IDL117 Season 3: Unreasonable Hospitality with Will Guidara

Are you coming up into your career and wondering where you should go work? How can you filter and find the best performers on your team? Why should you have the tough and honest conversation with your new employees on the first day?

In this episode, I have an awesome conversation with today’s guest, Will Guidara. Will is the author of Unreasonable Hospitality, whilst also being a partner to the world’s number one ranked restaurant, Eleven Madison Park. We dive into a range of topics, from how to find the best performers to how leaders create trust.

Meet Will Guidara

Will Guidara is the the author of the National Bestseller Unreasonable Hospitality, which chronicles the lessons in service and leadership he has learned over the course of his career in restaurants.

He is also the former co-owner of Make It Nice, a hospitality group that included Eleven Madison Park, the NoMad restaurants, Davies and Brook at the Claridges Hotel, and Made Nice.

Under his leadership, Eleven Madison Park received numerous accolades, including four stars from the New York Times, three Michelin stars, and in 2017 was named #1 on the list of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants. The restaurant also received seven James Beard Foundation awards, including Outstanding Service and Outstanding Restaurant in America.

He is also the co-founder of the Welcome Conference, an annual hospitality-driven event that brings together the best minds from the world of hospitality; and of the Independent Restaurant Coalition, an organization that represents the 500,000 independent restaurants in America.

A graduate of the hospitality school at Cornell University, he has coauthored four cookbooks: Eleven Madison Park: The Cookbook, I Love New York: Ingredients and Recipes, The NoMad Cookbook, and Eleven Madison Park: The Next Chapter.

Connect with Will on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

IN THIS EPISODE WE DISCUSS:

• Where you should look to work next - 06:32

• The person impacts the profession - 11:14

• How to find your best performers - 13:26

• How a leader creates trust - 20:44

Where you should look to work next

Often people consider where they should go to work when they are launching into their careers.

However, don’t get sidetracked by big names or brands, because often those huge organizations – when you are new – are not well-equipped as landing pads or launching pads into the big industry.

So, instead of thinking about where you should go, rather think about who you would want to work for.

“You should not be limiting your search to just the companies with the biggest names. You need to be looking for the place that has the most to teach you about the thing, the specific thing you want to learn about, and where your boss is actually the person that you’re very excited to work for. ”

— Will Guidara

The person impacts the profession

With hospitality, people interact with other people under the umbrella of the company. That being said, if a customer has a bad experience with the person that represents the company, the company is associated with that poor level of service.

In reality, this has nothing to do with that employee, but more so with their leader, because if someone in the room representing the company so clearly doesn’t care about the customer it means that the leader has made one of two mistakes:

-        They have not properly trained the employee

-        The leader has hired someone that doesn’t care

“One person can make or break it, so you’re talking about the lid of the leader, I think the other approach is the basement of your poorest performer. That one individual can define the reputation of your entire business. ”

— Will Guidara

How to find your best performers

“You can’t identify who a poor performer is until you have given all of yourself to try to make them great. ”

— Will Guidara

You need to give everyone the chance to step up by investing your effort into bringing the on board.

Only if after you have sincerely tried to help them help themselves in finding the right method, place, or approach in your business, and they still are not fitting into what needs to happen should you consider firing them.

“I think a lot of people give up on certain members of their team because those people aren’t performing exactly as expected … but the leader never took the time to … inspire those people to want to be better versions of themselves, or … get to know those people well enough to make sure that they’re set up for success [in this business]. ”

— Will Guidara

Have you connected with your new employees? Have you taken the time to find out more about them and where they do their best work? Have they been given the support and means necessary to do great work and go beyond their scope?

The leader of the team needs to set an example as well as expectations from the first day.

Everyone on your team can be great and you need to put yourself out there to connect them with the actionality of their capacity. Only if after that it still doesn’t work, then should you let them go.

How a leader creates trust

A leader can create trust by:

1 – Taking the time to show the people that you work with that you want to get to know them and care about them beyond simply fulfilling positions in the company

2 – Being clear and setting expectations with the team about what your non-negotiables are and how you will make team decisions

3 – Being as close to unwaveringly consistent in holding people accountable to those expectations as possible

In Tyler’s words; connection, communication, and consistency.

The people on your team are much more likely to want to work with you, for you, and do great work in the company when they feel safe, supported, and encouraged by you.

“The mentor relationship as a leader is the best … way to look at being a leader … if we’re choosing to mentor then we want better for someone else even though it may not be better for us, but if we’re collectively doing that together, it is going to be better for all of us. ”

— Tyler Dickerhoof

Resources, books, and links mentioned in this episode:

BOOK | Will Guidara – Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect

BOOK | Will Guidara and Daniel Humm – Eleven Madison Park: The Cookbook

BOOK | Will Guidara and Daniel Humm – I Love New York: Ingredients and Recipes

BOOK | Daniel Humm, Will Guidara, Leo Robitschek, and Francesco Tonelli – The NoMad Cookbook

BOOK | Will Guidara and Daniel Humm – Eleven Madison Park: The Next Chapter

BOOK | Simon Sinek – Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action

Connect with Will on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Impact Driven Workshop over the 8th and 9th of May 2023: www.impactdrivenworkshop.com

Sign up for the roundtable at: hello@theimpactdrivenleader.com

Check out the Practice Of the Practice

www.tylerdickerhoof.com

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About the Impact Driven Leader Podcast

The Impact Driven Leader Podcast, hosted by Tyler Dickerhoof, is for Xillennial leaders who have felt alone and ill-equipped to lead in today's world. Through inspiring interviews with authors from around the world, Tyler uncovers how unique leadership strengths can empower others to achieve so much more, with real impact.

