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Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara

Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara

by Parker · 129 things on Twos

The remarkable power of giving people more than they expect
His restaurant is Eleven Madison Park
What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?
Fads fade and cycle, but the human desire to be taken care of never goes away.
The best interview technique: you simply have enough of a conversation that you can get to know the person a little bit. Do they seem curious and passionate about what we're trying to build? Do they have integrity; are they someone I can respect? Is this someone I can imagine myself-and my team—happily spending a lot of time with?
Hospitality is a selfish pleasure. It feels great to make other people feel good.
"People will forget what you do; they'll forget what you said. But they'll never forget how you made them feel." - Maya Angelou
Drink your best bottles of wine on your worst days
We have an opportunity —a responsibility—to make magic in a world that desperately needs more of it.
Map out your day with precision, organizing your priorities, and set your nonnegotiables.
Intentionality isn’t a luxury or business philosophy; it is a requirement.
Intention means every decision, from the most obviously significant to the seemingly mundane, matters.
To do something with intentionality means to do it thoughtfully, with clear purpose and an eye on the desired result.
It’s easier to learn the right way to do things at the high end than it is to break bad habits. You can always take it down a notch later, but it’s harder to go the other way.
Two things happen when the best leaders walk into a room. The people who work for them straighten up a little, making sure that everything's perfect—and they smile, too.
Setting the table by Danny Meyer
All it takes for something extraordinary to happen is one person with enthusiasm
Let your energy impact the people you’re talking to, as opposed to the other way around.
I’m trying to make today the very best day of my life
Develop a sense of ownership in the people who work for you
Constant, gentle pressure: Everyone in the organization should always be improving, getting a little better all the time
Athletic hospitality; always be looking for a win whether you were playing offense making an already great experience even better or defense apologizing for and fixing an error
Be the swan: guests should see a gracefully curved neck and meticulous white feathers sailing across the ponds surface, not the webbed feet churning furiously below driving the glide
Make the charitable assumption: assume the best of people even when they weren’t behaving particularly well.
You’re late, is everything okay?
Maybe this person needs more love and more hospitality than anyone else in the room.
Always take the time to explain why when you give advice.
Just because a few regulars love an employee doesn’t mean they should be allowed to erode the foundation of everything you’re trying to build.
Manage 95 percent of your business down to the penny; spend the last 5 percent “foolishly.”
Run towards what you want, as opposed to away from what you don’t want.
You should never waste an opportunity to gather intel before your first day on the job.
Every leader should have someone who feels comfortable telling you when you aren’t acting as the best version of yourself.
Take care of one another.
Advice on starting in a new organization: don’t cannonball. Ease into the pool.
You’re not always going to agree with everything you hear, but you’ve got to start by listening.
A leaders responsibility is to identify the strengths of the people on their team, no matter how buried those strengths might be.
Criticize the behavior, not the person. Praise in public; criticize in private. Praise with emotion, criticize without emotion.
The one minute manager
Every manager lives with the fantasy that their team can read their mind. But in reality, you have to make your expectations clear.
And your team can't be excellent if you're not holding them accountable to the standards you've set. You normalize these corrections by making them swiftly, whenever they're needed.
Make corrections in private.
Every person on the team should be hearing more about what they did well than what they could do better, or they're going to feel deflated and unmotivated.
You’re going to mess up. When you do, apologize.
The way you do one thing is the way you do everything.
30 minute daily meetings to become a team.
Make sure people who are trying and working hard have what they need to succeed.
Knowing less is often an opportunity to do more.
Don’t let tradition get in the way of hospitality.
It’s about connecting with people.
The kind of truly hospitable person, in other words, who wants to do good things, not for financial gain or some sort of karmic bump, but because the idea of bestowing graciousness upon others makes their own day better.
If you don't trust the people behind you, then you're never going to perform that huge, heroic hospitality gesture (or even a tiny one) that ultimately saves the day.
Because when you're 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 outsize 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.
At the end of the day, the best way to respect and reward the A players on your team is to surround them with other A players. This is how you attract more A players. And it means 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.
It's also why you've got to hire slow. It's so dreadful to be shorthanded that managers tend to rush in and find a body to fill the void.
Someone wise once told me, "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.'
When you find a group that cares about the same things you care about, you don't have to hide your passions-you can sing them from the rooftops. And when the people you work with aren't hanging back but cranking it all the way up, then you can meet them there; you don't have to dim your light to succeed.
If your business involves making people happy, then you can't be good at it if you don't care what people think. The day you stop reading your criticism is the day you grow complacent, and irrelevance won't be far behind.
But I don't change something every time one or two people say they don't like something-maybe not even if a lot of them don't like it! 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.
