The idea
The standard in any hotel, restaurant or service team is what the leader does in front of the people who work there. It is set by gesture: the cup lifted from a lobby chair, the mise rearranged at the pass without a word, the problem noticed and fixed or noticed and walked past. The team reads every one of these within a week and copies what it sees. Manuals and ratings sit downstream of that example.
Philip Barnes, then running The Savoy in London, accepts that when he stays in his own hotel six hundred people know what he eats and who he dines with. His formulation is the sharpest in the book: a leader who walks by a problem has become the problem, because the team saw the leader notice it and will now read every similar fault as something the leader tolerates. Enrico Crippa, at Piazza Duomo in Alba, gives the kitchen’s version in one line.
“How can I ask my team to sacrifice if I don’t get my own hands dirty?” Enrico Crippa, chef of Piazza Duomo, Alba
George Cozonis carries the negative example from early in his career. He was an assistant restaurant manager on a morning when half his team had called out and the line of waiting guests was growing faster than he could seat it. The food and beverage director came by, remarked on how busy it was, and when Cozonis asked for help walked away without a word.
“I will always remember that day. It taught me a lot about being there for your team, having integrity, and leading by example.” George Cozonis, then general manager of The Plaza Hotel, New York
Several practices follow from this. The first is where your body is. The general managers who command the deepest loyalty walk the floor for two or three hours a day, and the chefs are at the pass through service, tasting and watching the stations.
The second is recognition. The team is watching whether you see them. A lobby walk that registers no faces is also a gesture, and it reads as surveillance. Surveillance gets compliance and little else; the leaders who are known by their teams get work nobody had to ask for.
The third is admitting error in front of the team. Peter Hopgood, then at Outrigger Fiji Beach Resort, rebuilt an autocratic style into one built on surveying staff and appreciating them in public, and he did it visibly, so the team watched the change happen. A private adjustment reverts under stress. A witnessed one becomes the new standard.
The fourth is the difference between presence and performance. Matthew Orlando, then chef and owner of Amass, said a leader needs to be more motivated than the team. He is describing the discipline of leaving the morning’s argument at the back of house door and bringing your real motivation into the room. Performance is decoded within a week, and after that the team obeys without following.
For an assistant manager or a sous chef, none of this waits for the title. You are already the most senior person in the room for stretches of every shift, and the people on your station or your desk are already copying you. Stephen Ansell led the Hyatt Regency Bishkek through a political revolution in 2010 on the strength of relationships with a local team built over ordinary days, and the chapter treats his account as proof that the habits built now are the ones a crisis calls on.
Think it through
- What did you walk past this week that you noticed and did not fix, and who on your team saw you do it?
- How many hours did you spend on the floor or at the pass in your last five shifts, and how many in an office or on a screen?
- Which people on your team could you name along with something about their lives right now, and which could you not?
- When did you last tell your team that you got something wrong, and what did you do next?
This week
Carry a walked past card for five shifts: a pocket card that records every fault you noticed, what you did about it, and who saw.
- Each shift, carry a card or a notes page and make a mark every time you notice something below standard, such as a smudged glass, a guest waiting, a station set up wrong or a colleague struggling.
- Beside each mark, write one of three words: fixed, delegated or passed. Then add whether anyone on the team was watching.
- Once during the week, in front of at least two people on your team, name something you got wrong, say what you should have done and say what happens now.
- On the fifth day, count the marks in each column and count how many times you were watched passing.
- Pick the one fault you passed most often and fix it yourself, visibly, on each of the next five shifts.
Look for the ratio of passed to fixed on the occasions when you knew someone was watching, because the team has already done that count and it is the standard they are working to.
In the book
Chapter 3, Leading by Example, holds Aaron Kaupp on the coffee cup and the late night VIP, Susanne Hatje’s daily insistence on being present in every part of the Mandarin Oriental, New York, Niki Nakayama on keeping a team on the same page at n/naka, and Crippa’s count of twenty two judges a day at Piazza Duomo. It also makes the full argument about why the leaders I most respect refuse to turn the standard into a document, and what the pandemic revealed about who had been leading well all along.