1: It was the team’s very first strategic planning meeting.
Everyone who worked at the New York City restaurant Eleven Madison Park was there. The team had been divided into ten groups.
The question General Manager Will Guidara had charged them with answering was: “What do we want to embody?”
As Will went from table to table, listening in, he noticed a certain tension.
“Some people were arguing passionately about the importance of welcome and warmth and connection,” he writes in his wonderful book Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect.
“Others were convinced,” he notes, “nothing should take precedence over an impeccably trained staff and spit-polishing every formal aspect of the restaurant to a perfect shine,”
Hospitality and excellence. “They’re not friends,” Will observes.
“It’s easy to have a sweet culture of hospitality if we’re not going to be maniacal about precision and detail,” he observes. “Who cares if the waitress at the diner forgot to bring your Coke? What’s a little sloppiness between friends?
“And it’s pretty easy to scare your staff so they almost never, ever make a technical misstep in the dining room.”
The unintended consequence?
“If they’re living in constant fear of being caught in a mistake,” he notes, “we’re not going to get their most realized, relaxed selves interacting with our guests.”
2: Ultimately, both hospitality and excellence would make the list of four core values upon which Eleven Madison Park would be built.
There is power, Will believes, in the resulting tension: “By putting both words on our list, we were acknowledging that we would need to recognize the inherent friction between hospitality and excellence.”
To be successful, they would need to be good at both.
“We would need to explore that contradiction and embrace it,” Will writes. —integrating two opposing ideas and embodying both simultaneously.”
Not one or the other. But both and.
“Later, I would learn that the management guru Roger Martin calls this ‘integrative thinking,'” Will writes. “In When More Is Not Better, Roger argues that leaders should actually go out of their way to choose conflicting goals.”
One poignant example? Southwest Airlines seeks to be both the lowest-cost airline and the leader in both customer and employee satisfaction.
“Those goals would seem to be in opposition,” Will notes, “and perhaps they are. But much of the time, they’ve succeeded at all three.”
Which is one of the reasons Southwest has been the country’s most profitable airline.
3: Roger believes that embracing conflicting goals forces us to be innovative.
“We’d seen it ourselves,” Will writes. “When I’d arrived at EMP, one faction had been sacrificing hospitality in the name of precision and excellence, while the other had been delivering warmer service with less finesse.
“Those who survived and thrived with us had been able to see the merit in the other group’s priorities.”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: Where in our organization do we default to “either/or” thinking when we might achieve more by holding two opposing goals in creative tension?
Action: Identify one apparent contradiction in our work—like warmth and precision—and explore how we could pursue both with intentional balance.
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