WELCOME to Our Book Club!

Again, WELCOME to our book club!

As you grow your career or business, we recommend you read some of these books. I find it very helpful in growing within the hospitality industry, most of these books were very helpful when I transitioned from a team member to a leadership position and helped me further my career in the process!

One Minute Manager

Good management rests on the implementation of three simple ideas, namely; the need to establish clear-cut goals, the need to praise good performance, and the need to reprimand people when their performance fails to contribute to the attainment of commonly agreed goals.

Step One: Goals

All good performance starts with clear goals. If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there. If you were going to improve the performance of your team, the simplest and easiest way would be to make sure your staff has a clear goal.

It is amazing how often people are told about the power of goal setting, yet how few times there is agreement between what a person says their job involves and what their manager says it involves. Goals still tend to be set in organizations after someone does something wrong or doesn’t do what is expected. Then the goal is made clear.

The secret of Goals is simply to agree on your goals upfront so that you know what good behavior looks like. Make sure you write out each of the goals on a single sheet of paper or index card. Limit the number of goals to three or up to five. Identify what the present level of performance is on each goal and then what level is desired. The discrepancy between the actual and the desired goal becomes an area for improvement. Choose a deadline for reaching that new level. Make several copies of your goals for you and the employee so you can both refer to them daily. Look at the goals, then look at the behavior and see if your behavior matches the goals.

Goal setting starts behavior, but what makes the biggest difference is what you do after the goals are set to observe, monitor, and provide feedback for your people so that they can be at their very best. All good performance starts with clear goals, but what really keeps it going is what happens after the goals are set.

Step Two: Praisings

Of all the things I’ve taught over the years, I can’t say enough about the importance of praising. The key to developing people will always be to concentrate on catching them doing something right instead of doing something wrong. Yet most people are still managed by being basically left alone until they make a mistake that is noticeable and then their boss criticizes them. I call that a “leave-alone zap” management style or “sea gull management” sea gull managers fly in, make a lot of noise, dump on everyone, and then fly out.

Tell people upfront that you are going to let them know how they are doing. Then there are three main things you need to emphasize with praisings.

First, be immediate. don’t save praisings for the holiday.

Second, be specific. Just saying to someone, “Good job” is nice but it is not very helpful because they don’t know specifically what is good so that they can do it again.

Third, share your feelings about their work. Tell people how good you feel about what they did that was right, and how it helps the organization and the other people who work there. Stop for a moment of silence to let them enjoy “feeling” how good you feel. End with reaffirmation and encourage them to keep up the good work.

Remember to praise progress even if it is only approximately right. Perfect behavior is a journey that happens one step at a time. A manager’s job is to manage the progress toward the goal. A good manager thus constantly looks for opportunities to praise progress or to redirect.

Step Three: Reprimands

What do you do when people do not perform well or make limited or no progress toward their goals? You have to hold them accountable.

The first alternative for poor performance should be redirection, which means going back to goal setting trying to find out what went wrong, and getting them back on track. Never reprimand or punish a learner - you’ll immobilize them. If you are dealing with somebody who knows better, and who performed a similar task well in the past, then a reprimand might be appropriate.

Tell people beforehand that you are going to let them know in no uncertain terms how they are doing. Reprimand people immediately. Tell people exactly how you feel about what they did wrong. Pause to help your transition from your feelings to set up the last and probably the most important part of a reprimand: reaffirmation. Reaffirm that you think well of them but not of their performance in this situation. Your intent is to get them back on course, not to try to make them feel bad. Remind them how much you value them. Realize that when the reprimand is over, it’s over.

One of my favorite statements of late is from Dan Ferguson, chairman of the board of the Newell Company, a billion-dollar manufacturing company in the home supply field. He told me he is most effective as a manager when he thinks of himself as the sixth man on a basketball team. When they want to call him into the game he is happy to play, but if they don’t need him he is also happy to stay on the sideline and cheer.

To me, these techniques can help you be the coach in the workplace, at home, or on the playing field. Share these techniques with your people, use them as needed, and get your people to use them as well. You’ll all perform better as a result.

