I came to see my four-star inexperience not as a weakness but as a superpower. My inexperience enabled me to look critically at every step of service and to interrogate the only thing that mattered: the guests’ experience.
Most of time time, excellent training makes you better at what you do.
Think critically about the rules you are enforcing. Are they good ones or not?
When you ask, “Why do we do it this way?” and the only answer is “Because that’s how it’s always been done,” that rule deserves another look.
KNOWING LESS IS OFTEN AN OPPORTUNITY TO DO MORE.
When you get too caught up in showing your prowess - “Look at what we can do!” - you’re losing focus on the only thing that matters, which is what will make your customers happy.
Create a genuine relationship, and do what you need to in order to connect with the people you’re serving.
HIRE THE PERSON, NOT THE RESUME.
A leader needs to be able to trust that their team will operate on the same level as they do.
Get people who are excited about what you are up to, then teach them what they need to know.
They started all new hires at the lowest position in the dining room. This helps with the weeding out process. If someone balks at it, they probably won’t work out.
CULTURE CAN’T BE TAUGHT - IT HAS TO BE CAUGHT.
How you choose which people to invite onto the team is crucial to success.
HIRING IS SUCH A SOBERING RESPONSIBILITY. When you are hiring, you’re hiring not only the people who are going to represent and support you, but the people who are going to represent and support the team already working for you.
Morale is fickle, and even one individual can have an outsized and asymmetrical impact on the team, in either direction. Bring in someone who’s optimistic and enthusiastic and really cares, and they can inspire those around them to care more and do better. Hire someone lazy, and it means your best team members will be punished for their excellence, picking up the slack so the overall quality doesn’t drop.
The best way to respect and award A-Players on your team is to surround them with other A-Players. That’s how you attract more A-Players.
You must invest as much energy into hiring as you expect the team to invest in their jobs. You cannot expect someone to keep giving all of themselves if you put someone alongside them who isn’t willing to do the same. You need to be as unreasonable in how you build your team as you are in how you build your product or experience.
YOU’VE GOT TO HIRE SLOW.
It’s more detrimental to saddle yourself and your team with the wrong person, suffer the damage they do, and then end up right where you started three weeks later.
When you hire, you should ask yourself: “Could this person become one of the top two or three on the team? They don’t necessarily have to be all the way there yet, but they should have the potential to be.”
Hiring was hard before we got the culture of the restaurant fully dialed in. When we had an opening, I’d find someone good to join the team - not necessarily impeccably trained, but energetic and enthusiastic about the mission. But even if that person was all charged up when they got hired, the residual negativity of some of their colleagues would eventually infect them… Three or four times, I hired someone I thought showed promise. But they’d last only a month before the flame of their enthusiasm dimmed and died, and then they’d quit… So the next time a position opened up, I didn’t race to fill it. Instead, I waited until another position came open, and then another, and then hired three great people, all at the same time. Instead of one new person cupping their hands, trying to protect the tiny flame of their enthusiasm, that little crew brought a bonfire no one could put out… In the years to come, I would tell every group at their new-hire meeting, “You are part of a class, just as if you were starting college. Lean on one another; support one another.” But the first time I ever gave that speech, it was to those three. I wanted them to know that if they approached their shared experience as a team, the impact they could have on the restaurant would be profound.
The people getting the most out of their lives are the ones who wear their hearts on their sleeves, the ones who allow themselves to be passionate and open and vulnerable, and who approach everything they love at full-throttle, with curiosity and delight and unguarded enthusiasm.
You want people who are uniquely themselves. So many young coaches are still trying to figure out who they are - all too often pretending to be things they’re not in order to fit in. Be unapologetically invested in the things you care about. Don’t let other people’s cynicism or bad attitude distract you. Set your own tone.
SYNCHRONIZED - a great term for teams learning to play together with pace and precision.
Dancers learn choreography so their movements are precisely coordinated with the people on either side of them, and that’s all some of this stuff is - choreography… Practice it. And practice it. And practice it.
MAKE IT COOL TO CARE… We were overachievers - we cared - and we were proud of it.
When you find a group that cares about the same things you care about, you don’t have to hide your passions.
WORK WITH A PURPOSE, ON PURPOSE.
Don’t try to be all things to all people… If you try to be all things to all people, it’s proof that you don’t have a point of view - and if you want to make an impact, you need to have a point of view.
Language is how you give intention to your intuition and how you share your vision with others.
If you want to be the best in the world, you have to be authentic.
The bigger you get, the smaller you have to act. The smaller you are, the bigger you have to act.
Try having your assistant coaches serve the student managers for a change. See how that brings them together and let them have fun with it.
Create a culture based on teaching and learning. Hire those who are curious about what they don’t know and generous with what they do know. Find passionate people.
If players and coaches are living in constant fear of being caught in a mistake, you’re not going to get their most realized, relaxed selves.
No matter what you do, it’s hard to excel if you don’t love it.
You have to be able to tap into what’s important about your job.
When I encounter someone who thinks their work doesn’t matter, it’s usually because they haven’t dug deep enough to recognize the importance of the role they play.
Without exception, no matter what you do, you can make a difference in someone’s life. You must be able to name for yourself why your work matters. And if you’re a leader, you need to encourage everyone on your team to do the same.
