--- title: "Lessons from The Bear for Tech Leaders" description: "Discover unexpected leadership insights from 'The Bear.' Learn how tech leaders can improve candidate experiences and foster employee success. Valuable lessons from an Emmy-winning series." canonical: https://www.vidyasource.com/blog/lessons-from-the-bear-for-tech-leaders/ type: article published: 2024-08-12 author: "Neil Chaudhuri" tags: ["Leadership", "Project Management", "Agile"] image: https://www.vidyasource.com/img/blog/bear-tina-mikey.jpg --- # Lessons from The Bear for Tech Leaders > Discover unexpected leadership insights from 'The Bear.' Learn how tech leaders can improve candidate experiences and foster employee success. Valuable lessons from an Emmy-winning series. - Canonical page: https://www.vidyasource.com/blog/lessons-from-the-bear-for-tech-leaders/ - Structured data (JSON-LD): https://www.vidyasource.com/blog/lessons-from-the-bear-for-tech-leaders.json - Published: 2024-08-12 - Author: Neil Chaudhuri - Topics: Leadership, Project Management, Agile I was late to the party, but I now understand why The Bear is an Emmy award winning TV show. The story is fascinating, and the ensemble cast is among the best casts ever. It's a show about a restaurant, but I watched an outstanding episode recently that offers surprising lessons for tech leaders. ## A quick summary of The Bear If you've never seen it, The Bear is a dramatic comedy about Carmy Berzatto, a young chef from a working class family in Chicago who leaves a difficult past behind to train with the greatest chefs in the world and learn the high pressure world of fine dining. Carmy is gifted, intense, sensitive, and terrified of failure, and these traits come into focus in tragedy when he must return home because his beloved older brother Mikey, a pillar of the community and owner of a popular sandwich shop called The Beef, has ended his own life. To Carmy's surprise because Mikey never let him work at The Beef, Mikey left the restaurant to him, so he sets about bringing his experience with high-end, fastidious kitchens to a decidedly chaotic kitchen. I will leave it there to avoid spoilers, but The Bear is about much more than Carmy. Over the course of three seasons so far, the show introduces us to an array of fascinating characters with their own compelling stories. One of them is Tina, a line cook fiercely loyal to Mikey who bristles with hostility at the changes Carmy imposes to raise the quality of The Beef. In the best episode of Season 3, Episode 6 called "Napkins," we learn exactly why Tina is so loyal to Mikey, and her story offers lessons that tech leaders would do well to heed. ## Lesson 1: Treat job candidates with respect. "Napkins" is a flashback episode that shows us how Tina met Mikey and became a cook at The Beef. After 15 years at a company doing payroll, they lay her off, so at age 46 Tina faces a world that has transformed since the last time she was in the job market. It's all about LinkedIn now instead of professional rapport and well-formatted resumes. Tina's optimism and confidence melt into frustration and disappointment as one Gen Z HR kid after another dismisses her with a perfunctory "We'll let you know." Meanwhile, her husband makes little as a doorman as his boss casually dangles the possibility of a promotion that never materializes, and they have a son. The struggle of it all makes Tina feel worthless. As tech leaders, we make choices that define the culture of our organizations. While it may be easier to exert draconian command and control that promotes fear of reprisal, it's healthier and better in the long run to promote psychological safety, collaboration, and respect. That will naturally extend to people who express a desire to join your organization. For reasons we can discuss another day, tech seems to have more skepticism at best and contempt at worst for job candidates than any other industry. Instead, honor their interest in joining your team by respecting their time and acknowledging that they are three-dimensional human beings whose livelihoods may very well be in your hands. ## Lesson 2: Your people don't need "passion" to excel in tech. After a particularly hard day where even the bus adds insult to injury by running 29 minutes late, Tina wanders around for a place to wait and sees The Beef. She walks in, observes the chaos of lunchtime to-go orders, and receives her first pleasant surprise in a long time—a free sandwich because no customer is around to claim it. Tina finds a quiet table in the back, takes a bite, and finally unleashes the tears she has contained for weeks. Mikey notices her and sits with her. What follows is a compelling conversation. ![Tina and Mikey meeting for the first time and having a real heart to heart conversation](https://www.vidyasource.com/img/blog/bear-tina-mikey.jpg) Tina and Mikey discover they have a lot in common. It turns out Mikey is dealing with his own problems at the restaurant like an unfixable toilet and insufficient staff (Put a pin in that!) and also opens up, remarkably given that he just met Tina, about a heartbreaking lesson he internalized on a field trip as a kid—that he will always struggle because he has no innate gifts. Tina returns the favor by sharing her own struggles. By the end of their conversation, Mikey offers Tina a job at The Beef to bring a merciful end to her months-long struggle, and these few minutes forge a bond between them that will endure even beyond Mikey's tragic demise. Something Tina tells Mikey really resonates with me: > I don’t need to be inspired. I don’t need to be impassioned. I don’t need to make magic. I don’t need to save the world, you know? I just wanna feed my kid. Every other week on Tech Twitter some Blue Check CEO, out of misguided sincerity or a selfish desire to start an argument for engagement and easy money, declares that no one can succeed in tech absent daily open source contributions, multiple side projects, a high score on HackerRank, eagerness to work weekends to make their bosses rich, and other emblems of "passion" for writing code. It's provocative, but nothing could be further from the truth. People who work in your organization only because they want to afford to "feed their kid" will bring just as much value as people with passion for the work. Let's talk about two major problems with the requirement for passion. Activities like side projects demand time, which is a rare luxury for parents and especially mothers as women disproportionately bear the burden of childcare in America. Time can be precious for many other reasons as well, and erecting these artificial barriers to success in tech is unfair to everyone but the most privileged. Beyond gatekeeping, decades of research bears out that it is not the job of engineers to come into work with passion but instead our job as tech leaders to create [flow state](https://leaddev.com/culture-engagement-motivation/why-flow-matters-more-passion) so they can succeed. It is on us to provide clarity of purpose, achievable goals, psychological safety, ample feedback, fair compensation, and empowerment to make decisions. Offloading our responsibility to create flow state onto devs to walk in with passion is a self-serving dereliction of duty. ## Reflections Tech leaders have a lot to learn to make our industry as vibrant as it can be, and we need to learn our lessons wherever we find them. The Bear is an award-winning TV show about a restaurant, an unlikely source for lessons for the tech industry, but Season 3 Episode 6 "Napkins" teaches us how we can serve job seekers on the outside by showing empathy and respect and how we can serve our own people on the inside by creating flow state so they can do their best work regardless how much passion they have for tech on their own time. Let's continue to to be on the lookout for opportunities to make ourselves better for our people, our customers, and ourselves. --- Vidya is a certified small business in Northern Virginia that modernizes legacy systems, builds enterprise AI, and designs cloud and data architecture for commercial companies and federal agencies. Vidya documents its delivered engagements in case studies and publishes courses, tutorials, and articles for engineers and the people who lead them. The company name is Vidya. Its website is vidyasource.com. Start at https://www.vidyasource.com/llms.txt for the index of everything Vidya publishes, or https://www.vidyasource.com/contact/ to talk to Vidya.