The One Minute Manager

Book by Kenneth Hartley Blanchard and Patrick Spencer Johnson

Raving Fans

Your customers are only satisfied because their expectations are so low and because no one else is doing better. Just having satisfied customers isn't good enough anymore. If you want a booming business, you have to create Raving Fans.

This, in a nutshell, is the advice given to a new Area Manager on his first day--in an extraordinary business book that will help everyone, in every kind of organization or business, deliver stunning customer service and achieve miraculous bottom-line results.

Written in the parable style of The One Minute Manager, Raving Fans uses a brilliantly simple and charming story to teach how to define a vision, learn what a customer wants, institute effective systems, and make Raving Fan Service a constant feature--not just another program of the month.

Through a fable, this book presents a simple framework on how to build a raving fan base.

 The story is about an Area Manager who has been tasked to go beyond product quality to create Raving Fans for his company. With the help of a mysterious fairy godmother, he meets with several successful business leaders and learns the 3 secrets of creating Raving Fans.

 Here’s a quick overview of the 3 secrets

 Secret #1: Decide on Your Service Vision

 Define your service vision in detail, with the customer as the focal point. You must know the ideal way you want to serve your customers (seeing each service detail in your mind) before you can create it in reality.

 Secret #2: Discover What Your Customer Wants

 Once you’ve developed your service vision, you must discover what your customers want, i.e. uncover their service vision. Only then can you integrate the 2 service visions to offer the perfect service that meets both your passions and your customers’ needs.

 Using your service vision as a foundation, incorporate specific aspects of your customers’ vision to integrate the 2 visions. In the complete Raving Fans summary, we share (i) more tips and examples on what to look out for in drawing up the 2 visions above, and (ii) why you must define your service vision before your customers’ vision.

 Secret #3: Deliver What the Customer Wants…Plus 1%

 Once you know what the customer wants, you must (i) deliver that all the time (without exception) and (ii) seek to over-deliver and continually improve by 1%.  In the book you can learn more about establishing trust/credibility with consistency, the difference between rules vs systems, and why you must continually refine your service, 1% at a time.

America is in the midst of a service crisis that has left a wake of disillusioned customers from coast to coast. Raving Fans include startling new tips and innovative techniques that can help anyone create a revolution in any workplace--and turn their customers into raving, spending fans.

About the Author

Ken Blanchard, PhD, is one of the most influential leadership experts in the world. He has co-authored 60 books, including Raving Fans and Gung Ho! (with Sheldon Bowles). His groundbreaking works have been translated into over 40 languages and their combined sales total more than 21 million copies. In 2005 he was inducted into Amazon's Hall of Fame as one of the top 25 bestselling authors of all time. The recipient of numerous leadership awards and honors, he is cofounder with his wife, Margie, of The Ken Blanchard Companies®, a leading international training and consulting firm.

Setting The Table

If you are a restaurant business owner, this book is a must-read!

I have read this book numerous times, and have given this to managers I worked with in the past and some have commented that this is the best book they’ve ever read.

Below is the summary of the book: Happy reading!

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. These two simple concepts –for and to –express it all - Danny Meyer

Understanding the distinction between service and hospitality has been 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 standards for service.

Hospitality, on the other hand, is a dialogue. To be on the 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 I was developing what I would call an “athletic” approach to hospitality, sometimes playing offense, sometimes playing defense, but always wanting to find a way to win.

On offense, we’d figure out creative ways to enhance an already good experience (extra dessert with inscriptions written in chocolate for birthdays; dessert wine for regulars).

Playing defense, we got better and better at overcoming our frequent mistakes or at defusing whatever situations the guests might be angry about. Increasingly, their anger was over not getting a reservation at a specific time. I was good at dealing with that, guided by my instinct to let the callers know I was on their side – I am your agent, not the gatekeeper!

Selling excellent food is secondary to creating a sense of community. For example, Starbucks sells great coffee (and is habit-forming), but performing a daily ritual with a self-selected group of like-minded human beings also sells. A business that doesn’t understand it’s reason for fostering community will inevitably underperform.

Imagine everyone is wearing an invisible sign reading “make me feel important.”. For most people, it is more important to be heard than agreed with. There are five primary stakeholders to whom we express our most caring hospitality, and in whom we take the greatest interest. Prioritizing those people in the following order is the guiding principle for practically every decision we make, and it has made the single greatest contribution to the ongoing success of our company: employees, guests, community, suppliers, investors.

