1: “Everyone who was anyone in Hollywood ate lunch at Spago,” Will Guidara writes in his book, Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect.
The restaurant was “the crown jewel of an empire presided over by Chef Wolfgang Puck,” he notes, “who had revolutionized American dining by popularizing California cuisine.”
It was the summer after Will graduated from high school. He was working as a busboy at the Spago.
“Half a busboy, actually,” he writes. “Spago was a well-oiled machine, and the bussers were impossibly fast and clean and efficient. Since I could never hope to keep up with them, they gave me half a station; every other busser had fourteen tables, while I had seven.
“I did half the side work—the behind-the-scenes maintenance work required to keep a restaurant running smoothly, like polished glassware and folding napkins—and received half the tips.”
Because his dad had gotten him the job, “the team would have been well within their rights,” Will reflects, “to roll their eyes while they were hazing me, but I was so excited to be there and worked so hard that everyone treated me like a kid brother.”
Then, one day, during the busy lunch rush, he opened a credenza in the dining room that “had been stocked so that a tall stack of bread and butter plates leaned precariously against the closed door,” he remembers. “As soon as I opened it, those plates slid to the ground and shattered into a million pieces.”
The resulting sound was ear-piercingly loud. The buzzing restaurant was suddenly silent. Will recalls someone clapped.
Next, “the kitchen doors flew open, and the chef de cuisine charged out of the kitchen, already screaming,” he writes. “At the top of his lungs and in front of everyone—my colleagues and all the guests—he told me exactly what he thought about my clumsiness. . . I was horrified.”
2: As leaders, one of our most important responsibilities is to give feedback.
“Every manager lives with the fantasy that their team can read their mind,” Will notes. “But in reality, we have to make our expectations clear. And our teams can’t be excellent if we’re not holding them accountable to the standards we’ve set. We normalize these corrections by making them swiftly, whenever they’re needed.”
As General Manager of Eleven Madison Park, which eventually earned the No. 1 ranking in The World’s 50 Best Restaurants, Will let his team know that “I wasn’t afraid to have difficult conversations—hearing difficult things, or saying them,” he writes.
In college, he read The One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson. “It’s an amazing resource on how to give feedback,” he writes.
His biggest takeaways? “Criticize the behavior, not the person. Praise in public; criticize in private. Praise with emotion, criticize without emotion.”
“I can still feel the flush of shame and horror that crept up from my collar when I was screamed at in the dining room by the chef de cuisine at Spago,” Will recalls. “I’ll remember it for the rest of my life. And while it was a terrible experience, it was also a privileged peek at a mistake I never wanted to make. Correct an employee in front of their colleagues, and they’ll never forgive you.
“In fact,” he observes, “the wall of shame that goes up may mean they they can’t even absorb what we’re telling them. Issue the same correction in private, though, and it’s a different exchange.”
As leaders, while it’s important to provide constructive criticism, we also need to be aware of our ratio of positive-to-negative comments. Otherwise, our team members will not be motivated.
When Will observed someone doing something great, “I made sure to find a way to hype them up for it, and in front of as many of their colleagues as I could,” he writes. “Receiving praise, especially in front of our peers, is addictive. We always want more.
“And if we can’t find more compliments to deliver than criticism, that’s a failure in leadership—either we’re not coaching the person sufficiently, or we’ve tried and it’s not working, which means they should no longer be on the team.”
3: What is one trap that young managers often fall into? Wanting to be liked.
“They work with people fourteen hours a day, and often they end up going out for a drink after work,” Will explains. “It’s normal to want to be seen as part of the group.
“So when a server comes in with an unironed shirt, we let the minor infraction slide in the interest of creating a friendly environment, both for the server in question and—let’s face it—for ourselves. We don’t say anything. And we don’t say anything when you notice the shirt isn’t ironed the next day, and the next day, and the next.
“By day twenty,” he notes, “we’ve started to take those wrinkles personally. The reality is that this guy hasn’t ironed his shirt because nobody’s told him to. But in our mind, he’s not ironing his shirt because he doesn’t respect us as the manager, or the restaurant he works at, or the other members of his team.
“That sloppy shirt has become a blinking neon sign for us: this guy couldn’t care less about the amazing organization we’re trying to build,” Will writes. “Our resentment festers, so by the time we eventually get around to addressing this unironed shirt issue with our employee, it feels personal—and emotional.
“Spoiler alert: the conversation we finally end up having with him is going to go badly.”
The answer is to talk about moments like this at manager meetings.
“Many of these confrontations could be avoided with early, clear, and drama-free corrections—like pulling that guy with the wrinkled shirt aside on day one to say: ‘Hey! Good to see you this morning. That shirt’s looking a little rough; why don’t you head upstairs and give it a once-over with the iron before we sit down for family meal?'”
By applying The One Minute Manager’s rules —criticizing behavior in private and without emotion—our team feels safe.
One other key is to be consistent. “Consistency is one of the most important and underrated aspects of being a leader. A person can’t feel safe at work if they’re apprehensive about what version of their manager they’re going to encounter on any given day,” Will observes.
And when we screw up, because we will from time to time, be quick to apologize.
“There’s an inherent intensity that comes with being passionate about what you do, and on occasion, it can get the better of us,” he notes. “I’ve certainly expressed exasperation and disappointment in ways that weren’t textbook illustrations of how to handle a correction in the workplace. But every time, I’ve made sure to apologize—not for the feedback itself, but for the way I delivered it.”
More tomorrow.
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Reflection: Am I offering feedback—both positive and constructive—in a way that motivates and respects our team, ensuring it’s consistent, private when needed, and always focused on behavior?
Action: Be attentive to praise team members in public, deliver corrections calmly and privately, and address small issues early—making feedback a normal and empowering part of our culture.