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Creating restaurants or even recipes is like composing music: there are only so many notes in the scale from which all melodies and harmonies are created. The trick is to put those notes together in a way not heard before.
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.
to create an extraordinary rapport between price and quality.
While I, too, love sitting in the captain’s chair, my greatest joy comes not from going it alone, but from leading an ensemble. Hospitality is a team sport.
“leave the campsite neater than I had found it.” (That concept remains, for me, one of the most significant measures of success in business, and in life.)
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.
One of the core business lessons I have taken from the continued success of Union Square Cafe is that willingness to overcome difficult circumstances is a crucial character trait in my employees, partners, and restaurants.
The point was to keep the dialogue open while sending the message: I am your agent, not the gatekeeper!
“We have fun taking service seriously,” he said. “And as for perfection, we just hide our mistakes better than anyone else!”
these candles had short wicks.
Anything that unnecessarily disrupts a guest’s time with his or her companions or disrupts the enjoyment of the meal undermines hospitality. The beautiful choreography of service is, at its best, an art form, a ballet.
service without soul, no matter how elegant, is quickly forgotten by the guest. 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
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I do have some pet peeves that I don’t ever want to hear in our dining rooms. I cringe when a waiter asks, “How is everything?” That’s an empty question that will get an empty response. Also, I can’t stand the use of we to mean you, as in, “How are we doing so far?” I abhor the question, “Are you still working on the lamb?” If the guest has been working on the lamb, it probably wasn’t very tender or very good in the first place. And if a guest says “Thank you” for something, the waiter should not answer, “No problem.” Since when is it necessary to deny that delivering excellent service is a
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first gather as much information as I can about our guests. I call this collecting dots. In fact, I urge our managers to ABCD—always be collecting dots.
I realize that I don’t have to do this kind of thing, but there is simply no point for me—or anyone on my staff—to work hard every day for the purpose of offering guests an average experience.
In hospitality, one size fits one!
Mary Kay would teach the sales people that everyone goes through life with an invisible sign hanging around his or her neck reading, “make me feel important.”
Like restaurants, kids are a lot of fun to conceive and significantly less fun to gestate over the next nine months.
I began to outline what I considered nonnegotiable about how we did business. Nothing would ever matter more to me than how we expressed hospitality to one another. (Who ever wrote the rule that the customer is always first?) And then, in descending order, our next core values would be to extend gracious hospitality to our guests, our community, our suppliers, and finally our investors. I called that set of priorities enlightened hospitality.
Every decision we made from that day forward would be evaluated according to enlightened hospitality. We would define our successes as well as our failures in terms of the degree to which we had championed, first, one another and then our guests, community, suppliers, and investors.
Know Thyself: Before you go to market, know what you are selling and to whom. It’s a very rare business that can (or should) be all things to all people. Be the best you can be within a reasonably tight product focus. That will help you to improve yourself and help your customers to know how and when to buy your product.
The only way a company can grow, stay true to its soul, and remain consistently successful is to attract, hire, and keep great people. It’s that simple, and it’s that hard.
Our staff performance reviews weigh both technical job performance (49 percent) and emotional job performance (51 percent)—
how staff members perform their duties and how they relate to others on a personal level.
People duck as a natural reflex when something is hurled at them. Similarly, the excellence reflex is a natural reaction to fix something that isn’t right, or to improve something that could be better. The excellence reflex is rooted in instinct and upbringing, and then constantly honed through awareness, caring, and practice. The overarching concern to do the right thing well is something we can’t train for. Either it’s there or it isn’t. So we need to train how to hire for it.
To me, a 51 percenter has five core emotional skills. I’ve learned that we need to hire employees with these skills if we’re to be champions at the team sport of hospitality. They are: Optimistic warmth (genuine kindness, thoughtfulness, and a sense that the glass is always at least half full) Intelligence (not just “smarts” but rather an insatiable curiosity to learn for the sake of learning) Work ethic (a natural tendency to do something as well as it can possibly be done) Empathy (an awareness of, care for, and connection to how others feel and how your actions make others feel)
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special type of personality thrives on providing hospitality, and it’s crucial to our success that we attract people who possess it.