Employees - mutual trust and respect are the most powerful tools for building an energetic, motivated, winning team in any field. The only way a company can grow, stay true to its soul, and remain consistently successful is to attract, hire, and keep great people. While technical skills are important, they only account for 49% of the equation. The other 51% is innate emotional skills for hospitality. It is my firm conviction that an executive or business owner should pack a team with 51 percenters because training them in the technical aspects will then come far more easily. Hiring 51 percenters today will save training time and dollars tomorrow. And they are commonly the best recruiters for others with strong emotional skills. Nice people love the idea of working with other nice people. Over time, we can almost always be training for technical prowess. Training for emotional skills is next to impossible. I had learned that the trick to delivering superior hospitality was to hire genuine, happy, optimistic people.

51 percenters have 5 core emotional skills

1. Optimistic warmth (kindness, glass is always at least half full)

2. Intelligence (insatiable curiosity to learn for the sake of learning)

3. Work ethic (do something as well as it can be done)

4. Empathy (an awareness of, care for, and connection to how others feel and how your actions make others feel)

5. Self-awareness and integrity (an understanding of what makes you tick and a natural inclination to be accountable for doing the right thing with honesty and superb judgment)

Excellence Reflex – 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.

We conduct a monthly dining voucher program for all staff with at least 3 months’ tenure that allow them to dine at any of our restaurants using a credit. The catch is that in exchange for the credit, the employee must answer a detailed questionnaire about their dining experience We’ve also asked our staff to periodically participate in a questionnaire created by our HR department: our “Walk the Talk Survey.” This offers them a chance to tell us how we’re doing as leaders and manages. It’s a remarkably instructive report card that provides illuminating, challenging, uplifting, and occasionally discouraging results. When you take the risk of telling your staff what your company stands for and what’s non-negotiable, and then give them a mirror to hold up, they are delighted to reflect an accurate picture.

Guests - our front line in delivering our promise of hospitality is our team of telephone reservationists. I consider the initial dialogue so critical to our business that for years the path to becoming a manager at Union Square began with being a reservationist. In every business, some employees 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. There is no stronger way to build relationships than taking a genuine interest in other human beings and allowing them to share their stories. When we take an active interest in the guests at our restaurants, we create a sense of community and a feeling of “shared” ownership. Shared ownership develops when guests talk about a restaurant as if it is 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 longterm survival. Guests get mad at waiting for reservations and food. Inside our dining rooms, one basic way we take care of our guests is by providing an atmosphere of comfort and welcome.

Controlling noise and designing a thoughtful seating arrangement are effective tools to help us do that. I hear noise the way a good chef tastes salt: too much is overbearing; too little can be stifling. We also put a lot of effort into dampening ambient noise with acoustical treatments (hanging draperies, and stapling sound-absorbing fabric to the backs of chairs and the undersides of tables). We’ve placed tiles behind walls of wine bottles and applied ceiling and wall treatments wherever they make sense. In our seating we’ve been quite conscious about dividing seating plans as if we were forming several smaller communities within a larger zip code. This makes it feel more intimate and human and the format and scale allows our guests to feel anchored, and it encourages genuine connections between the staff and guests as well as between guests and other guests. Part of our job is also to provide a public social environment that distinguishes it from the experience of eating at home j.

Community i. Invest in your community and the rising tide will lift all boats. 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 ii. Doing things that make sense for the community leads to doing well as a business. It is in any company’s self-interest to take what it does best and apply that core strength to an appropriate form of outreach beyond its own four walls. 1. Enlightened self-interest

Suppliers i. We express care for our purveyors and vendors by building loyal, mutually respectful relationships and by seeking win-win transactions. The most fundamental way we accomplish this is by doing what we say we’re going to do. If we strike a deal for certain payment terms, we honor it. Saying what we will do implies an agreement to also say what we cannot do.

