Competent communication within a group doesn’t just happen; it takes work. This is not the responsibility of a single, designated leader, however. Instead, if all group members communicate openly and respond to conflicts competently, the group can create and maintain a supportive environment.

Chef Niki Nakayama knows pressure. As a female in the male-dominated culinary world, she has battled stereotypes and dismissive attitudes for over 20 years. A Japanese customer once left her sushi bar without eating, believing that she couldn’t be making “real sushi” (Fontoura, 2014). Even Niki’s family saw her culinary interest as a hobby rather than a career (Fontoura, 2014). But now foodies pay as much as $185 for a 13-small-course meal at her Los Angeles restaurant, n/naka. Considered to be the only female chef serving kaiseki—an ancient Japanese method of preparing carefully sequenced servings of light and heavy foods using seasonal ingredients—Chef Nakayama relies on a small team committed to delivering a high-quality dining experience.

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Chef Nakayama inspires her team with her vision, coordinates various tasks, and, most important, creates a setting in which the team shares responsibility for serving uniquely tailored dishes for each guest. Her kitchen and serving team help in menu planning by keeping records of everything customers eat so that when they return to n/naka, they don’t eat the same dish twice. Servers and kitchen staff have ongoing communication to maintain a rhythm to the meal, which can span over two hours. Working closely in leading the team is her sous chef, Carole Iiga, who Nakayama describes as organized and attentive to details, unlike herself. Together they lead a culinary team that one food critic described as “perfectly calibrated” and “extraordinary” (Rodell, 2013).

If you watch television shows like Kitchen Nightmares, Restaurant Impossible, or Cake Boss, you know that culinary teams are unnecessarily stressed when their communication and leadership are poor. Whether it’s a culinary team or any other group, competent leadership requires careful attention to maintaining satisfying relations among members while monitoring and evaluating progress toward completing the given task (Morgeson et al., 2010). To foster a satisfactory working relationship among members, group leaders should make every effort to support gender and cultural diversity, create a supportive climate, prevent groupthink (see pp. 299–301), and help group members constructively work through the conflicts that will inevitably arise.