Rate, review and subscribe here on Apple Podcasts or subscribe on Stitcher and Spotify.

If you don’t have the competence and conviction to dream big out loud, you’ll never achieve it.

Will Guidara

Podcast Transcription

[TYLER DICKERHOOF] Welcome back to the Impact Driven Leader podcast. This is your host, Tyler Dickerhoof. Man, I am glad you are turning in, tuning in, watching on YouTube, listening wherever you're listening. Excited to share today's conversation with a fellow Cornell University alumni. Actually, he and I were there at the same time as I learned reading his book, Unreasonable Hospitality. Today's guest is Will Guidara. Will is the author of Unreasonable Hospitality, phenomenal book that's going to be part of our Impact Driven Leader book club here for the month of May. As well, he was principal, he was partner to the number one ranked restaurant in the world 11 Madison Park. You're going to hear so much wisdom from Will. Truly one of the most enjoyable books that I've read in quite some time. I'm excited for this conversation. Not only do we have a good time just chatting and actually reliving a little bit of our college days, but so much beyond that will share so much wisdom. I'm excited for you to take part in this episode. Beware, be ready, take some notes. I will wrap up at the end and I will share the few things that I took away that really impressed upon me from Will's experience, but also things that maybe caught him that he didn't realize impacted him as much, which I'm grateful that we had that conversation. Here's one other piece that I wanted to share with you. May 8th and 9th, just a few days away, if you're listening to this as it's released, I'm hosting the Impact Driven Workshop. It's a workshop for HR directors, VPs, team leaders that are trying to navigate the season we're in right now. What is going on? How do we make sure that we build an environment where team members thrive? Oftentimes, we are the peanut butter and jelly in the sandwich between senior leadership and those team members. How do we manage through that? That's what I want to share in the workshop. Excited to extend that offer. We'd love to have you there. Go to impactdrivenworkshop.com to get more details. Register. I'd love for you to be there and enjoy in the conversation. All right, one last thing. If you could be so kind to be a show reviewer, rater, leave a review. Let me know what you think about this conversation. Let me know what you think about the Impact Driven Leader, one so I can get better, two, we can develop the community to impact those around us even more. That's what happens when you leave a review or a rating. It allows those that listen to this show to get more value. I want that for you. I want that for others. Again, thanks for tuning in wherever you are. If you're not subscribed on YouTube and you watch it there, make sure you go YouTube Impact Driven Leader YouTube channel. Watch it. All right, here's my conversation with Will. [TYLER] Will, thank you so much for joining me. Man, I'm excited for this conversation. I'm excited for really two reasons. I don't run, I don't interact with a lot of Cornell graduates on a daily basis, and so I'm excited to interact about that a little bit, bring back some memories at Cornell. As I shared with you before, we were getting ready, reading your book brought me back to a lot of those memories and that made not only a connection, made it fun, but with that also enthralled, I am absolutely enthralled how you took hospitality beyond a point of hospitality, but into a leadership style that allowed for hospitality to be replicated. So I'd love to --- [WILL GUIDARA] That's the way you articulated that. [TYLER] Well --- [WILL] And hey, on behalf of Cornell, maybe we can do a little PR work because in the entertainment world, like the two people that people think about from Cornell is Andy from the office and then whatever that guy was in White Lotus and I just feel like Cornell's not been well represented in Hollywood these days since maybe you and I today can begin to reframe that. [TYLER] Here's what, here's just a total snippet. If, if people want to fast forward a couple seconds, that's okay. I came to Cornell as a non-New Yorker, meaning I was from out of state. What I found is people that came to Cornell from out of state or didn't have a family member that were there, had a much different opinion of Cornell than people that were from New York and then endeared to Cornell. There was, there's pretty drastic like, yeah, I went to Cornell, ok, fine, but it wasn't like this badge of honor that I'm like, look how proud, because it really didn't mean much to my family or me. It did after the accomplishment, but it wasn't like this legacy piece. [WILL] Yes. I mean, it was different for me, man, in the sense that I wanted to go to Cornell since I was 12 years old, because I mean, it was the perfect confluence of going to the best hospitality school in the country that also is an Ivy League school. So, like in this whole idea that I've always talked to people about, about setting just the biggest, best goals you can set for yourself, given who I was and what I wanted to do with my life, it was all Cornell. We've already talked before we started recording about the weather and how it was not the most welcoming to put it in hospitality terms, but outside of that, I just loved it up there. [TYLER] Yeah, no, I mean, I think back fondly the experience, I'm appreciative of it. I think what's interesting is, so I went to Cornell for animal science degree, number one, animal science school and number one hotel school. People didn't realize hospitality that, I mean, they're great at a lot of things that no one cares about. They're great at hockey, they're great at lacrosse, they're great at things no one cares about until they care about it. If you don't have food to eat or if you don't have a nice restaurant hotel to stay at, you care about it but you don't care about it until you need to care about it. [WILL] It's funny, a lot of the time I talk to people coming up in their career and trying to figure out where they should go work next and one of the things I always tell people is, "Hey, you should not be limiting your search to just the companies with the biggest names. You need to be looking for the place that has the most to teach you about the thing, the specific thing you want to learn about, and where your boss is actually the person that you're very excited to work