Investors - Earning a profit is not the primary destination for my businesses, but I know what it is the fuel that drives everything else we do. Whether you call it enlightened hospitality or enlightened self-interest, it’s the safest and surest business model I know

Leadership - 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

I first sought to build a sense of family amongst my team. Punctuality and responsiveness are non-negotiable. One of the core business lessons I have taken from the continued success of Union Square Café is that willingness to overcome difficult circumstances is a crucial character trait in my employees, partners, and restaurants. It has always been a priority of mine to develop leaders from within, both for the sake of team morale and as an assurance that we’d begin our new restaurants with as much of our preexisting DNA as possible. Letting our business grow on the shoulders of those who’ve gotten us there provides safety and is its own rationale for growing in the first place.

Handling Mistakes a. The road to success is paved with mistakes well handled. The definition of business is problems. This philosophy came down to a simple fact of business life: 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 more 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.” Whatever mistake happened, happened. And the person on the receiving end will naturally want to tell anyone who’s interested all about it. That’s to be expected. While we can’t erase what happened, we do have the power to write one last episode so that at least the story ends the way we want it. If we write a great one, we will earn a comeback victory with the guest. Also, the guest will have no choice but to focus on how well we responded to the mistake when telling anyone we made it. We can, then, turn a mistake into something positive. To be effective, the last chapter must be written imaginatively, graciously, generously, and sincerely. The time frame for addressing mistakes is crucial. Ultimately, the most successful business is not the one that eliminates the most problems. It’s the one that becomes the most expert at finding imaginative solutions to address those problems. And lasting solutions rely on giving appropriate team members a voice, as well as responsibility for making decisions.

There is definitely an art to this inclusive type of leadership. It can take away a lot more time than leadership based on “my way or the highway.” It demands dialogue, compromise, and a willingness to share power. Two keys to building consensus for problem-solving are coaching and communication. Coaching is correction with dignity. It’s helping people refine skills, showing how to get the job done, and truly wanting employees to reach their peak potential.

Communication is at the root of all business strengths – and weaknesses. When things go wrong and employees become upset, whether at a restaurant, a law firm, a hardware store, a university or a major corporation, nine times out of ten the justifiable complaint is, “We need to communicate more effectively.” I admit that for many years, I didn’t really know what this meant. I had no problem standing up in front of a group to give a talk. I thought I was a pretty good communicator, but then it dawned on me: communicating has as much to do with context as it does content. That’s called setting the table. Understanding who needs to know what, when people need to know it, and why, and then presenting the information in an entirely comprehensible way is a sine qua non of great leadership. Clear timely communication is the key to applying constant, gentle pressure.

The 5 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

Acknowledgment – “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.

Whenever a mistake is found, take the initiative to: Respond graciously, and do so at once. You know you’re going to resolve the mistake eventually. It’s always a lot less costly to resolve the matter at the outset, err on the side of generosity. Apologize and make sure the value of the redemption is worth more than the cost of the initial mistake. Always write a great last chapter. People love to share stories of adversity. Use this powerful force to your advantage by writing the closing statement the way you want it told. Use all your imagination and creativity in thinking about your response.

Learn from the mistake. Use every new mistake as a teaching tool with your employees. Unless the mistake involved a lack of integrity, the person who made it has helped your team by providing you with new opportunities to improve. Make new mistakes every day. Don’t waste time repeating old ones. When we do learn about a mishap in one of our restaurants, I always want to hear the staff member’s side of the story before I connect with the guest, since our first responsibility in the culture of enlightened hospitality is to be on the side of our team.

The enlightened hospitality framework, and the priority of each stakeholder within that framework, help make decisions easier as they are “downstream” from this structure.

Determining Next Ventures - with new ventures, the idea is to draw on the best elements of the classic, make it authentic for the present context, and then try to execute it with excellent “Yes” criteria for new ventures. The opportunity fits and enhances our company’s overall strategic goals and objectives. The opportunity represents a chance to create a business venture that is perceived as groundbreaking, trailblazing, and fresh. The timing is right for our company’s capacity to grow with excellence, especially in terms of our having enough key employees who are themselves interested and ready to grow. We believe we have the capacity to be category leaders within whatever niche we are pursuing. We believe our existing businesses will benefit and improve by pursuing this new opportunity. We feel excited and passionate about the idea. Pursuing it will be an opportunity to learn, grow, and have fun. We are excited about doing business in this community. The context is the right fit. Our restaurant and our style of doing business will be in harmony with its location. An in-depth pro forma analysis convinces us that it is a wise and safe investment.

