Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business

by Danny Meyer

the intense human drive to provide and receive hospitality—well beyond the world of restaurants. Within moments of being born, most babies find themselves receiving the first four gifts of life: eye contact, a smile, a hug, and some food. We receive many other gifts in a lifetime, but few can ever surpass those first four. That first time may be the purest “hospitality transaction” we’ll ever have, and it’s not much of a surprise that we’ll crave those gifts for the rest of our lives. I know I do.

4 basic things part of hospitality transaction.

Hospitality is the foundation of my business philosophy. Virtually nothing else is as important as how one is made to feel in any business transaction. Hospitality exists when you believe the other person is on your side. The converse is just as true. Hospitality is present when something happens for you. It is absent when something happens to you. Those two simple prepositions—for and to—express it all.

Learning to manage volunteers—to whom, absent a paycheck, ideas and ideals were the only currency—taught me to view all employees essentially as volunteers. Today, even with compensation as a motivator, I know that anyone who works for my company chooses to do so because of what we stand for. I believe that anyone who is qualified for a job in our company is also qualified for many other jobs at the same pay scale. It’s up to us to provide solid reasons for our employees to want to work for us, over and beyond their compensation.

Why building a good company culture is more important.

Understanding the distinction between service and hospitality has been at the foundation of our success. Service is the technical delivery of a product. Hospitality is how the delivery of that product makes its recipient feel. Service is a monologue—we decide how we want to do things and set our own standards for service. Hospitality, on the other hand, is a dialogue. To be on a guest’s side requires listening to that person with every sense, and following up with a thoughtful, gracious, appropriate response. It takes both great service and great hospitality to rise to the top.

Service vs hospitality.

Shared ownership develops when guests talk about a restaurant as if it’s theirs. They can’t wait to share it with friends, and what they’re really sharing, beyond the culinary experience, is the experience of feeling important and loved. That sense of affiliation builds trust and a sense of being accepted and appreciated, invariably leading to repeat business, a necessity for any company’s long-term survival.

Invest in your community. A business that understands how powerful it is to create wealth for the community stands a much higher chance of creating wealth for its own investors. I have yet to see a house lose any of its value when a garden is planted in its front yard. And each time one householder plants a garden, chances are the neighbors will follow suit.

It’s not what you know, it’s whom you’ll listen to. Sometimes—very, very occasionally—I’m presented with an idea or invitation, and I know there’s a 99.9 percent probability I’m not interested in it. Yet my intuition tells me that it’s worth investigating, just to see what’s on the other side. I’ll allow myself to be open to new ideas, particularly when they’re presented by good people I know and trust. And when I hear those ideas from people I know and trust, I pay even stronger attention to my own instinct and intuition.

Trusting ofher people's intuition, especially if you trust them.

The only way a company can grow, stay true to its soul, and remain consistently successful is to attract, hire, and keep great people.

Time after time, I had noticed that great leaders tend to have a heightened sense of how to attract and hire other extraordinary people. So that we can achieve our business goals of extending warm hospitality while performing at a high level of excellence, we look intently for strong emotional and technical skills when hiring staff people. Theoretically, if the ideal candidate were to score 100 on a suitability test (something we have never administered), his or her potential for technical excellence would count for 49 percent, and innate emotional skills for hospitality would count for 51 percent.

Deciding between technical and emotional skills.

“People will say a lot of great things about your business, and a lot of nasty things as well. Just remember: you’re never as good as the best things they’ll say, and never as bad as the negative ones. Just keep centered, know what you stand for, strive for new goals, and always be decent.”

Pat Cetta’s simple lesson has helped me navigate through years of challenging moments as I’ve worked to encourage our team to build and sustain standards of excellence, especially while we’re growing. Pat pointed to the set table next to us. “First,” he said, “I want you to take everything off that table except for the saltshaker. Go ahead! Get rid of the plates, the silverware, the napkins, even the pepper mill. I just want you to leave the saltshaker by itself in the middle.” I did as he said, and he asked, “Where is the saltshaker now?” “Right where you told me, in the center of the table.” “Are you sure that’s where you want it?” I looked closely. The shaker was actually about a quarter of an inch off center. “Go ahead. Put it where you really want it,” he said. I moved it very slightly to what looked to be smack-dab in the center. As soon as I removed my hand, Pat pushed the saltshaker three inches off center. “Now put it back where you want it,” he said. I returned it to dead center. This time he moved the shaker another six inches off center, again asking, “Now where do you want it?” I slid it back. Then he explained his point. “Listen, luvah. Your staff and your guests are always moving your saltshaker off center. That’s their job. It is the job of life. It’s the law of entropy! Until you understand that, you’re going to get pissed off every time someone moves the saltshaker off center. It is not your job to get upset. You just need to understand: that’s what they ...

How to guide your employees back to your core principles.