for." [TYLER] Man, that's --- [WILL] But in the first category, it applies well to this conversation. [TYLER] We could stop right there. We're about four minutes in and you've left an absolute platter full of gold. Now I'm going to try to tie in here in the conversation, but what be, we'll come back to that, I promise we'll come back to that. But I want to hear from you. For someone, I'm not a foodie, I'm going to admit it, I'm not a foodie, but I'm enthralled again by the industry as you describe it, because I do love hospitality and I love that great experience and you talk so much about experience. So help the listener that maybe hasn't read your book yet, I surely hope after this they get it because it's entirely well worth it, and then buy 10 cop copies to give to people. But beyond that, explain how you came about this great, wonderful desire to turn the hospitality industry on its head. [WILL] Well, a few things that I want to say, first, you talked about how I approached my work by showing that hospitality as a leadership skill could actually translate it into a service skill. When you take a step back, that's pretty intuitive. One of my mentors Danny Meyer, one of the things that he said back in the day that sticks with me today is that hospitality is a team sport, and I think that applies to really any service industry business. The person at the top of the hierarchy has really no capacity to impact very many of the people they're serving. The only scalable approach you can take to ensuring that every one of your customers or your guests is served in the way that you want them to serve, is to first serve the people that will end up serving those customers and guests. Because until you create an environment where the people who you work with are inclined to do what you would do in the room, even when you're not there, until they understand fundamentally how good it receive, how good it feels to receive hospitality such that they're kind and until want to pay for it, until you can give the people on your team not only the permission but the resources, bring their own creativity to a hospitable expression, it's not a scalable approach to take the work. I mean, I just genuinely believe that it's the most appropriate and honestly, the only genuinely impactful approach to take if you are in the business of trying to make people happy, if you can't serve the people on your frontline, they have an inability to serve your customers. [TYLER] I think about this as if, it's the law of the lid, that's a John Maxwell concept, if you're a 10, you can only, people below you can only be as high as a nine or whatever. That's not limiting them. They need to go be their own 10. But if you're a seven, then the capacity of those below, you can only reach that lid. And I think about this from a hospitality perspective, if I'm not hospitable, if I'm not serving, if I'm not caring about the people working for me, then there's no way possible they can care for the guest long-term. You're going to do it short-term, maybe, but then they're going to find out I don't fit here. And vice versa is if they're not of the capacity where they want to serve people at the level of expectation that you're serving them, they're either going to rise to the case or they're like, I don't fit here. [WILL] Yeah, I also think it has to do with just the extent to which the people who work for you feel trusted by you and the ability to trust you in return. Because with trust comes support and until you feel like the people you work for genuinely have your back, how could you ever expect them to give their full selves to the work? When I go to, when I'm on an airplane or I go to get a coffee at a poorly run Starbucks, or when I'm checking into a hotel that's bad, okay, A let's just be clear, I'm calling the hotel bad. I'm calling the Starbucks poorly run, and I'm doing those things not having anything to do with the product but because of the way that one individual made me feel, sure, There's a lot of people out there that in those moments say that that person is the problem when in reality it has nothing to do with the person. It has to do with their leader. Because what it means, if someone in that room so clearly doesn't care about you as a customer, it means that their leader has made one of two mistakes. They either have not shown the person how good it feels to show hospitality to others, or perhaps they just haven't trained them on what that looks like. Or it means that the leader has hired someone that doesn't care and in spite of the efforts to show them why they should care, they've allowed them to stay on the team. But every single person has an outsized and asymmetrical impact on the operation as a whole. Because I go to a Starbucks, I have one bad interaction with one person, and now I'm saying to you, it's poorly run. One person can make or break it. So if you're talking about the lid of a leader, I think the other approach is the basement of your poorest performer and that one individual can define the reputation of your entire business. [TYLER] Well, and I guess the question I want to ask there is, which one of those, and you talk about the feeling of people, the process, if that's what we expect, or the eradication of the pro performers, which do you feel is like in your experience through running your restaurants, going through EMT to be able to take it from one point where you started to the pinnacle, what was the defining of those three, if we keep it within that triad? [WILL] Well, I think they're all required because you can't actually identify who a performer, a poor performer is until you've given all of yourself to try to make them great. So you need to start with that. [TYLER] Wait, can I ask you to share that again, Will? That was good [WILL] Let me see if I can say it the exact same way. You can't identify a poor performer until you've given all of yourself to make them great. [TYLER] Good. That's perfect. [WILL] Because here's the thing. One of the things I talk about in the book is this idea of hiring slow and firing fast. But I had a caveat, like hire slow, fire fast, but not too fast. I think a lot of people give up on certain members of their team because those people aren't performing exactly as expected, but the leader never took the time to do two things. One, inspire those people to want to be better versions of themselves or B, get to know those people well enough to make sure that they were set up for success, whether that means