270: Will Guidara’s Unreasonable Hospitality (Part Two)

Good morning friend

This week’s letter continues our exploration of Will Guidara’s Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect.

If this is your first time here, welcome.

Last week’s letter explored Guidara’s philosophy about culture. This week, we examine how he made it come alive. The principles were born in transforming Eleven Madison Park into the world’s best restaurant. They can be applied with equal effect in our leadership and lives.

As you read Guidara’s strategy, keep reminding yourself that at its core is a vision, a way of being, of connection and service, that pulses with meaning beyond spreadsheets and PowerPoints:

“The moment you start to pursue service through the lens of hospitality, you understand there’s nobility in it. We may not be saving people’s lives, but we do have the ability to make their lives better by creating a magical world they can escape to—and I see that not as an opportunity, but as a responsibility, and a reason for pride.”

Whatever your unique strategy mix, the starting point has to be helping people know how what they do makes a difference in the world. If you don’t engage the heart, you won’t get the head and hands.

/strategy
Guidara ensured every aspect of the business was owned by someone both close to the action and empowered to make the required changes.

That tactic flows from his ‘Rule of 95/5’.

He explains, “Manage 95 percent of your business down to the penny; spend the last 5 percent ‘foolishly’… that last 5 percent has an outsize impact on the guest experience, it’s some of the smartest money you’ll ever spend.”

He shares this example:
“A family of four from Spain was dining with us on the last night of their New York City vacation. The children at the table were incandescent with excitement, and for the most wonderful reason: thick snow was falling past our massive windows, and they’d never seen real snow before. Spur of the moment, I sent someone out to buy four brand-new sleds. After their meal was over, we had a chauffeur-driven SUV whisk the whole family up to Central Park for a special nightcap: a few hours of play in the freshly fallen snow.”

It’s tempting to grab an example like this and look for outsize opportunities to impress our customers. But remember Frances Frei and Anne Morriss’ injunction that service must always be paid for and there are only four ways it can be achieved.

The relentless focus on the 95% freed the cash and time to create the memory-grabbing moments.

Decide where you want to be great. Invest. Decide where you need to be good enough – manage diligently. True for leadership, true for life.

Focus ripples. Paying attention enables you to identify all sorts of possibilities to improve employee and customer experience. Attention, pattern-recognition and possibility formulation become performance-improving capabilities that cascade through the business.

Guidara notes, “As oxymoronic as it may seem, you can also be proactive about improvisational hospitality. This is simple pattern recognition: identify moments that recur in your business, and build a tool kit your team can deploy without too much effort.”

They created bespoke recovery kits for tables where the wine was flowing. No doubt their guests were grateful the next morning.

I love how they created calm, smoothing the movement of waiters moving between kitchen and table:
“The room felt busy. It took a lot of people to execute hospitality at this level, but too many bodies moving swiftly around a room—even one as big as the dining room at EMP—can feel chaotic. In a bustling brasserie, servers zigzagging through the room lends an exciting energy; in a fine-dining setting, the commotion feels disruptive.

So we established traffic patterns for the staff like the ones on city streets, though they were imperceptible to our guests. Corners had invisible stop or yield signs. Most of the room was one-way only, and the traffic moved clockwise. In a two-way corridor, you hugged the wall to the right, as you would if you were driving.”

Every business has invisible patterns and flows. We mostly put up with them and the friction they cause. Guidara demonstrates another way. It starts with attention and the determination to care.

//self
He echoes a sentiment I often share with executive clients: Ensure that you regularly experience what your customers and employees experience. Personal success is wonderful, but, over time, it insulates us blunting our experience of the world.

One night, Guidara decided to eat in his restaurant. He discovered that their elaborately designed menu meant that guests were interrupted ninety times during the meal! Theoretically, he should’ve known this. Experiencing it made it real.

As the restaurant grew, the complexity became too much for him to manage. His staff was telling him decisions weren’t being made fast enough, that things were falling through the cracks.

But, like many of us, he held on, convinced he had to do it.

He reflects, “All I heard was: You need to work harder. You’re not here and you need to be, so you better figure out a way to shoehorn an extra hour into the day so you can do your new job and this one, too. No matter how guilty I felt, I was able to rationalize it away. ‘How bad could it be, when our guests were so happy?’”

We all have versions of that story. Eventually, he appointed GM.

Before he did, his staff pointed to a toxic side-effect resulting from his overwhelm. There were gaps – “Nobody’s making decisions, and when someone does step up, they’re accused of making a power grab.” The culture was at risk.

That resonated with me. Too often, we attributed systemic failures to individual psychology. His team didn’t descend into petty politics (which easily happens). They spotted the symptom and diagnosed the cause.

Shaping culture means shaping systems and being self-aware.

///soul
We started today, reminding ourselves that purpose must power tactics, that soul sits at the heart of strategy and self.

Accordingly, it feels apt to end with Bessie Head’s declaration:
“I am building a stairway to the stars. I have the authority to take the whole of mankind up there with me. That is why I write.” (Why Do I Write?)
 
You too have authority. Take it. Use it.
 
Much love
 
Karl
PS: You can learn about my executive coaching practice [here] and find me on LinkedIn. If you’re interested in creating space to strengthen your leadership team’s strategic, communication and reflective powers, I facilitate curated leadership journeys. The details are [here]. Please do share this letter with friends. They can subscribe [here].