need to return to the earth. I need to ground myself. When I take a deep breath, I can get out of my head, lower my heart rate and my shoulders, and return to the ground. Because that’s where I will find my people, my team, my community. Humanity shares the same root of humus, and so a human is a person of the earth, an “earthling,” if you will. So when I get out of my head—and when Carmy gets out of the fridge in season —we can both return to the ground and remember that we are not alone.
A love song about learning in community
What The Bear does for me is make me love my fellow earthlings. I love Carmy and Sydney and Richie and Nat and Fak and Ebra and everyone on this show because it showcases their passion, their love for each other, and their commitment to making something that serves their community, their vision, and their family. I’ve always been a character-driven reader and viewer, and the wonderfully human humans on The Bear have helped me reconnect with myself, my colleagues, and my sense of purpose as a person-driven member of a team working for literacy, education, and justice for all.
Schools are communities, and learning in community is both what schools do for students and what educators at every level of the chill-archy need to commit to in order to make change. In my head, I’ve always known that school reform takes commitment, passion, and skill for a wide range of community members…but watching the transformation from The Beef to The Bear helps me feel and believe in my gut and my heart that it truly is possible to gut the old and create something new.
Kate Lechtenberg, PhD 
Leave a comment