CHOOSE A WORTHY RIVAL: another company that does one or more things better than you, whose strengths reveal your weaknesses and set you on a path of constant improvement.
SUCCESS COMES IN CANS… FAILURE COMES IN CAN’TS…
Leo had always been full of great ideas, but he was also the squeakiest wheel, the person on the staff who never failed to let you know why what you were doing was fundamentally flawed and never going to work. He completely transformed once given an ownership role, as if he hadn’t wanted to commit to greatness until he was in charge… THERE ARE PEOPLE OUT THERE LIKE THIS…
WHEN YOU GIVE PEOPLE RESPONSIBILITY, THEY BECOME MORE RESPONSIBLE… At least the right ones do…
OWNERSHIP PROGRAMS… Let them choose them… Don’t randomly assign them… They have to be invested in them and care about them or what the hell is the point? Participation is strictly on a volunteer basis. All you can ask if that they are interested and curious and have even the first inklings of passion for it.
Refusing to delegate because it might take too long to train someone will only get in the way of your own growth.
While it does take more time to fix someone else’s mistakes than to do it yourself in the first place, these are short-term investments of time with long-term gains. If you insist on a manager having previous managerial experience, you’ll never be able to promote a promising server into the role. By definition, then, it’s impossible to promote from within if you wait until an employee has all the experience they need. Often, the perfect moment to give someone more responsibility is before they’re ready. Take a chance, and that person will almost always work extra hard to prove you right.
If we were trying to encourage people to take a shot, we couldn’t penalize them if they didn’t succeed; we simply found another area where they could invest their time. It’s always been my belief that “It might not work” is a terrible reason not to try an idea, especially one that has the potential upside of making the people who work for you more engaged with your mission.
THE BEST WAY TO LEARN IS TO TEACH. Make teaching part of your culture. Onetime presentations is much less of an obligation than taking over an ownership program - and it’s fun. As more and more members of the hourly team led classes, they acted more like leaders.
BASICS OF PUBLIC SPEAKING: (1) Tell them what you’re going to tell them. (2) Tell them. (3) Tell them what you’ve told them.
Public speaking is a leadership skill. Being able to communicate your own excitement is a powerful way to engage the people who work for and with you, and to infect them with energy and a sense of purpose.
Getting people to change their behavior is hard. Sometimes you need to give them a taste of what it feels like to get them hooked… This doesn’t mean being exploitative - pay people for their time. But don’t be afraid to make participation in a program mandatory… Some people need to contribute to know how good it feels when they do…
The best way to introduce a new employee to your culture is to have them work side by side with someone who believes in it.
When a new reservationist was hired at Eleven Madison Park, we asked them right away to do one thing to make the reservationist’s office better. This was a mandate, not an invite, though they could decide what to do and how big or small… We had to show them, right off the bat, that we meant it when we said collaboration was welcome. Otherwise, even a real self-starter might hesitate before jumping in: I wonder whose toes I’d be stepping on if I were to fix that nightmare of a bulletin board…
NEW PEOPLE HAVE THE GIFT OF FRESH EYES AND CAN SEE ALL THE WARTS YOU’VE LONG STOPPED SEEING.
A lot of good comes from empowering the most junior staff.
Make it clear - if you have an idea for how we can improve, I want to hear it.
The first time someone comes to you with an idea, listen closely, because how you handle it will dictate how they choose to contribute in the future. Dismiss them that first time, and you’ll extinguish a flame that’s difficult to rekindle… Someone may approach you with an idea you’ve heard before, or one you’ve already tried; don’t automatically reject these. Maybe they’ve thought it through in a way you didn’t previously, or circumstances have changed and you’re no longer too far in front of the curve for it to work… Someone may even come to you with an idea that’s just plain dumb. That’s an opportunity to teach - to listen, and then to explain in a respectful way the idea is unlikely to work, so that the person leaves both encouraged and educated. Remember: there’s often a brilliant idea right behind a bad one.
GREAT LEADERS MAKE GREAT LEADERS
Two responses are possible when you realize that perfection is unattainable: either give up altogether, or try to get as close as you possibly can… It may not be possible to do everything perfectly, but it is possible to do many things perfectly.
Here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter if you recognize the food critic coming into your restaurant. No football team phones it in for twenty games, then steps it all the way up for the Super Bowl. Similarly, you can’t be a mediocre restaurant three hundred and sixty-four days a year, then transform into a great one the day the critic happens to come in… You can’t suddenly become something you’re not.
Wiggled fingers… Straight chop… Twist of a fist… These are all signs and signals used by servers in a restaurant…
Precision in the smallest of details translates into precision in bigger ones.
PEOPLE CAN FEEL PERFECTION... (And imperfection)…
If you’ve corrected a guest because you don’t want them to think you’ve made a mistake, you’ve made a much bigger mistake. If hospitality is about creating genuine connection, and if that connection happens only once the guest has let their guard down, shaming them makes it highly unlikely you’ll ever be able to get that connection back again… Make sure you serve your guests and not your ego… BEING RIGHT IS IRRELEVANT…
THEIR PERCEPTION IS OUR REALITY.
Saying sorry does not mean you’re wrong.