Creative Leadership

9 The Creative Leadership Practices of Haute Cuisine Chefs

Isabelle Bouty, Marie-Léandre Gomez, and Marc Stierand

Introduction

This chapter aims at unveiling specific creative leadership practices that contribute to leading as Directing. We present some aggregate insights of our joint learning from researching the leadership practices of highly creative chefs, and offer a nuanced and contextual sensitive account of creative leadership in haute cuisine. We define creative leadership as the practice of “leading others in thinking innovatively together” (Basadur, 2004: 103) and understand ‘thinking together’ more broadly as a ‘knowing in practice’ (Gomez, Bouty, & Drucker-Godard, 2003), because in the context of haute cuisine, creative cooking may ...