Additional criteria - any new restaurant would have to be as excellent within its niche as Union Square Café. The opening of the new restaurant could in no way compromise or diminish the excellence of Union Square Café. I would open another restaurant only when I was sure that I would also achieve more time for myself and Audrey. Timing is everything. There is an important art not only to determining whether one should or should not go into a deal, but to knowing whether one might want to go into such a deal somewhere down the road. Especially in cases where timing was the decisive factor in not making a deal, there is value in remaining in close contact with the potential future partner. While it’s true that today’s potential business deal may later evaporate, it also may one day evolve into something bigger, better, and more richly textured. Patience has its rewards.

Hiring & Training - it may seem implicit in the philosophy of enlightened hospitality that the employee is constantly setting aside personal needs and selflessly taking care of others. But the real secret of its success is to hire people to whom caring for others is, in fact, a selfish act. I call these people “hospitalitarians.” A special type of personality thrives on providing hospitality, and it’s crucial to our success that we attract people who possess it. Their source of energy is rarely depleted. In fact, the more opportunities hospitalitarians have to care for other people, the better they feel. Most of the mistakes we’ve made are when we’ve misread the employee’s emotional makeup.

Emotional skills are harder to assess, and it’s usually necessary to spend meaningful time with people – often in the work environment – to determine whether or not they’re a good fit. But it’s critical to begin by being explicit about which emotional skills you’re seeking. Doing that – even if you do nothing else – greatly increases your odds of success. For years we’ve used a system called “trailing” to test and hone a prospect’s technical skills – the 49% – and to begin to assess his or her emotional skills, the 51%. Trailing is a combination of training and auditioning; it’s rigorous and sometimes awkward. We generally keep people on probation until we’ve first observed their behavior within the real environment of the dining room or kitchen and until we’ve assessed their overall fit with our team. We’re upfront about this process, and we tell candidates that we also expect them to audition us as prospective employers.

We urge those who trail to ask themselves, “Is this really the kind of place I’m going to want to spend one-third of my time? Is this place going to challenge me and make me feel fulfilled?”

Our training is designed not as a hazing, but as a healthy way to foster a stronger team. Staff members, by being directly involved in the decision-making, have a good deal of influence over who is hired and thus a stake in the ongoing success of the outcome. Trailers don’t advance to their second trail unless the first trainer recommends this to the manager; they don’t move on to their third unless the second endorses it; and so on. After five or six trails we end up with a well-trained candidate who has also been endorsed by as many as half a dozen team members. And the candidate doesn’t move along unless he or she agrees that the fit seems good. By creating a built-in support system for new hires, we greatly enrich the subsequent team-building experience.

A good first check is to imagine that you have invited the prospective employee to your home for dinner with your judge of character. You can also imagine your keenest rival in business hiring the candidate you’re thinking about. Is your immediate reaction, “Shit, we blew it! Or, “Whew, we’ve dodged bullet!”. I prefer to hire by consensus. I also ask our managers to weigh one other critical factor as they handicap the prospect. Do they believe the candidate has the capacity to become one of the top 3 performers on our team in his or her job category? If people cannot ever develop into one of our top three cooks, servers, managers, or maître d’s, why would we hire them? How will they help us improve and become champions? It’s pretty easy to spot an overwhelmingly strong candidate or even an underwhelming weak candidate.

It’s the “whelming” candidate you must avoid at all costs because that’s the one who can and will do your organization the most long-lasting harm.

