1: “When initiating change,” Will Guidara writes in his inspiring book, Unreasonable Hospitality, “I look for the best lever, whatever will allow me to transmit the most force with the least amount of energy.”
In 2006, Will became General Manager of the New York City restaurant Eleven Madison Park, or EMP. He inherited a culture with two warring factions, “the fine-dining squad” and the “old guard.”
“The servers and managers who had been running the restaurant for years and were proud of everything they’d created felt unsettled and disrespected, while the fine-dining squad was frustrated by the lack of progress toward excellence.”
The bottom line? Everyone was pissed off.
Eleven years later, Eleven Madison Park was ranked No. 1 in The World’s 50 Best Restaurants.
This week, we are examining the practices Will and Chef Daniel Humm utilized to transform the culture to deliver a world-class dining experience.
2: In Will’s opinion, a daily thirty-minute meeting with our team is one of the most powerful practices we can embrace as leaders.
“I firmly believe,” he writes, “that if every dentist’s office, every insurance company, every moving company had a daily thirty-minute meeting with their team, customer service as we know it would profoundly change.”
For restaurants, the daily meeting is called line-up or pre-meal. It’s when new menu items and new wines are introduced.
And, it can be “much, much more than that,” he believes.
At Eleven Madison Park, “attendance was mandatory,” Will writes. “The meetings started on time, at eleven and five, and lasted exactly thirty minutes.”
Will faced internal resistance when he announced the meeting would be thirty minutes.
“Sometimes my insistence on these meetings felt like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic,” Will writes. “The managers immediately let me know that taking the full thirty minutes for the meeting would mean less time for side work, which was already squeezed into a slot too tight for everything to get done.”
The answer, for Will, was simple. “So let’s dial back on some of this side work to make the time.”
Why is Will so passionate about the daily meeting?
When run correctly, the daily thirty-minute meeting transforms a group of individuals into a cohesive team.
Step one involves communicating consistent standards through repeated messaging. “A good manager makes sure everyone knows what they have to do, then makes sure they’ve done it,” he observes, “that’s the black-and-white part of being a leader.”
Step two is explaining to the team why they are doing what they’re doing. “I used pre-meal to get into that why,” Will writes. “I spoke to the spirit of the restaurant and to the culture we were trying to build. I used those meetings to inspire and uplift the team and to remind them what we were striving for.
“Those thirty minutes were our time to celebrate the wins, even the small ones,” he notes, “a time to publicly acknowledge when someone on the team was crushing it. . .
“Done right,” he writes, “a pre-meal meeting fills the gas tank of the people who work for you right before you ask them to go out and fill the tanks of the people they’re serving.”
Will believes the tone of the meeting is as important as the content. In fact, during his first year as GM, he led every single lunch and dinner pre-meeting, Monday through Friday.
“I wanted the team to see me,” he writes, “and to know I was accessible and accountable to them, and consistent–that I’d do exactly what I’d said I would do, when I’d said I would do it.”
Will was demonstrating the behavior he wanted and expected to see everywhere in the restaurant.
“There would be no more ambiguity about what we expected the servers to know,” he notes. “All the menu and wine descriptions had to be carefully written out, edited, and spell-checked by the managers, who were expected to have their packets ready on time for the meeting so servers could take notes in the packet during the verbal presentations made by the kitchen team and the wine director.
“I stayed late every night that first week,” he remembers, “designing a template for those line-up notes, so they would be beautiful as well as clear and well-organized.
“That was unreasonable, but the way we do one thing is the way we do everything, and I wanted those notes to be as thoughtful, as beautifully presented, as the lavender honey–glazed dry-aged duck we brought to our guests.
“In this case,” Will explains, “the people on staff were the recipients of my hospitality, and I wasn’t going to stand up and talk about excellence without modeling it myself.”
3: The agenda for the meetings was simple and consistent. “We’d start with housekeeping (“Thursday’s the last day to make changes to your health insurance; call Angie if you’ve got questions”). Then I’d move into a quick riff on a topic that had inspired me,” he recalls. “It could be an article I’d read about another company or a service experience I’d had somewhere else. Inspiration was everywhere.”
One day, Will went to a new place to get his hair cut, “a classic New York City barbershop, complete with a twisting striped pole and combs soaking in huge blue jars of Barbicide.
“As I was paying for my haircut, the gruff barber asked me, ‘What do you want?’ I looked up, confused; he was pointing at three huge handles filled with gin, vodka, and whiskey.
“‘Whiskey!’ I said, grinning, and he handed me a shot in a tiny disposable cup, the kind your dentist uses for mouthwash, before sending me on my way.”
Will shared the story at the EMP pre-meal that afternoon.
“Who on earth thought of that mini-shot?” he asked. “It was ridiculous, irrelevant, whimsical. A tiny dose of generosity designed to—what? To surpass your expectations, to change your channel, maybe just to put a smile on your face as you were walking out the door. It was wonderful, and I wanted the team to be as inspired by it as I had been.”
Each pre-meal meeting began with a standard call-and-response: “Happy Wednesday!” “Happy Wednesday!”
The meeting ended that way, too. I’d say, “Have a good service!” to which the staff would respond, in the tradition of the French kitchen, “Oui!”
“You knew when you’d given a good pre-meal by the way they said “Oui!”
More tomorrow.
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Reflection: Am I dedicating enough consistent time each day to connect, inspire, and communicate with our team—so everyone feels seen and aligned?
Action: Commit to leading a daily, energizing meeting with my team, using it to reinforce our standards, celebrate small wins, and model the culture and behaviors I want to see.
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