Stepping back into the kitchen after time away feels like stepping into a warm bath. That is, up until you wonder how the water got hot and why it’s getting hotter from the bottom up.

Coming back from South Carolina and the first one in kitchen to start the day like usual, I found myself sighing with relief once I got into the familiar work again after the requisite “let’s see what I have to work with” anxiety.

The kitchen still stood. My team carried on well enough and even set me up a bit so I could slide back in to the groove. You really can’t beat a well-trained reliable assistant when you want to take time off. I came back to the same kind of work, the same personalities and difficulties, and the same serene focus I had taken a break from as much as anything. “Serene focus” sounds better than “conscious detachment” when I talk to my therapist. Positive framing and all.

The work had been hard in my absence, and small problems get bigger when they are ignored. What people fail to realize is that while the best alternative to ignoring a problem is solving it, a secondary solution for problems too complex to solve quickly is allowing those problems to be aired out in a judgement-free way.

Supposedly, an Egyptian pharaoh caught on to this quickly. The pharaoh (a Rameses or a Thutmose, I think) was hearing a petition from one of his people that was less “asking for something” and more “ranting screed about a number of things that should have gone to several people before they reached the royal court, and a few things that weren’t even in the pharoah’s power.”

The entire time, the pharaoh sat quietly and listened to the man, then nodded and said whatever the Ancient Egyptian equivalent was of “I’ll see what I can do.” After the man left, his advisors asked why he let the man go on when so much of it was just ranting and complaining. The pharaoh said, “I was listening to his words, but I was listening more to his anger. An angry man wants to be heard first, their problems solved second.”

I can tell you from personal experience that this is true. At a previous employment, I got frustrated when I suddenly had to put in extra time to make a batch of pastries for a wholesale order that I didn’t realize we were even selling AS wholesale.

I brought my frustration on being “out of the loop” to my employer who proceeded to ask “what’s the problem? You make those all the time. My mission is growth. Why don’t you want to make them” and so on. Over and over I tried to tell them that that wasn’t the point. The point was that I, the person in charge of production, was no longer aware of what I needed to have on hand to fill wholesale orders without unscheduled labor. This wasn’t something that the employer understood might concern me and instead said “I get the feeling you don’t feel heard right now”- and it was because I wasn’t. It took fully twenty minutes of back-and-forth for them to finally say, “oh… I forgot to tell you that I was offering those.”

Having someone in the workplace- ideally someone in leadership, but truly anyone- who has a temperament that lets people relax around them, can sit and listen while others vent, reliably keep confidence, and put others at ease is beyond valuable. I’d even say those qualities count as “soft skills” that should have a place on ones resume.

Several people welcomed me back to the kitchen earnestly- because it wasn’t just my skills and competence that were missed. I do my best to listen, to smile, and to make others laugh because often that’s what’s needed to remind people that the heating pot we are all in can feel like a hot bath- if just for a little bit.

We shouldn’t employ people without practical skills in jobs like this just because they are nice. That is not what I am suggesting. Instead, I think we need to consider kindness and humor as “soft skills”- the kind that don’t necessarily appear on a productivity metric, but make a difference when it comes to employee satisfaction and turnover.

After all, angry people want to be listened to- why not have someone that will listen to them AND make them smile for a bit while solutions are found? There’s nothing wrong with trying to diffuse tension before people start grabbing the metaphorical torches and pitchforks.

Stay Classy,