Overwhelmers earn you raves. Underwhelmers either leave on their own or are terminated. Whelmers, sadly, are like a stubborn stain you can’t get out of the carpet. They infuse an organization and its staff with mediocrity; they’re comfortable, and so they never leave; and, frustratingly, they never do anything that rises to the level of getting them promoted or sinks to the level of getting them fired. And because you either can’t or don’t fire them, you and they conspire to send a dangerous message to your staff and guests that “average” is acceptable. I usually offer a free meal or a bottle of wine for successful referrals. Our ability to remain as good as we have been has always depended on our ability to attract great people. To the degree that we can do this, a “virtuous cycle” of hiring spins on. Sustaining peak performance helps us to attract other highly talented people, who in turn help keep performance at a peak. Earning high rankings from critical sources such as The New York Times not only increases business; it improves our chance of fielding better and better teams. These teams further perpetuate our ability to perform with excellence and they polish our public image. But I always caution against complacency. I instruct our managers to recruit new staff “blood” as if we’re behind. In fact, we’ll even create a job that wouldn’t otherwise exist when we meet someone we just know belongs to our team. In addition to instituting an athletic hiring strategy; it’s critical to be a champion at retaining top staff members.

A business owner can too easily squander the winning edge that comes from fielding a great team by not treating its members with respect and trust, teaching them new skills, and offering clear challenges.

A good sense of humor – about oneself, one’s business, and life in general – goes a long way toward fostering good feelings to accompany excellent performance. Individual victories have to register for the whole team or they can be more disruptive than helpful l. I have always viewed people who work for me as volunteers. It isn’t that they’ve agreed to work without pay. “I’m aware that you’re all here, on the most basic level, to pay the rent,” I tell new hires. “Just as you need a job, I need people to take orders accurately, and to cook wonderful food.” Then I remind them that if they’re as talented at what they do as we believe they are, they could have gotten a job at any of 200 other very good restaurants for the same pay. “You could all be doing what you do anywhere else,” I say. “But you chose to be with us. You have volunteered to be on our team, and we owe it to you to provide you with much more than just a paycheck in return. We want you to feel certain you have made a wise choice in joining our company.” It’s a chance to work at a company where respect and trust are mutual between management and workers, where you can enjoy working alongside and learning from excellent colleagues, and where you can know that your contributions can make every day truly matter.

Meeting with all new hires – as I continue to do once every four weeks – often makes me think of the way champagne houses make non-vintage, or multi-vintage, champagne. All the major houses strive to produce a very good non-vintage champagne that tastes virtually the same every year. They know exactly what the taste profile is, how to achieve it, what grapes are needed, and can balance it perfectly. That’s called house style and that’s what I’m aiming to do with my new hires.

In hiring chefs, my goal is to do three things: develop a close, mutually trusting, and respectful relationship; establish a shared vision of what the food should be; and encourage them to search their own heart and soul for inspiration, urging them to go further than they’ve ever gone before. I am especially proud of the enduring bonds of shared success and loyalty that I have enjoyed with our chefs over the years.

Communication & Leadership - the 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 well-defined set of cultural priorities and non-negotiable values. Perhaps most important, true leaders hold themselves accountable for conducting business in the same manner in which they’ve asked their team to perform. Like most business owners and CEOs, I’m responsible for articulating to the public the core principles and values for which we want our business known. My initial idea is that Blue Smoke would become our organization’s “farm system” for talent. We would be able to hire 51 percenters whose technical skills might not yet be refined enough for a job at the other restaurants. I reasoned that they wouldn’t need those more advanced restaurant skills in a bbq joint but if and when they acquired enough ability to earn a promotion to one of our other restaurants, we would be ready with a job. And we would nurture “green” managers in precisely the same way. This scheme proved to be a serious miscalculation. I learned that no matter what our concept is, people expect 3 specific things in our brand:

1. culinary excellence

2. knowledgeable service

3. and gracious hospitality

This farm system didn’t always deliver on that. To help deal with late-seated reservations and to take are of people who made a spur-of-the-moment decision to drop in for some bbq, Richard Coraine urged that we set aside as much as 50% of the business each night for walk-ins. This strategy was effective in two ways. First, we regained control over how busy we would be on any given evening, since once we had seated the guests to whom we had promised tables, we still had discretionary control over whether or not to seat the other half of the dining room. Second, since we know that aficionados are not used to planning – or interested in planning – four weeks in advance to go to a bbq joint, we were able to satisfy their desire to enjoy bbq on the spur of the moment. Encouraging walk-ins also attracted a whole new population to our business: bbq goers who wanted to drop in for some ribs and a couple of pints of beer, hang out with friends, and hear some great live music downstairs on the jukebox upstairs. They weren’t inveterate foodies surfing the Internet for reviews and wondering what the food bloggers were chatting bout. By eliminating the requirement to reserve in advance, we had removed the “special occasions” of Blue Smoke, and almost instantly we encouraged and attracted hundreds of new patrons who packed the bar four and five deep, enjoying the experience of waiting as much as an hour for a table to free up. Of course, the most important adjustments would be those we made as we persevered in our quest to serve top-quality bbq.

