Book Summary — Setting the Table
The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business
You can find all my book summaries — here.
1 paragraph summary:
Half-autobiography, half-business building book — Danny Meyer’s story of building a restaurant empire. Enlightened hospitality — put hospitality to work for first for the people who work for you, guests, community, suppliers, and investors — in that order.
Hospitality
I had begun to understand that business and life have a lot in common with a hug. The best way to get a good one was first to give one.
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.
Hospitality must be enlightened: we must care for our own staff first.
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 p prepositions — for and to — express it all.
Service is the technical delivery of our 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 the guest’s side requires listening to that person with every sense, and following up with the thoughtful, gracious, appropriate response.
It is whatever it takes to make the guests feel and understand that we are in their corner. I don’t tell the staff precisely what to do or say in every scenario.
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 opportunity hospitalitarians have to care for other people, the better they feel.
Employees
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.
Nice people love the idea of working with other nice people.
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 realise 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.
I realised, too, that my own hands-on managerial style was not particularly effective in operation two restaurants at the same time under pressure. I managed by example, and I had yet to learn how critically important it is to lead by teaching, setting priorities, and holding people accountable.
Hiring
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 hones 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.
I ask managers to pose themselves 3 fundamental hypothetical situations when they are hiring:
- Situation 1: Think of someone you know well who has an uncanny gift for judging character. When the prospect leaves and the door closes behind him or her, what will be the first thing your character says?
- Situation 2: Imagine your keenest rival in business. Then imagine that the day you make a job offer to a prospect, he or she calls you back and says “Thanks, but I just got a great offer and taking it from the competitor”. Is your immediate reaction “Shit, we blew it!” or “Whew, we’ve dodged a bullet!”
- Situation 3: Imagine a person with an especially weighty opinion (who you really, really care about) drops in announced, and the only person available is the new prospect to serve them. Is your reaction “Great!” or is it “Oh no!”
- Finally — Does the candidate have the capacity to become one of the top 3 performers on our team in their job category?
When hiring we look for 9 specific traits that define the mindset and character traits:
- Infectious Attitude
- Self-Awareness — why is this your next logical chapter in your life?
- Charitable Assumption — optimistic, hopeful and open-minded
- LongTerms View of Success — enlightened hospitality, employee first
- Sense of Abundance — be generous also in hard times
- Trust
- Approving patience and tough love — “I’m on your side” honesty
- Not feeling threatened by others
- Character — 51 percenters
We are hoping to develop 100 percent employees whose skills are divided 51–49 between emotional hospitality and technical excellence.
51 percenter has five core emotional skills:
- Optimistic warmth (genuine kindness, thoughtfulness, and glass it at least half full)
- Intelligence (not just smarts, but insatiable curiosity to learn for the sake of learning)
- Work ethic (natural tendency to do things as well as it can be done)
- Empathy (how others feel and how your actions make them feel)
- Self-awareness and integrity (understanding of what makes you tick and accountability to do the right thing)
Relationships
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”.
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”.
For most people, it’s far more important to feel heard than to be agreed with.
But in business, turning over the rocks and reading the water, as a fly-fisherman might do, gives you crucial information so that you can take an even deeper interest in your customers, and courages them to do the same with you.
Community & Culture
Invest in your community. 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 neighbours will follow suits.
Change works only when people believe it is happening for them, not to them.
Chronic lateness (whether it’s showing up late for appointments or not returning phone calls or emails promptly) is a form of arrogance —”I’m important enough to make others wait for me”.
Leadership
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 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.
Wherever your center lies, know it, name it, stick to it, and believe in it. → apply constant, gentle pressure
Communicating has a much to do with context as it does with content. That’s called setting the table. Understanding who needs to know what, when people need to know it, and why, and then presenting that information in an entirely comprehensible way.
In any hierarchy, it’s clear that the ultimate boss holds the most power. But a wonderful thing happens when you flip the traditional organizational 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.
Managers primary job is to help make other people on our team successful. I urge them to use their position to maximize the positive impact they can have on and for our team. Good managers can have a multiplier effect and add significantly to the company’s excellence.
Success & Mistakes
The road to success is paved with mistakes well handled.
The best companies 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 the last chapter”.
Whatever mistake happened, happened. And the person who it happened to will naturally tell everyone. 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. The guest will have no choice but to focus on how well we responded to the mistake when telling anyone we made it.
5A’s for effectively addressing mistakes
- Awareness
- Acknowledgement
- Apology (no excuses)
- Action
- Additional generosity
Generosity of spirit and a gracious approach to problem-solving are, with few exceptions, the most effective way I know to earn lasting goodwill for your business.
👇My Newsletter — SUBSCRIBE HERE👇
