1: As leaders, when we are short-staffed, it is difficult to resist the temptation to hire the first person who walks through the door.
“I know what it’s like to think, We need someone so desperately—how bad could this person be?” Will Guidara writes in his wonderful book Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect.
“I’ve also (unfortunately),” he recalls, “been in a position to find out the answer to that question.”
Because, as Will writes, “it’s more detrimental to saddle ourselves and our team with the wrong person, suffer the damage they do, and then end up right where we started three weeks later.”
It’s far better to have the team work a few extra shifts until we find the right person.
Because hiring intentionally is always a better strategy.
As leaders,” Will notes, “we must “be as unreasonable in how we build our teams as we are in how we build our product or experience.
“When we hire, we should ask ourselves: Could this person become one of the top two or three on the team?” he recommends. “They don’t necessarily have to be all the way there yet, but they should have the potential.”
Because A-Players want to work with other A=Players. So, hiring A-Players is the best strategy to attract and retain other A-Players.
2: Which is hard to do when a battle is being waged between different factions of our team.
This was the situation Will inherited when he became General Manager of the New York City restaurant Eleven Madison Park.
The “fine dining squad,” who had recently been hired to elevate the restaurant’s stature, was actively feuding with the “old guard,” who had been working there for years.
“EMP only had two stars in those early years,” Will writes, “but it was a popular, busy restaurant with a ton of devoted regulars.”
This “culture war” impacted Will’s ability to retain new hires.
“In truth, hiring was hard before we got the culture of the restaurant fully dialed in,” Will remembers.
“When we had an opening, I’d find someone good to join the team—not necessarily impeccably trained, but energetic and enthusiastic about the mission.”
Will was looking for “people with the right attitude and philosophy of hospitality.
“We were looking for the kind of person who runs after a stranger on the street to return a dropped scarf, who stops by with a plate of cookies to welcome a new family to the neighborhood, or who offers to help carry a stranger’s heavy stroller up the subway stairs.
“The kind of truly hospitable person,” he notes, “who wants to do good things, not for financial gain or some sort of karmic bump, but because the idea of bestowing graciousness upon others makes their own day better.”
This hiring strategy would ultimately become an essential component of Eleven Madison Park’s rise to the #1 spot on The World’s 50 Best Restaurants list.
“It didn’t matter if our new hires didn’t know a ton about wine or how to pronounce turbot,” he shares. “If they were excited about what we were up to, then we could teach them what they needed to know.”
But these new hires did not want to be part of a team with active infighting.
“Even if that person was all charged up when they got hired, the residual negativity of some of their colleagues would eventually infect them,” Will writes.
“The fine-dining crew was still being snooty, and some of the remaining members of the old guard weren’t ever going to get on board.
“Three or four times,” Will writes, “I hired someone I thought showed promise. But they’d last only a month before the flame of their enthusiasm dimmed and died, and then they’d quit.”
Then, inspiration struck.
“The next time a position opened up, I didn’t race to fill it,” he explains.
“Instead, I waited until another position came open, and then another, and then hired three great people, all at the same time.
“Instead of one new person cupping their hands, trying to protect they tiny flames of their enthusiasm,” Will notes, “that little crew brought a bonfire no one could put out.”
From that moment forward, Will would start new hires together and tell them to “lean on one another; support one another.”
His goal? “I wanted them to know that if they approached their shared experience as a team, the impact they could have on the restaurant would be profound.”
3: Will made another critical decision early on regarding new hires: “Everyone we hired started as a kitchen server, running food from the kitchen to the dining room.
“This meant,” he writes, “they started at the lowest position in the dining room, even if their previous position had been as a general manager somewhere else.
“Practically speaking, this helped with the weeding process; if someone was going to balk at starting out as a kitchen server, they probably weren’t a good fit.”
The other benefit of this approach was that it allowed new hires to understand all aspects of the restaurant.
“Because what we needed them to know was much bigger than the correct way to open a bottle of wine,” Will writes.
“It’s a cliché that culture can’t be taught; it has to be caught,” he notes.
“And what better way to appreciate the exquisite nature of Daniel [Humm]’s food than to spend six months ferrying plates from the kitchen to the table?”
As the new hires learned the technical aspects of their new roles, they also absorbed the emerging culture that Will and Daniel were intent on building.
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: How might our team’s culture improve if we focused on hiring for attitude and shared mission, even if it meant waiting longer to find the right people?
Action: Review our current hiring approach and commit to prioritizing true hospitality, attitude, and culture fit—possibly hiring in groups to ignite lasting enthusiasm.
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