Wherever your center lies, know it, name it, stick to it, and believe in it. Everyone who works with you will know what matters to you and will respect and appreciate your unwavering values. Your inner beliefs about business will guide you through the tough times. It’s good to be open to fresh approaches to solving problems. But, when you cede your core values to someone else, it’s time to quit.

Constant, gentle pressure is my preferred technique for leadership, guidance, and coaching. It’s the job of any business owner to be very clear as to the company’s non-negotiable core values. They’re the riverbanks that help guide us as we refine and improve on performance and excellence. A lack of riverbanks creates estuaries and cloudy waters that are confusing to navigate. I want a crystal-clear, swiftly flowing stream. Riverbanks need not hinder creativity, and in fact, I leave plenty of room between riverbanks for individual expression and personal style. If you are constantly gentle but fail to apply pressure when needed, your business won’t grow or improve: your team will lack the drive and passion for excellence. If you exert gentle pressure but not constantly, both your staff and your guests will get a mixed message depending on what it is, and probably won’t believe that excellence truly matters to you. If you exert constant pressure that isn’t gentle, employees may burn out, quit, or lose their graciousness – and you will probably cease to attract good employees. 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 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.

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 biggest mistake managers can make is neglecting to set high standards and hold others accountable. This denies employees the chance to learn and excel. Employees do not want to be told, “Let me make your life easier by enabling you not to learn and not to achieve anything new.”. In any hierarchy, it’s clear that the ultimate boss holds the most power. But a wonderful thing happens when you flip the traditional organization chart upside down so that it looks like a V with the boss on the bottom. My job is to serve and support the next layer “above” me so that the people on that layer can then serve and support the next layer “above” them, and so on. Ultimately, our cooks, servers, reservationists, coat checkers, and dish washers are then in the best possible position to serve our guests…I staunchly believe that standing conventional business priorities on their head ultimately leads to even greater, more enduring financial success. With each year I’ve spent as a leader, 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. And all the team asks is that the same rules apply to everyone.

Our HR staff created a list of nine specific traits that define the mind-set and the character traits we look for when making a decision about hiring a manager:

• Infectious Attitude

• Self-Awareness

• Charitable Assumption – assumes the best in other people

Long-Term View of Success – if you have a philosophy that puts employees first, guests second, community third, suppliers fourth, and investors fifth, you implicitly have a long-term perspective – at least as long as your lease. Sense of Abundance – by giving more, we end up getting more. Generosity is clearly in our self-interest. Trust > Fear. Approving Patience and Tough Love – manager’s job to catch people in the act of doing the right thing. Feeling seen and acknowledge is a powerful human need. Not feeling threatened by others. Character – optimistic warmth, intelligence, work ethic, empathy, integrity, and self-awareness. Overall, integrity and self-awareness are the most important core emotional skills for managers. You must be self-aware enough to know what makes you tick. You have to understand your own strengths, weaknesses, and blind spots. You need to surround yourself with a team of people who will mirror your integrity but complement and compensate for your strengths and weaknesses. That’s critical. There is absolutely an art to surrounding yourself with great advisers and effective auxiliary sets of eyes and ears. These are the leaders on whom you must rely to present you with timely, accurate, balanced information and to apply constant, gentle pressure on your team so that you can move your company decisively forward. I believe that leadership is not measured just by what you’ve accomplished, but rather by how other people you depend on feel in the process of accomplishing things. I realized that a critically important role for me, as the leader of the company, was to define upfront what was non-negotiable. That way, if employees were not comfortable, they could choose to walk. I understood his fear [the chef] about large parties, though not his position. When a table of eight or two parties of six arrive all at once, their orders can clog up the restaurant’s flow and wreak havoc. Trying to cook for and coordinate the timing of too many large parties can be very challenging. It demands precise alignment among the various stations in the kitchen and the dining room – and meanwhile, service for the smaller tables can grind to a halt.