THREE HALLMARKS OF EFFECTIVE leadership are to provide a clear vision for your business so that your employees know where you’re taking them; to hold people accountable for consistent standards of excellence; and to communicate a well-defined set of cultural priorities and nonnegotiable values.
“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 do. Your job is just to move the shaker back each time and let them know exactly what you stand for. Let them know what excellence looks like to you. And if you’re ever willing to let them decide where the center is, then I want you to give them the keys
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Understanding the “saltshaker theory” has helped me develop and teach a managerial style I call constant, gentle pressure. It’s the way I return the saltshaker to the center each time life moves it.
Every time that happens, I’m going to move everything right back to the way it should be. And so should you! That’s the constant aspect. I’ll never recenter the saltshaker in a way that denies you your dignity. That’s the gentle aspect. But standards are standards, and I’m constantly watching every table and pushing back on every saltshaker that’s moved, because excellent performance is paramount. That’s the pressure.
Clear, timely communication is the key to applying constant, gentle pressure. To illustrate the point, I teach our managers about the “lily pad” theory. Imagine a pond filled with lily pads and a frog perched serenely atop each one. For the fun of it, a little boy tosses a small pebble into the water, which breaks the surface of the pond but causes just a tiny ripple. The frogs barely notice, and don’t budge. Enjoying himself, the boy next tosses a larger stone into the center of the pond, sending stronger ripples that cause all of the lily pads to rock and tilt. Some frogs jump off their lily
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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
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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
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Most managerial problems stem from an irresponsible, inappropriate, or inconsistent use of fire. It takes time to learn, but until managers understand all the different ways they can—and must—use their fire, depending on the circumstances, they cannot reach their own greatest potential or help others reach theirs. Managers can use their fire as a torch: a light for guidance and teaching, and for leading and showing the way. They can use their fire to offer warmth and empathy, to make employees feel safe. A manager’s fire can be used as a campfire, to form collegial bonds with employees, and to
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I’ve grown more and more convinced that my team—any team—thirsts for someone with authority, and power, to tell them consistently where they’re going, how they’re doing, and how they could do their job even better.
When I scan their resumés, I often tell management candidates that their career story is like an autobiography they have been writing for many years: “You’ve made a lot of interesting choices. I’m very curious about why a job with us strikes you as the logical next ‘chapter’ in the book of your life.” I also want to know why they feel they have finished the most recent chapter: “Why does this particular twist in the plot make perfect sense to you right now?”
For our managers to become great leaders, we identify and assess a number of crucial character traits that are a subset of the five core emotional skills—optimistic warmth, intelligence, work ethic, empathy, integrity, and self-awareness—that make a “51 percenter.” Those traits include honor, discipline, consistency, clear communication, courage, wisdom, compassion, flexibility, ability to love (and be loved) humility, confidence (to possess it and to inspire it in team members), passion for the work and for excellence, and a positive self-image. These traits may mean something slightly
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The air grows increasingly thin the higher up the ranks of leadership a manager moves.
their emotional skills were no longer adequate for this higher level of authority and power, and the staff withdrew its support—making it clear that we should do the same.
the higher you climb the ladder of power, the less technical skills count and the more significant emotional skills become.
The road to success is paved with mistakes well handled.”
success lies not in the elimination of problems but in the art of creative, profitable problem solving.
The best companies are those that distinguish themselves by solving problems most effectively.
the worst mistake is not to figure out some way to end up in a better place after having made a mistake. We call that “writing a great last chapter.”
Policies are nothing more than guidelines to be broken for the benefit of our guests. We’re here to give the guests what they want, period.
Prioritizing those people in the following order is the guiding principal for practically every decision we make, and it has made the single greatest contribution to the ongoing success of our company: Our employees Our guests Our community Our suppliers Our investors
I place the interests of our investors fifth, but not because I don’t want to earn a lot of money. On the contrary, I staunchly believe that standing conventional business priorities on their head ultimately leads to even greater, more enduring financial success.
am I being perceived by this caller as an agent or a gatekeeper? An agent makes things happen for others. A gatekeeper sets up barriers to keep people out. We’re looking for agents.
My own grandfather used to express similar wisdom: Doing two things like a half-wit never equals doing one thing like a whole wit.
