The idea
The human touch is the discipline of noticing the particular guest in front of you, registering what they need at that moment, and acting on it so the guest feels seen as a person. It is the one quality in this book that cannot be taught, so the leader’s work is to hire for it and then protect the conditions that let it survive. Every person I interviewed named it, unprompted, as the difference between good and great.
Aaron Kaupp gave me the cleanest version.
“Today, we can teach someone to shake the perfect martini or to read a profit and loss statement, but what we cannot teach is the human touch, and being a people person.” Aaron Kaupp, then general manager of Le Royal Monceau, Raffles Paris
The phrase has been worn smooth by marketing. The broad smile, the welcome champagne and the note under the door are the visible artifacts. The quality underneath them is specific noticing.
Two moments from the chapter make the difference concrete. At Le Royal Monceau, a guest traveling alone on business had recently become engaged and missed her fiancé. The team noticed, and while she was at dinner they filled her room with a hundred helium balloons, each carrying a photo of the man she was going to marry. The gesture reads as absurd on paper and was exactly right in the room, because the team had identified the source of her loneliness and answered it. At Mandarin Oriental, New York, a family rented a Signature Suite for their daughter’s thirteenth birthday. Susanne Hatje’s team filled it with sleeping bags, pillows, a popcorn machine and an ice cream cart. Anyone with a credit card can rent a suite. The hotel produced the actual sleepover.
Generic noticing produces generic service. Specific noticing produces the moment a guest tells friends about for twenty years.
Because the trait cannot be taught, hiring for it comes first. Marc von Arnim at Park Hyatt Sydney listens for whether a candidate speaks from the heart. Pinar Kartal Timer interviewed every hire at the Pera Palace, whatever the role, because twenty minutes told her what no resume could. She also gave me a checklist for the trait itself.
“Hotel employees should be friendly but not pally, assertive but not rude, kind but not weak, humble but not timid, and proud but not arrogant.” Pinar Kartal Timer, then general manager of Pera Palace Hotel, Jumeirah, Istanbul
The harder half of the chapter is about erosion. Fear wears the human touch away, because a team member who is afraid of the leader has part of their attention on the consequence instead of on the guest. Exhaustion wears it away after too many doubles and short staffed shifts. So does a leader who fails to stand between the team and the difficult guest or the impatient owner. Even the station matters. A bad chair, poor light and a long walk to the bathroom leave a gifted person at a fraction of their capacity by hour six. A property that hires brilliantly and operates poorly ends up, within a year or two, with the team it would have had by hiring adequately.
For an assistant manager, a sous chef or a team lead, the idea asks for two things you can do without permission. In interviews, listen for the five pairs and for whether the person speaks from the heart, and weight that above the resume. On shift, treat your team’s conditions as part of your job: their rest, your protection when a guest turns hostile, and the comfort of the station they stand at. The gesture the guest remembers is produced by a person who had enough left at hour six to notice.
Think it through
- Think of the last moment on your team that a guest will still be talking about in a year, and write down what the team member noticed that made it possible.
- In your last three hiring conversations, how much weight did the resume carry against your read of whether the person spoke from the heart?
- Which member of your team has been running on too many doubles or short staffed shifts, and what would it cost you to give them a real rest this week?
- Walk to the station where your team spends the most hours and list what about it, physically, would wear you down by hour six.
This week
Keep a noticing log for five shifts, recording one specific thing a team member noticed about a guest and what was done with it, and act on the best of them.
- At the start of each shift, tell your team you want to hear one thing they noticed about a particular guest that day: a mood, a habit, a mention in passing.
- At the end of each shift, collect the observations in a notebook, one line each, with the team member’s name and what, if anything, was done with it.
- Each day, pick one observation that has not yet been acted on and act on it yourself, or with the person who noticed it, in a way that fits that guest and your place rather than a template.
- During the week, fix one physical thing at your busiest station: a light, a stool, a piece of equipment moved within reach.
- On the fifth day, read the log aloud with the team and name who noticed what.
Look for whether the observations get more specific as the week goes on and whether more of them have already been acted on before they reach your notebook.
In the book
Chapter 8 holds the full stories: Susanne Hatje’s wedding arranged within hours at the Ladies Pavilion in Central Park, with her chief concierge as the witness, Graham Ledger’s surprise gin bar at a Singita bush dinner, Patrick O’Connell’s description of his work at the Inn at Little Washington as a healing art, Niki Nakayama pacing each diner’s meal at n/naka, Philip Barnes on the one thing the Savoy could not teach, and Ralph Radtke on where technology stops adding to the guest experience. It also carries the chapter’s argument about how the standard passes from one generation of leaders to the next, in the thousands of small moments the next senior person is close enough to observe.