receiving more training or putting them in the right position where they're actually set up to utilize all of the skills that are innate to them. So I think it's innocent until proven guilty. Everyone on your team has the capacity to be great, and you need to give all of yourself to make them great and then if they just don't care, then it's time to let them go. [TYLER] Well, I think you could, they have a place to be great, and maybe the place isn't where you're at. And part of --- [WILL] Maybe the place is in a different position within your organization and if that doesn't work, maybe it's just not in your organization at all. Maybe they need to go flourish somewhere else. [TYLER] Totally. I think that's where I think a lot of leaders struggle is this idea of, oh, if they're not right here, then it's something on me. Instead of, oh, if I fire them, if I say this isn't working, then it's this internal animosity. Instead of saying, this isn't working, I am going to find a place for you. I learned that from Alan Malawi. Alan did that when he took over at Fords. It's like, hey, I love you and just you don't fit here. I would imagine you saw that circumstances, especially at the cultural turnover. We're seeing that I think in a lot of organizations today where we have industries that can work remote and they're having people, they're like, I want to work remote. They're like, no, no, we're an office. We're an eight to five job. Even though it doesn't require that's the mentality in thinking, well, the person that wants to work remote just doesn't fit in your job anymore. Let them go. [WILL] By the way, neither person's wrong in that exchange. [TYLER] Yeah, exactly. [WILL] There's just different things. [TYLER] That is the changeover I think we're seeing in cultures and the leaders that are secure in themselves are doing well there. The ones that are insecure and they say, well, this is the only way I know how to accomplish it, it's if you go back and to try to tie in, to have this elite experience, this elaborate fine dining experience and you were to go into it and say, well, this is the only way it's ever been done. As I read from your book, that is not the way you approached it. You're like, no, we're going to turn it around and say, how can we focus differently? [WILL] Eventually I'm going to answer the question you asked first. I want to do one more aside, we're going to have a lot of asides in this conversation I think. At new hire orientation, which I did often, I thought it was a really, really important part about joining our company was that you spent an hour with me and I spent the first 20 minutes listening to everyone introduce themselves, because I always loved the idea of people who joined the team within a two-month period, becoming a class of sorts and feeling bonded to one another. The only way a group of people can feel any sort of meaningful connection is if they have a moment to learn a few things about one another and they're not just professionally linked, but also personally linked in some small way. But at the end of that new hire orientation, the last thing I would say was, "Hey, you're here. You've just started. The energy in this room is awesome. You're all fired up. If there comes a day when you don't love your job anymore, this is my request, come and talk to us. Our doors are always open. Perhaps there's something we can change or fix to make sure you love it, but if you come and talk to us and we can't, then please leave." In other words, it was me saying, you have to love your job in order to work here, which sounds tyrannical, but really what I believe is that everyone deserves to work alongside other people that love their jobs, and everyone also deserves to love their job. So if you're in a job that you can't stand, not only are you selling yourself short by being in a place that doesn't bring you joy, but by the mere decision to continue working there, whether you intend to or not, that energy negatively infects those around you. [TYLER] Everyone. Even if you're not in a person to person business, it eventually affects everyone. [WILL] Yes. So there's this one woman on my team, Laura Wagstaff, who's one of my closest friends, and who is like my cultural teammate as we identified the culture of our company. We normally saw eye to eye on many things, but that one of things she always hated when I did that. She's like energy is good but I believe being a great leader is setting very clear expectations with your team around what you expect the very first day. Even if that means it's not all teddy bears and flowers on day one I think having the really fun conversations and also the very direct challenging conversations right from the get go, set up the most clear and strong foundation from which people can build something amazing together. [TYLER] Well, I mean, I would say the additional layer to that is stating it in that first meeting, as a leader, making that decree, but then going beyond that to say, I have to hold up to that. Because if I don't hold up to that, even though I say it in the new hire meeting, eventually that's going to permeate the organization where they're like, oh, will just says that he doesn't mean it. It's like, well then that becomes a cultural problem instead of saying, no, he says it and when they go interact with someone, they're like, I don't love it here, go talk to Will. Instead of like, well, he's just saying that he doesn't really want to listen to you, he's just saying that to appease you or spin something. That statement and then action sticking with it is more important than really the entire process. Like, how do I stick to that? [WILL] I think that three of the most important ingredients in a leader in gendering trust from their people are A, taking the time to show the people that you work with, that you want to get to know them, that you care enough about them as individuals beyond just bodies, to fill a role. That you will invest time to get to know them, time that does not have a clearly defined return. That's one. Two, being very clear and setting expectations with the team on what your non-negotiables are and how you'll make decisions and then three, being as close to unwaveringly, consistent as humanly possible in holding people accountable to those very non-negotiables that you just set their expectations around. [TYLER] I wrote that down as connection, communication, consistency. [WILL] I love that. [TYLER] You think about that as a leader. I believe