1: A decade before their restaurant Eleven Madison Park (EMP) would be recognized as the world’s best restaurant, Will Guidara and Daniel Humm were young and hungry entrepreneurs.
The year was 2007.
“We wanted to be one of the best restaurants in New York,” Will writes in his book Unreasonable Hospitality. “We wanted to make our restaurant excellent without sacrificing warmth, contemporary without compromising standards.”
“But before we set out of that journey,” Will recalls, “we needed to know how we characterized ourselves, both as individuals and as a team.”
Up to that point, as General Manager and Chef of Eleven Madison Park, Will and Daniel had set the goals and made all the decisions by themselves.
“At many of the companies we’d studied, strategic planning was reserved for upper management,” Daniel writes.
But organizations with extraordinary workplace cultures, like Nordstrom, Apple, and JetBlue, take a different path.
“They all held strategic planning sessions, or long-form meetings where groups from across the organization got together to brainstorm ways for the company to grow,” Will writes.
“This was a revelation to us,” he notes, “the practice is still virtually unheard of in the restaurant world.
“It was also a relief.”
Why? Because they had built a team of “vibrant, bright young people who loved restaurants and food and hospitality,” Will shares.
“No matter how ambitious or innovative we were, we could never hope to match the combined brainpower of our entire staff.”
2: So, they closed the restaurant for the day—”admittedly unreasonable,” Will reflects, “and invited everyone who worked at EMP to come together and strategize as a team about our future. . .
“We included everybody on the team,” he recalls, “from the assistant general manager and the chef de cuisine all the way to the dishwashers, prep cooks, and assistant servers, which is what we called our bussers. . .
“This inclusivity was important,” he writes, “because a busser sees all kinds of things a general manager never can. . .
“Of course we’d be able to come up with more (and better!) ideas if they were involved,” Will notes, “not to mention the sense of ownership they’d get from making those contributions.”
In later years, the strategic planning sessions became brainstorming sessions in which the team collectively set goals for the coming year.
“But that first year,” Will explains, “we posed only one question: What do we want to embody?”
After sharing the goal, Will and Daniel got out of the team’s way.
“They broke into ten groups, scattered across the restaurant, each gathered around a notebook. I spent the day walking from group to group,” he writes, “noting as people got excited, argued, and laughed with one another.”
Will went from table to table, listening, but he didn’t contribute.
“Because I didn’t want anyone to feel that they couldn’t speak freely,” Will writes, “we’d had the dining room and kitchen managers do their strategic planning the day before.”
So, on the day of the all-hands meeting, managers had a different role: “The sous-chefs came out into the dining room and took custom sandwich orders from the staff,” he explains, “while the dining room managers staffed the kitchen, putting the orders together.
“Give people a safe space to mess with their bosses,” Will writes, “and some of them are going to go for it—I remember one request for a turkey sandwich featuring one slice of untoasted wheat, one slice of toasted rye, and three dots of mayo.”
The other benefit to switching roles? Everyone left, Will notes, “with a new appreciation for the difficulties their counterparts faced every night.”
After the brainstorming was completed, each of the ten groups presented what they had come up with.
“Immediately,” he observes, “we could see how inviting our team to take part in identifying and naming the goals of the company would increase the likelihood we’d all meet those goals together.
It was also clear how aligned the team was, Will observes.
“Ultimately, four words took center stage,” he shares. “None of them were particularly groundbreaking on their own, but we determined they could be—if we could embody all of them simultaneously.
- Education
- Passion
- Excellence
- Hospitality
“Education was a no-brainer,” Will writes. “We had always known that we wanted to build a culture based on teaching and learning, and to hire those who were curious about what they didn’t know and generous with what they did.
“Similarly,” he notes, “we wanted people who were passionate about the mission, as fired up as we were about what we were trying to accomplish.
“But it was the two remaining words on list—and the inherent conflict between them—that would inform everything we did going forward.”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: What might change in our workplace if everyone, from leadership to frontline staff, shared in defining our guiding values?
Action: Gather the team to co-create a short list of core principles—just a few words that capture who we are and how we aspire to show up together.
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