How to build a high-functioning team is a challenge for all workplaces during daunting projects or after a restructure.
Some efforts to encourage people to bond can miss rather than hit. I’ve sometimes found teambuilding activities of the corporate variety demoralising (I have caused teams many missed chances to score during ten-pin bowling and archery) or faddish (side-eyeing you, paintball and escape room). In honesty, being forced into a team can have the opposite of its intended effect and make me feel shy, inadequate and resentful.
But recently, I attended a cooking class, along with about 12 other strangers, run by Free 2 Feed, a NFP social enterprise in Melbourne that empowers asylum seekers and refugees by hiring and supporting them to run cooking classes, catering services, and build community networks.
I came to learn some Persian recipes, and to hear the story of Sadat, the smiling and statuesque Iranian woman running the class. But I left with more than new skills and flavours (crispy golden goodness at the bottom of your rice pan!).
I gained an appreciation of how great it is to try something new with a bunch of strangers. There is a kind of alchemy in learning, as a group, technical, practical and creative skills, and jointly making a feast we could then share. It struck me as a great model for how to lower barriers and form collaborative team bonds in a most unforced – and delicious – way.
Breaking the ice
The class was held on a weeknight in a shop-turned-kitchen-classroom in Melbourne’s hipster inner-north. People arrived mostly straight from work, mostly in pairs, to learn to cook Persian food from the unflappable Sadat, a woman who had fled Iran with her family.
We awkwardly milled around, making smiling eye contact and avoiding conversation, putting on aprons and named sticky labels. Then we were offered a glass of delicious Persian lemon black tea (with a surprise twist – see below) and an appetizer: a small, light and fluffy potato, egg and turmeric pikelet, served with Labneh and mint (Kuku Sabzimimi). Offered with a kind of low-key ceremony by Sadat, fellow teacher Nassim and several smiling volunteers, suddenly we all had something in common – delicious food and drink. Conversations started about how subtle and more-ish the food and drinks were
Photo: Learncy Paul
The takeaway
- Small acts of inclusion like passing around a tray of food allow strangers to acknowledge each other and create a loose connection. Having a few people act as facilitators compounds the networks formed.
Strengthening ties
After Sadat told us about how the first dish had been prepared and what it meant to her, we were asked to take it in turns to each describe a dish we loved and associated with “home”.
You’d think being asked to nominate which food we loved most might have led to confessions of late night Maccas or a hot beverage drunk through an Arnott’s’ biscuit (the Tim Tam slam). But being asked about food that smelled and tasted of home was a short cut to what was important to each of us – to cultural heritage, family tradition, travel or migration, treasured relationships.
The takeaway
- The metaphor of team building through food is not that people are ingredients in the kitchen as workplace; it is that activities based on food can unite us in our diversity because food is delicious and sharing it with strangers is a shortcut to finding important things in common in our pasts and our present.
Photo: Learncy Paul
Different learning styles
Most home cooks rely on written recipes when making a new dish (and indeed, after the class, we were emailed Sadat’s recipes so we could recreate them at home).
But during the class, Sadat taught us via different methods: instruction, demonstration, application and experience. Having a teacher present IRL rather than written instructions or a video gave us the opportunity to learn by doing and offers a greater range of ways to acquire new information and skills.
We absorbed Sadat’s lessons with our brains but also our senses and muscle memory.
She demonstrated how she had prepped pre-marinated chicken by cutting a trapezium-shaped piece of paper into small triangles against the grain; she told us to toast nuts until they smelled “tasty” She showed us techniques, such as how to press the edges of the dough together around a knob of chopped nuts, coconuts, honey and cardamom for the filled doughnuts (Ghottab).
She watched as we practiced the technique, giving us tips based on our aptitude or ineptitude (“Your dough is too sticky – that means you have very warm hands, use more flour!”).
And we got to eat it at the end, and think of ways we’d iterate the project next time based on preferences/successes/failures. Sadat liked to keep her Persian poached apples on the crunchy side, for example. I found this tricky to eat without getting messy with the cinnamon-saffron syrup. (Note to self: poach until tender.)
The takeaway
- Learning via conceptualising: theory and data can provide important foundational information that is important for consistency and safety. But not all learners retain information provided only or mainly in this way.
- Learning via direct instruction and demonstration: watching someone put a methodology into practice can be a good way of making a concept come to life in a visual/physical sense.
- Learning by doing: trying it yourself helps connect concepts and methods with muscle memory, which parts come easily, which will take a bit of practice.
- Learning by experiencing: becoming an end-user of the product or process you are working on is a great way to understand it from the client or stakeholder’s point of view.
- Learning by refining: so you’ve had the cake and eaten it too. What would you do differently next time? Can the process, team or outcome be iterated to make it more efficient (or delightful)?
Different methods of collaboration
Some parts of the cooking we could each learn and practice individually (filling doughnuts!).
A few we could only observe. There was only one giant induction hob for the chicken, walnut and pomegranate stew (Fesenjan), for example, and one giant Persian rice cooker for the very pretty steamed Basmati rice with contrasting saffron infused grains and separately-plattered crunchy rice from the bottom of the pot (Tahdig). (Sadat explained that a Persian rice cooker, which looks like a pressure cooker, can take oil in its heated base to produce a toasty crust reminiscent of the bottom of a paella. The interwebs suggest you can get a similar effect with a non-stick pan.)
But for many dishes, we self-divided into groups to collaborate on a salad or dip, depending on our individual skills, (speed with a razor sharp knife in finely dicing celery for the yoghurt dip, Karafs Borani) or external limits (waiting for the veg peeler to become free for the cucs for the Shirazi Salad). Notably, most people stuck to the partner/friend they had come to the class with, but formed additional small, cooperative groups with others and thus our familiarity with strangers developed in an easy and natural way.
There was another bonus too: picture making a generous chopped salad for 16 people; now picture making it for four people. To state the obvious, dividing up work so it could be done simultaneously was so much more efficient, but it also felt natural when team members, left to our own devices, were permitted to gravitate to different roles.
We were not yet a crew or a squad, but after four hours together, we were each finding our groove. 
The takeaway
- Dividing up production for efficiency has been around since the Model T Ford; however in the contemporary workplace, if done with creativity and agency, it can turn a gaggle of strangers into a functioning team.
About the Author:
Gina McColl is an experienced workplace investigator, committed to fair, independent and rigorous processes and has worked with a wide variety of stakeholders in challenging environments. Gina is also an award-winning senior journalist and editor. In 2017, Gina won the Gold Our Watch Walkley Award for a series on sexual harassment.
Get in Touch if you’d like to chat to Gina about workplace culture, team building or if you have a delicious Persian recipe you’d like to share 🙂
