When I attended The Culinary Institute of America, there was a seven-day ‘weed-out’ class in the first semester called Fish Identification and Butchery (aka Fish ID), which was followed by seven days of Fish Cookery (aka Fish Kitchen). Each class had an AM and a PM group of students. Chef C taught AM, Chef D taught PM, and each was widely feared.

My group was the PM class with Chef D. He was a big, gruff, barrel-chested barker of a chef, and he treated all of us with equal disdain. He didn’t bother getting to know any of us and he didn't seem to care what was going on elsewhere in the school. He threw tasting spoons–accurately–at us from across the room when he saw us tasting sauces with our fingers. We knew that we had to have everything from crisp uniforms to sharp knives to the difference between a straight cut and an un-and-over cut ready to go for his class every day.

On the weekends, we traded stories with our AM counterparts. Chef C, fish instructor in the AM, was an ex-Marine of the Vietnam era, and he seemed to have a talent for making students cry. (Once I had graduated from the CIA and moved on to professional kitchens, I realized that, of course, the boiler-room intensity of the CIA’s classroom kitchens was a tempest in a teacup compared to the real thing. But to us students, it WAS the real thing, and we were competing with one another, and it was the only perspective we had; as such, those of us who took it seriously took it very seriously. Not unlike Colin Farrell in Tigerland, for those of you lucky enough to have seen that movie.)

Few, if any, of us liked Chef C or Chef D. Their classes were tough, their standards were high, and they didn’t joke around. They heaped criticism on us and withheld compliments. In Fish Cookery, we produced dinners for 30-40 people (and ourselves) each day that were served to other students and faculty in the school, and they took that charge seriously.

Some chef-instructors were easily distracted, some were pushovers, some were intense, some were clearly out to pasture after a lifetime of the kitchen grind. But as we progressed through the curriculum and neared graduation day, quite a few of my classmates went back to Chef C and Chef D to ask for career advice, connections, and letters of recommendation. Why? I believe it’s because they were predictable in their roles, and being predictable is an underrated quality of great leaders. It is an indicator of reliability, consistency, and promises that will be upheld.

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Several years after graduating from the CIA, I was working as a Sous Chef for a famous chef. He found a reason to erupt with anger nearly every time he came to the kitchen (which wasn’t often). I had no idea what mood he would be in–sometimes he was giggly, but far more often ballistic–and that mood dictated the tenor of the kitchen for the entire day. One time he saw me clench my jaw when he was yelling at me in front of the cooks. He had been excoriating me for doing B. The week before, when I had been doing A, he had yelled at me for not doing B. He snarled, “Follow me!”

He marched me into the private dining room and we sat down. He boomed, “I can tell you’ve got a temper. Guess what, motherf***er? SO DO I!!!” I gave that job everything I had physically. It was a very demanding post. But it was on that day, in that private dining room, that I stopped making decisions of any import in his kitchen, and I decided to start looking elsewhere for my next opportunity.

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Last week, I sat with the Chef and a junior sous chef of one of our restaurants for the JSC’s quarterly review. The Chef led the review; the JSC had responded well to some past critical feedback from his cooks–they’d told us that the JSC had been way too harsh, and had picked on a few cooks in particular, when he was the MOD (Manager On Duty) on the Chef’s days off. The more recent feedback we’d got was that his leadership style was now much closer to Mama Bear’s oatmeal: not too hot, not too cold, but just right.

Which brings up an important ancillary point about consistent leadership: bosses take days off too. Whoever is leading the team–usually a second-in-command–on those days off must do so in a manner that complements the primary leader. Energy, personality, and style will vary from leader to leader if each is being authentic, but expectations, standards, and tone should remain consistent no matter who is in charge.

If the workers find that they must alter their behavior from day to day depending on the managers’ schedules, they will become frustrated, and some will throw up their hands (as I did mentally in the example above). This situation will snowball into diminished guest experiences, and to make matters worse, the problem is difficult to root out, because doing so requires employees to give negative feedback directly to their bosses, whom they don’t feel like they can trust because of the inconsistencies endemic to their leadership.

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The qualities necessary for effective leadership are nearly endless. I find it useful to ask myself “What does my team need from me; what does my team want from me?” Hollywood presents us with inspirational halftime speeches and battle cries, but those approaches don’t land (at best) and fall flat (at worst) in restaurant settings. Where I work, framing every single service as a championship game or a do-or-die battle has rapidly diminishing returns on tired (and often jaded) hospitality workers.

Far better for the leader in any restaurant to be predictable: to publish the schedule on time, to make sure paychecks are handed out on the expected date, and to receive and respond to the feedback, problems, and challenges of her crew with attention, empathy, equanimity, and resolve.

An unpredictable boss is exhausting to work for. If you are a leader, I encourage you not to play favorites, politics, or games. If you are promising your team a safe work environment where they must leave their problems outside the door when they come to work, you, as their leader, must hold yourself to the same standard.