1: Ever said, “It’s just quicker if I do it myself?”
Probably.
Yesterday, we looked at the powerful results of “the ownership program” at the New York City restaurant Eleven Madison Park where junior team members were given ownership of different types of beverages, including coffee, cocktails, and tea.
“I’m not going to lie,” General Manager Will Guidara acknowledges in his book Unreasonable Hospitality, “it’s much easier to not share ownership—at least to start.”
Why? Because “at the beginning, the young people running these ownership programs did require tons of oversight and encouragement and advice,” he explains.
“Mentoring them was a lot of work,” Will writes.
“And there were bumps in the road,” he says. “Yes, we’d set up guardrails so Kirk couldn’t lose a million bucks in beer, but a kid right out of hotel school is naturally going to make more mistakes than someone with ten years of experience running a beverage program.”
That said, Will believes strongly that the benefits far outweigh the challenges.
“While it does take more time to fix someone else’s mistake than to do it ourselves,” he writes, “these are short-term investments of time with long-term gains.”
After all, “if we insist on a manager having previous managerial experience, we’ll never be able to promote a promising server into the role.
“By definition, then,” Will observes, “it’s impossible to promote from within if we wait until an employee has all the experience they need.
“Often, the perfect moment to give someone more responsibility is before they’re ready,” he notes. “Take a chance, and that person will almost always work extra hard to prove us right.”
In Will’s case, the results were over-the-top good: “Given that I eventually promoted Kirk [Kelewae, who ran the beer program] to the position of general manager of EMP—you could say the investment paid off.”
2: Will and his team also found other, smaller ways for team members to take on additional responsibility.
After wine director John Ragan began a weekly meeting called Happy Hour, dedicated to the wine, beer, and cocktails on our menu, Will encouraged associates from other parts of the restaurant to step in and give presentations of their own.
“A onetime presentation was much less of an obligation than taking over an ownership program,” Will writes, “and it was fun, because the people who worked for us loved food and wine.
“Whether they’d had a lightbulb moment with a glass of Burgundy at a wine bar and wanted to know more about the history of the region or had finally tasted a sherry that wasn’t like sneaking a sip at their grandmother’s bridge game, presenting at Happy Hour was an excuse to do research, then share what they’d learned with the team.”
In time, the Happy Hour presentations expanded beyond the topics of wine and spirits.
“Madison Square Park was right outside our enormous windows,” Will shares. “One of the servers did a presentation on the storied history of the park, so we’d have interesting factoids to share with guests. (The rules of baseball were created there; the torch from the Statue of Liberty was displayed there; and it was the site of the country’s first community Christmas tree lighting in 1912.)
“That,” he explains, “led us to reach out to Kenneth T. Jackson, a professor at Columbia and the world’s foremost authority on New York history, who gave the entire team a tour of the park and the surrounding blocks.”
One EMP associate Jeff Taylor was a restaurant-history buff.
“Once a month,” Will writes, “he’d do a deep dive on an iconic, old-school restaurant like Le Pavillon, which debuted at the 1939 World’s Fair, launched chefs like Jacques Pépin, and defined both French food and fine dining for New Yorkers in the second half of the twentieth century.”
Another presentation came from Billy Peelle, a food runner, who researched the New York Public Library’s vast historic menu archive, and shared with the team how menu design has evolved over the decades.
“Perhaps it’s not a surprise,” Will writes, that, years later, Billy also went on to be the general manager.”
3: There was another benefit to the Happy Hour presentations.
“As more and more members of the hourly team led classes,” he notes, “they acted more like leaders.”
Public speaking is an important element of leadership.
“Being able to communicate our own excitement is a powerful way to engage the people who work for and with us,” Will writes, “and to infect them with energy and a sense of purpose.”
As team members became more comfortable speaking, the overall quality of their communication also improved.
“I loved the way they talked to guests: After all, taking an order, helping a guest make a decision about wine, or spieling a course are all forms of public speaking,” he explains. “They had more authority when giving instructions to their colleagues during service, too.
“But the real shift was intangible,” Will writes, “they began carrying themselves differently.”
More tomorrow.
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Reflection: Where might I be holding back from delegating because I think it’s “just quicker if I do it myself,” and what opportunities for growth am I unintentionally taking away from others?
Action: Choose one task or project this week to hand off to someone who’s ready to stretch, focusing on coaching and feedback rather than control.
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