People who aren’t alerted in advance about a decision that will affect them may become angry and hurt. They’re confused, out of the loop; they feel as though they’ve been knocked off their lily pads. When team members complain about poor communication, they’re essentially saying, “You did not give me advance warning or input about that decision you made. By the time I learned about it, the decision had already happened to me, and I was unprepared.” Team members will generally go with the flow and be willing to hop over the ripples, so long as they know in advance that you are going to toss the rock, when you’ll be tossing it, how big it is, and—mostly—why you’re choosing to toss it in the first place. The key is to anticipate the ripple effects of any decision before you implement it, gauging whom it will affect, and to what degree. Poor communication is generally not a matter of miscommunication. More often, it involves taking away people’s feeling of control. Change works only when people believe it is happening for them, not to them. And there’s not much in between. Good communication is always a factor of good hospitality.

How gentle pressure works best when people know about it in advance.

The moment people become managers for the first time, it will be as if the following three things have happened: An imaginary megaphone has been stitched to their lips, so that everything they say can now be heard by twenty times more people than before. The other staff members have been provided with a pair of binoculars, which they keep trained on the new managers at all times, guaranteeing that everything a manager does will be watched and seen by more people than ever. The new managers have received the gift of “fire,” a kind of power that must be used responsibly, appropriately, and consistently. The imaginary “megaphone” is to let our managers know that we place so much value on what comes out of their mouths that we want to make sure everyone hears it. The “binoculars” are to convey that we expect each of our employees—as well as our guests—to watch them as they exemplify the values and goals of our restaurants. The megaphone and the binoculars place a weighty responsibility on the shoulders of the managers. What they say and embody matters and will be heard, seen, and scrutinized by all. If we were a copy machine, managers would be the documents we’d want to replicate. We are very careful about which documents we feed into that machine. “Fire” is the most important element in management’s application of constant, gentle pressure. During my early, inexperienced years as a boss when I first got into business, it was far more important for me to please people and be l...

Three powers of a new manager.

for most people it’s far more important to feel heard than to be agreed with.

rather than apply a sense of scarcity and uncertainty to Tabla, I applied a sense of abundance. Hand-wringing over low covers and low revenue was getting us nowhere. I truly believed that a sense of abundance would create more business. Though it made little apparent budgetary sense, we began participating in charity fund-raisers and offering gift certificates for dinners at Tabla as auction prizes—far more generously than ever before. It was a very effective way to target our marketing to people who tended to care about our favorite causes, and who also might take an interest in Tabla. If an occasional guest at Tabla happened to attend a charity fund-raiser and noticed that we were a sponsor of the charity, he or she would probably feel a sense of affiliation with our restaurants. And anyone who would compete to make the highest bid on an auction item for our restaurants is a fan or a potential fan. By giving more, we’d end up getting more. If you want to be busy, especially in times of scarcity and uncertainty, you cannot accept diminished standards of excellence in even one area. You do everything you possibly can afford to show your staff and guests that you care deeply about improving. That’s acting from a positive and hopeful place, rather than from fear that can ultimately be self-fulfilling. The mind-set “We’re just hanging on” perpetuates scarcity. Investing money, imagination, and hard work to create a mind-set of abundance achieves abundance.

Creating a sense of abundance in times of scarcity and not comprimising on the quality of excellence.

THE FIVE A’S FOR EFFECTIVELY ADDRESSING MISTAKES Awareness—Many mistakes go unaddressed because no one is even aware they have happened. If you’re not aware, you’re nowhere. Acknowledgement—“Our server had an accident, and we are going to prepare a new plate for you as quickly as possible.” Apology—“I am so sorry this happened to you.” Alibis are not one of the Five A’s. It is not appropriate or useful to make excuses (“We’re short-staffed.”) Action—“Please enjoy this for now. We’ll have your fresh order out in just a few minutes.” Say what you are going to do to make amends then follow through. Additional generosity—Unless the mistake had to do with slow timing, I would instruct my staff to send out something additional (a complimentary dessert or dessert wine) to thank the guests for having been good sports. Some more serious mistakes warrant a complimentary dish or meal.

the most talented employees are often those attracted to companies that can provide them with the most important job benefit of all: other great people with whom to work. Considering that most of us spend about one-third of our lives at work, it is the value of the human experience we have with our colleagues—what we learn from one another, how much fun we have working together, and how much mutual respect and trust we share—that has the greatest influence on job satisfaction.

One of the important factors employees expect.

In every business, there are employees who are the first point of contact with the customers (attendants at airport gates, receptionists at doctors’ offices, bank tellers, executive assistants). Those people can come across either as agents or as gatekeepers. An agent makes things happen for others. A gatekeeper sets up barriers to keep people out. We’re looking for agents, and our staff members are responsible for monitoring their own performance: In that transaction, did I present myself as an agent or a gatekeeper? In the world of hospitality, there’s rarely anything in between.

Agent vs gatekeeper in the first point of contact.

The courage to grow demands the courage to let go. Whenever you expand in business—not just the restaurant business—the process is incredibly challenging, especially for leaders who first rose to the top because of their tendency to want to control all the details. You have to let go. You have to surround yourself with ambassadors—people who know how to accomplish goals and make decisions, while treating people the way you would. They’re comfortable expressing themselves within the boundaries of your business culture, and content with the role they play in helping a larger team achieve its greatest potential success.