this, I believe this is, it's something that I speak a lot with I try to communicate through my community is that it all starts with connection. If you're, you talk, as I interpret what you're talking about, the new hire, you're looking to build a connection with those people that day. You're setting expectations, you're setting the environment, that is, you're asking for their identities so they're a part of it. That's connecting. I mean, we did that here as we got started, we connect over Cornell, we connected about other things, we connected about my background, agriculture, the hat you're wearing. That to me moves relationships along. That's to me, that's intentional, but it's also, I know how we're going to get the most out of this, is if we build that, and then it's having those expectations, like you're saying, and then staying with it. Having that ability to communicate as a leader is imperative. Then the consistency is, I elude back to is, hey, I need to hold true to that even when I don't want to. [WILL] Yeah, you can't always hold people accountable or you can't only hold people accountable when you have enough energy to. Sometimes you need to dig deep into the tank and find the energy even when you don't think you have it. I think connection, by the way, is also the cornerstone of hospitality. Like when you, one of the most beautiful and clear and efficient way is to engender connection with other people is to show them that they are seen, to give them a sense of belonging, to remind them that you will take the time to hear what they say and then do something with what you heard. That is hospitality. Like when you go into a great hospitality place, whether it's a restaurant or hotel or any number of other service businesses that are making the choice to be in the hospitality industry, that's the one thing they all have in common, is that the person you're being served by has taken the time to get to know you, and they're delivering an experience to you that is unique to you. I'm going to answer your question now, how did this become the guiding principle or focus in my approach to restaurants? Well, for me, it started with an accolade that I was aspiring to achieve, which I think is fine. Accolades are important and dangerous. They're dangerous because if you start working for the accolade alone, then you can quickly look up and realize you've lost your way, but you can use them as a tool to help motivate you and help push you further than you would normally be inclined to go. The accolade in question came, I had been at this restaurant 11 Madison Park for four years. When I got there was a middling brassie in the first few years. We were there through a focus on excellence, almost a maniacal focus on the product and the excellence of that product. We improved dramatically to the point where we went from no Michelin stars to three Michelin stars, two New York Times stars to four. And for those of you unfamiliar with the words I just used, those are the highest ratings you can get in the restaurant business. But this one, which was to be on the list of the 50 best restaurants in the world and we finally got invited to that ceremony and our first year we came in last place. [TYLER] Which isn't really last place, but it's last place. [WILL] Well, here's the thing. [TYLER] I get it. It's last place. I understand that feeling, but --- [WILL] In that room we were in last place. There's a funny story, if people want to read it, it's, I think the book starts out with that story. You get to decide your perspective. It's like the documentary, the Last Dance with Michael Jordan, where he talks about how people would accidentally bump into him and then he would decide that they did it with intention just to fuel his competitiveness. Another way to say that is one of my favorite quotes from my dad, "adversity is a terrible thing to waste." That is true in the normal course of life. We can't control what adversity is thrown our way, but we can control how we react to it, how we allow it to fuel us, how we allow it to stoke or competitive fires and all of that. And sometimes you don't need for adversity, you don't need to wait for adversity to come to you organically. You can just manufacture it. So even if I wasn't genuinely upset about having come in last place, I still likely would've used it as a reason to push me harder. Now I got super angry when we were in last place. How is this possible? We're one of the best restaurants in America. That we're number 50 in the world that doesn't make sense. But ultimately we got the acceptance because here's the thing about the list, that's patently absurd to name one restaurant as the best restaurant in the world. What the list acknowledges is the restaurant that's having the greatest impact in the world of restaurants. [TYLER] I think that's, you share that in the book, and I think that is so profound. We can be the best metric wise, but if we're not making an impact, what is it worth? [WILL] Yes, then what are we doing? It's certainly a lot less fulfilling and there's a lot less legacy that comes out of it if you're just a practitioner. And so with that acknowledgement that night, I started thinking about the other restaurants that had topped that list before us. There's a restaurant in Copenhagen with the chef Renee Redzepi. They pioneered the whole idea of foraging for ingredients and creating a restaurant that wouldn't make sense to experience anywhere else in the world, but exactly where it was. Or a chef named Renne from a restaurant in Spain who pioneer gastronomy, which is the technique that's used in every restaurant in the world, whether in large doses or very small doses. Both of these chefs were unreasonable in pursuit of their product and relentless about what needed to change about the product. They were willing to do whatever it took in pursuit of the ingredients, the technique, the presentation. That night after we came in last place, my dad gave me this paperweight, which I have on my desk to this day, gave it to me when I was kid, says, "What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?" And he would always encourage me to answer that question honestly, whatever the answer was, to just try to do that. Saying that far too many people are scared to say their most audacious goals out loud for fear that if they do and then don't achieve them, they'll let themselves and everyone around them down. But if you don't have the confidence and conviction to dream big