“Say no more!” – There’s always a solution if you’re open to finding one, context, context, context, trumps the outdated location, location, location. Context is everything. What has guided me most as an entrepreneur is the confluence of passion and opportunity (and sometimes serendipity) that leads to the right context for the right idea at the right time in the right place and for the right value. I have never relied on or been interested in market analysis to create a new business model. I am my own test market. I am far more intuitive than analytical. If I sense an opportunity to reframe something I’m passionately interested in, I give it my absolute best shot…I want to expand our company on my own terms. My unwavering, long-term vision of our company is that everything else is subsidiary to context – no matter how seductive a prospective deal may appear, err on the side of generosity: you get more by first giving more. Danny felt he had no choice but to get into restaurants. He was obsessed. “You may think, as I once did, that I’m primarily in the business of serving good food. Actually, though, food is secondary to something that matters even more. In the end, what’s most meaningful is creating positive, uplifting outcomes for human experiences and human relationships. Business, like life, is all about how you make people feel. It’s that simple, and it’s that hard. “. Meyer has a true passion for adding something new and compelling to what already exists. Danny’s father had been entrepreneurial but had expanded too fast on several occasions and gone broke. This difficult experience influenced him greatly when he thought about growth and expansion – being conservative until he was ready to go all-in. At 26, Danny was developing his vision for a future restaurant by getting to know himself. In my obsession for big numbers, I’d created hideous logjams. But it was oddly exciting to manufacture challenges and then surmount them. In fact, that was and continues to be a pattern in the way I work. Excellence is a journey, not a destination. The single most powerful key to long-term success is cultivating repeat business, and ultimately regular guests. The number one reason guests cite for wanting to return to a restaurant is that when they go there, they feel seen and recognized. Imagine if our hosts consistently conveyed, “I see you!” I’m fairly certain that’s precisely what most people want. Must get both new guests and take care of regulars – trials & repeats. If you don’t get regulars, you’re in big trouble. They are your best form of advertising and bring in the most business. I’d guess we succeed at earning repeat business over 70% of the time. It’s significant that the older our businesses become, the more popular they become – and not just according to the Zagat Survey. With few exceptions, our restaurants have also enjoyed increased revenues each successive year they’ve been open. Over time, as he gained confidence and some success, he learned to turn intuition into intention. Doing two things like a half-wit never equals doing one thing as a whole wit i. What you say ‘no’ to is as important as what you take on. Wine critics taste young wine and try to predict the future. Restaurant critics rate the restaurant where it’s at today. How can we combine both? Able to face reality and the facts as we know them but also have an intuition/understanding of where they are heading. 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. Replicating something already in existence isn’t where my own business or design sense has ever guided me. Similar to how Disney never wanted to create sequels because he wanted to get the most creative juice out of his one life.

ABCD – Always Be Collecting Dots - Dots are information. The more information you collect, the more frequently you can make meaningful connections that can make other people feel good and give you an edge in business. Using whatever information I’ve collected to gather guests together in a spirit of shared experiences is what I call connecting the dots. If I don’t turn over the rocks, I won’t see the dots. If I don’t collect the dots, I can’t connect the dots. If I don’t know that someone works, say, for a magazine whose managing editor I happen to know, I’ve lost a chance to make a meaningful connection that could enhance our relationship with the guest and the guest’s relationship with us. The information is there. You just have to choose to look. The courage to grow demands the courage to let go. Whenever you expand your 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. What I got out of it 1. Understanding the context in which you’re building your business and honoring “enlightened hospitality,” regardless of industry, is a wise choice. Worth reading in its entirety to see how he approaches hiring, leadership, and communication.

About The Author:

Daniel Meyer (born March 14, 1958) is a New York City restaurateur and the Founder & Executive Chairman of the Union Square Hospitality Group (USHG).

Danny Meyer is one of the most successful restaurateurs in America today, running restaurants including Gramercy Tavern, Union Square Cafe, The Modern, Maialino, and the Shake Shack empire through his Union Square Hospitality Group, all while blazing a trail with his no-tipping policy.