Restaurants are creative pursuits. As with most creative endeavors, there's no clear right or wrong. The choices you make are always going to be subjective, a matter of opinion.
What criticism offers you, then, is an invitation to have your perspective challenged—or at least to grow by truly considering it. You might stick with a choice you've been criticized for or end up somewhere completely different. The endgame isn't the point as much as the process: you grow when you engage with another perspective and decide to decide again.
I had learned from my dad the importance of intentionality-knowing what it is you're trying to do, and making sure everything you do is in service of that goal. From Danny, I'd learned the importance of articulating that intention to our team.
We needed language. Language is how you give intention to your intuition and how you share your vision with others. Language is how you create a culture.
Miles Davis was cool, endless reinvention, inspired, forward moving, fresh, collaborative, spontaneous, vibrant, adventurous, light, innovative.
Serving other human beings can feel demeaning, unless you first stop and acknowledge the importance of the work and the impact you can have on others when you're doing it.
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.
But refusing to delegate because it might take too long to train someone will only get in the way of your own growth.
And while it does take more time to fix someone else's mistake than to do it yourself in the first place, these are short-term investments of time with long-term gains.
Often, the perfect moment to give someone more responsibility is before they're ready.
My dad says that the best way to learn is to teach, and he taught me to study for tests as if I were going in to deliver a presentation.
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 you spend this much time encouraging your team to contribute, you'd better make sure your team knows that your doors are always open to ideas.
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.
There’s often a brilliant idea right behind a bad one.
It may not be possible to do everything perfectly but it is possible to do many things perfectly.
The definition of excellence is getting as many details right as you can.
We can all relate to feeling like we’ve been waiting hours for that first glass of water or for the check. So it’s crucial to get something—anything—in front of the guest as soon as you can.
The way you do one thing is the way you do everything and that precision in the smallest details translated to precision in bigger ones.
“People can feel perfection.” - Walt Disney
When you lose focus in that last inch, the presentation is ruined.
Follow through to the last inch, no matter what you’re doing.
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.
Their perception is our reality.
The customer is not always right. Abuse should not and cannot be tolerated, period.
Saying sorry doesn’t mean you’re wrong.
It’s easy to be someone’s partner during the good times, but it’s most important during the hard ones.
Drink your best bottle not on your best day but on your worst.
People usually want to be heard more than they want to be agreed with.
Sarcasm is always the wrong medium for a serious communication.
Praise is affirmation, but criticism is investment.
If your response is consistently defensive, if you always push back or insist on justifying your mistakes, people are eventually going to stop coming to you with notes. You've made it too unpleasant for them to continue, and they're going to stop investing in you-and you're going to stop growing as a result.
Hire slow, fire fast—but not too fast.
No aspect of your business should be off-limits to reevaluation.
The secret to happiness is always having something to look forward to.
Don’t take credit for other peoples work.
Make decisions based on hope rather than fear.
When external affirmation comes, direct it to the people responsible.
“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.” - Calvin Coolidge
You don’t reach the top by taking no for an answer, especially not the first time you get it. We needed to be willing to fail.
If you aren’t tending to your own needs, you can’t help those around you.
Do less, and do it well.
Being able to ask for help is a display of strength and confidence. People who refuse to ask for help, who believe they can handle everything on their own, are deceiving themselves and doing a disservice to those around them.
The Michelin star system reflected whether a restaurant was worth traveling for. One star meant a very good restaurant in its category, worth a stop. Two meant excellent cooking, deserving of a detour, while three stood for exceptional cuisine, important enough to merit a special journey.
Perspective has an expiration date, no matter how hard you try to hold on to it. Journaling helps you maintain those perspectives.
If you’re giving a gift, it should be awesome.
Informality is something you earn.
What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?
You can speak things into existence. If you don’t have the courage to state a goal out loud, you’ll never achieve it.
A leader doesn’t have to know the details of every plan when they have faith in the people who work for them.
The more open you demonstrate yourself to be, the more likely people are to be open with you.
All you need to do is pay attention.
It isn’t the lavishness of the gift that counts, but it’s pricelessness.
The value of a gift isn’t about what went into giving it, but how the person receiving it feels.
Luxury means just giving more; hospitality means being more thoughtful.
Nobody knows what they’re doing before they do it.
Have faith in your ability to figure things out.
Growth happens outside of your comfort zone.
“You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” - Maya Angelou
Marry someone better than you.
There is such power when a leader can admit to their mistakes and apologize for them.
If you’re willing to stand up and criticize yourself, people will always be more willing to receive criticism from you.
Sometimes the best time to promote people is before they are ready.
Start with what you want to achieve, instead of limiting yourself to what’s realistic or sustainable.
“Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.” - Penn and Teller
Serve what you want to receive.
Don’t run away from what you don’t want; run toward what you do.
Ask yourself what “right” looks like, then do that.
Often doing what’s “right” isn’t always best for you in the short term.