out loud, you'll never achieve it. So that night I wrote on this cocktail napkin, we will be number one in the world, but any leader, a goal without a strategy that you are going to employ to try to achieve it is really meaningless. [TYLER] A nightmare. [WILL] So underneath that, I had to write what our impact was going to make. If they were unreasonable in pursuit of product and relentless in pursuit of what needed to change about that product, I decided I wanted to be unreasonable in pursuit of people and relentless in pursuit of the one thing that would never change, which is our collective desire to feel seen, to feel a sense of belonging, to feel welcome. So then I wrote Unreasonable Hospitality on that same cocktail napkin, and it was really in that night that this new journey began, this recognition that in my world, and I think the ingredients are different based on businesses, but the recipe is the same, in my world, the food, the service, and the room, they're just ingredients in the recipe of human connection, and if we could focus as much on connection as we always had been focusing on the food we were serving, then we could make a real significant impact. [TYLER] What do you think, so did, take that a step, why do you think it was missing in the restaurateur industry that allowed you to focus on that to be the impactful difference? [WILL] Well, I think it's missing in most industries. I think it's missing in most industries because people reserve their best efforts for the thing they're serving or selling and don't have much margin for the things that are left. [TYLER] Ok, yeah. [WILL] I also think there's a timeliness to it. I think, I mean, following the pandemic, talking about the hybrid workplace, everything that you're referencing right now, I think we ,well, thinking about the digital transformation and now the increasing presence of AI, I think as a species we're reconnecting with our genuine need to feel connected to other people in a way that we maybe always didn't feel was as important because it was never taken away from us as much as it's been removed from us recently. But I think so many of the people that succeed do so because of the products and now is this moment where I just think there's this general reckoning that that's just not enough anymore. And by the way, it's not enough for the person on the receiving end and it's also increasingly not enough for the people on the serving end. Because if all you're doing is selling someone a product, that's not a very fulfilling life to live. It's actually the presence of hospitality at the center of a culture where people on the team are given the permission and the resources to bring their own creativity to how they make other people feel that transforms a culture. It starts from within, it goes back to the whole hospitality as a team sport thing. Because if you can create an environment where the people on your team are able to imbue the experience they're serving with their own creativity, not only will they be so much more motivated to make the experience as good as it possibly can based on the agency and empowerment that they feel, but, and I've said this a million times, I don't think there's anything more energizing than the look on someone's face when they receive a gift you're responsible for giving them. We're in this time when everyone's struggling with staffing and depletion and burnout, and people are giving people more days off and paying them a little bit more, both of which important, but both of which are effectively treating symptoms and not the underlying condition, which is to make work more fulfilling. [TYLER] Well, I think the circle that goes around all of this, we've talked about it, it doesn't matter if you're leading, it doesn't matter if you're serving, it doesn't matter if you're interacting in your community, I think the pandemic really showed that we are a wildly disconnected community world and everyone is journeying. What you just told me was connection. I want to be connected to why are we doing this? Who are we serving? What are we trying to accomplish? What's the bigger picture? I believe that the pandemic forced that. I believe it's also this movement from a generation. I talked to you about this before. We are moving from generations of leaders, from a leadership basis that is, we'll call it baby boomer to non-millennial and Gen Z and we all have a different perspective of the world. It used to be where if you go into different sociological studies where it's what is like the normal group of community friends? No, it's like 148 people. Well, now we don't, we have a much, much larger connection group, but yet those connections are so shallow. It's just you walk in fast food, bam, off and gone. There's not that relationship that's built, but that's happened in all of our relationships, our work relationships. Well, I don't want to have that deep connection with people that I work with because I'm just doing my job. I want to have connection with people outside of that. But then we lose that outside until we're left with nothing. Then I think as you bring up and you go back to the new hire process and making sure that that connection, hey, you're a new class, I'm connecting you guys, we're connecting here to what we're serving, is a piece of leadership that it isn't required, but it is absolutely demanded to a point where it is a non-negotiable. [WILL] Well, I think having, I believe hospitality is the new, or will soon be the new required leadership skill. These are my, this is my like chronology of leadership skills. Leaders, once upon a time needed to just be the person in the room with the confidence and conviction to say to a bunch of other people, this is where we're going and people crave leadership so they would follow that person. Then that was no longer enough. My friend Simon Sinek with this book Start With Why people needed to be inspired to want to go there. They needed to understand why they should want to. Then generationally it changed again. This is a lot about what my book is. Even a group of people being inspired to want to go somewhere wasn't enough, they needed to feel like they were a part of determining how you were going to get there. Generationally, people needed agency and a sense of ownership and inclusion to want to follow someone, like, I'll follow you so long as you listen to what I have to say as well. By the way, that's a beautiful thing. Now, post pandemic things have changed, hybrid, remote. The people on your team are not organically connecting like they once were around the metaphorical water cooler or after work at happy hour. And in the absence of your team feeling that bond, they have an inability to cease being a collection of individuals and come together as a trusting team and only once you've done that can you unlock their collective creativity and capacity. There's data out there that says people are far less likely to leave a job once they have one or two good friends at that job. But now the leader needs to be much more intentional about creating the conditions for connection. They can't waste meetings. They need to take gatherings seriously. They need to make sure that they're sowing the seeds for relationships that transcend efficiency in product. [TYLER] I had this conversation on Tuesday, brought it up again today, and I'm going to paint this picture and it's time-stamped here. It's recorded. What you just described to me as we come into a workplace is we're in this big meadow. If you're having a meeting in your workplace, your new hire meeting, we'll go back to that. You're having your normal pre-meal service. It's like a meadow and everyone's milling around. They're trying to find their spot. They're like animals grazing. Well, you know to accomplish what you're going to accomplish, you have to go through the mountain pass and there's a trail through the mountain pass. So you're leading the group, you're the shepherd, you're trying to get everyone efficiently through the pass and if you have to create time for them to mill around in the meadow. They need to rest, they need to graze, they need to figure out who is the boss cow? Who is the one that's going to push everyone around and they just fall in and they find their place? We have to have that meetings, we have to have that in the communities because this is one thing that I've learned, it's a little bit tongue in cheek, but it's true. Why don't animals graze in single file? [WILL] I love that. [TYLER] Because they're going to end up eating the shit from the one in front of them. [WILL] I love that [TYLER] They have to be able to spread around. They have to be able to find out that hey, maybe that mountain trail that I want to go up that I think is the right way. Maybe that's not the right trail. Maybe there's one over tucked around in the corner, but somebody grazing over there, laying down over there, spending time over there is going to find that. Then when it's time to go through the trail, we're single file. We can go fast, we can go directive, we can make sure we get through that. But we have to be fully prepared beforehand. And as a leader, if we're trying to shove everyone in from an agenda point of view and not allowing that time for people to grace, then we're not going to get through that past. We're going to just bottleneck and then it's going to be the Donner party all over again. [WILL] No, dude, I love that. I think that's really smart. I always say, and I was talking about this recently, I started a business with a buddy of mine and each of our respective teams over the course of the pandemic and every time we'd get together for a Zoom to do whatever we were doing my team and his team started getting really close. So the Zoom would start, but it would never be like before seven minutes into the Zoom that we'd actually start getting into the work because everyone would want to catch up and I could always see on his facial expression, he did not have the ability to like hide his feelings that he was very, very annoyed during those seven minutes. Then the meeting would start and then he'd be great. I called him one day after I said, "Hey dude, what's going on with you in the first seven minutes? Like what's that energy?" And he goes, "I hate small talk." He goes, "I'm on Zoom all day, it's a waste. I just want to get into it. Let's just get the work done." I could not disagree more. I think if a leader is only focused on efficiency, they will become less efficient. To your point, you can't just go up the mountaintop. You need time to graze and you need time for the team to feel connected because the more connected they are to one another, the less inclined they're going to be to want to let one another down. So I think creating space with intention not just you're lazy and you're not ready to start the meeting, but you've made the call. One of my colleagues who you know, her name is Marylin, that is especially important to her now. I have a small team right now and so we have Zooms all the time and so we don't just have small talk for the first seven minutes of every Zoom, because we might be on three Zooms over the course of the day, but sometimes it's clear that we do need it. I'll just say right when it starts, "Hey guys, let's get a quick Marylin 10 in." That means we're taking 10 minutes. It's not for or about Marylin anymore. That's just the naming mechanism around it. It's just a check-in time, a time to check in with one another, not just as professionals, but as people. [TYLER] I believe it's essential. I believe it comes back to connection. But here's the question that I posed when I shared that and that came to me, and I'll ask for you to answer this, is it more important to have everyone together and not reach the point where you want to go? Or is it better to reach the point where you want to go but have lost everyone? Because that's the question that every leader faces at some point in the day, in the week, when it comes down to a deadline, to a meeting, whatever else. Would you rather have everyone with you and we're not quite there, but we're on our way or I'm going to get there and I don't care who's with me? [WILL] Man, I don't know if it's such a binary answer. [TYLER] Yeah, I get it [WILL] I think that [TYLER] It's hard. [WILL] You need to always invite people along, give them the resources required such that they have the capacity to be right alongside you. If certain people opt out along the way because they just decide that what you're trying to accomplish is not right for them, I'm not going to slow down or lower my ambition for one or two people. But you framed it in an absolute perspective, you have everyone with you and you haven't achieved it or no one with you and you have I guess I don't think that's a real question because I don't think it's possible to achieve it if you have no one left. You know like if you've lost everybody --- [TYLER] Then that's the answer to the question. Because I believed you, what you're saying is like, well there's going to be people, the New York Yankees this year, they're not going to have the same roster on October 1st, the end of the season as they do today, but they're still a team and it's how many of those guys are still engaged? How many of those are still playing? All right, that's going to determine where they hang --- [WILL] Yeah, to play that off, it's if all you have is the pitcher on the field, you're never going to win a single game. I don't care if it's the best pitcher in the world. [TYLER] You're done. I mean that's, so that, it's absolute, but I think what I take from that, and appreciate your interjection there is it isn't absolute, but at the same point, I believe this, if you have the team with you may not hit the deadline in the timeframe that you first wanted, but you will hit it and if you don't have people, it doesn't matter. You'll never, even if you think you hit it, you didn't hit it. [WILL] Yeah, yeah I'm with you on that. And I think what I was trying to say in the first one is just because you haven't picked the exact right team on day one of the season, and it turns out that two months in a couple you're left field, you're shortstop, they're not right and you need to move on from them and bring on two people who are right for the team, that doesn't show a failure in leadership. It just shows that you have the capacity to course-correct on the way. [TYLER] Absolutely. That to me is more important. [WILL] We just have the rest of our conversation around a baseball analogy and see how far we can take it. [TYLER] Considering how many people view, watch baseball, I think we'd lose a lot of people because it's a dying sport. I do want to, for the last few minutes because I really wanted to ask about this because I know one, the way you spoke of them, you've spoken about them in our time already. How important, you mentioned I think three major mentors, I think you have more in your life, but very impactful people in your life that you referenced. You mentioned Danny earlier, you talked about your dad, but I also took from this what you wrote, that your mom was very, very instrumental in you seeing things that not everyone else would see. [WILL] Yeah, my mom's, my mom was quadriplegic growing up, and we don't need to go into the whole story. We don't have we don't have time for that right now. But in my relationship with her, a few really, really powerful things happened. One, I mean, I was serving her when I was like 12, 13, 14. I was cooking her dinner. I was just, my dad and I were a team. We had to figure it out. We had to run our household. In serving my mother at such an early age, I never felt bad for myself, perhaps mostly because my dad never felt bad for himself. He led by example in that way. But to the contrary, I felt good because I was given the gift of being able to serve my mother. Something that maybe I didn't have things that all my friends had in the relationships they had with their moms, but I had the unique ability to serve her, something that they never got to, got to experience. That felt great and I wanted to do that for the rest of my life. And even though she was a quadriplegic, how loved I felt by her consistently through the way she smiled at me, the energy she sent to me from across the room, it instilled in me at an early age, not only the obvious impact of nonverbal communication, but the unbelievable power that hospitality has to possibly impact those around them, that even this person who could not walk or move had the ability to make me feel loved and to make my day a better day because she threw intention with the limited capacity she had, did everything she could and it was profound. So my mother was extraordinarily impactful and probably should start talking about her as a mentor because in many ways she was. I do think mentorship is extraordinarily important. I don't think you're ever too young to be a mentor, and I don't think you're ever too old to have a mentor. If anyone looks at their lives and realizes that they're not currently wearing both of those hats, as a mentor and a mentee, regardless of where you're at in your career or in your life, I would encourage you through intention to try to fix that. [TYLER] I think the mentor relationship as a leader is the best, I guess, way to look at being a leader in my mind. If we're choosing to mentor, then we want better for someone else, even though it may not, may be better for us, but if we're collectively doing that together, it is going to be better for all of us. I think that idea mentality is the mentality to have, I believe that's a level five leader from Jim Collins [WILL] Well, and a great leader should also have a mentor because it shows very clearly that they understand that they still have a lot to learn and it brings the humility required to be a great leader. [TYLER] Totally. Well I think that's the cherry on top, that's the 5% and I want to leave it there. Thank you so much, [WILL] Man, I feel like we never got through the first question. We could do this for a lot longer, but I appreciate you and I really enjoyed that conversation and I hope others did too. [TYLER] Thanks so much, Will. [WILL] Thanks bud. [TYLER] As I wrap up from this conversation with Will, there's two things that I want to really focus on. One is the three Cs that we discussed, that is connection, communication, inconsistency. Those elements I think are not only imperative in regard to unreasonable hospitality, hospitality in general, but in leadership, in life, in relationships. The next one is, we have mentors in our life that impact us and affect us. The fact that when I asked Will about his mom that he wrote about briefly, but wrote about and how she impacted him, I can see from our conversation, our interaction that she was one of his most impressive mentors. Not his dad, Danny Meyer, professors, those people, the people around him, yes, absolutely, but his mom. And just think about that. There are people impacting you in your life and maybe their circumstances are different. Learn from them. Be fascinated about what they have to share with you because you will learn more from that than overlooking. I thank you for being here again, super excited to share this time with you, that you're a subscriber, that you share with us, but as well, one last invitation, the Impact Driven Workshop. Go to impactdrivenworkshop.com to learn more. Love to see you there. Till next time, have a good one.