Attention as a leadership discipline is the practice of a leader directing their own noticing, daily and in person, at the team and at the work, so that the standard is held by presence rather than by a document. It treats where the leader stands and what the leader sees as the actual mechanism of leadership.
The book’s argument is that the attention a great hotel or restaurant gives its guests begins as attention the leader gives the operation. Across the interviews, the general managers who command the deepest loyalty describe the same daily choice: two or three hours on the floor, every day, in place of two or three hours of office work someone else will insist is urgent. The chefs describe the same choice in the form of the pass, the strip of steel where every plate pauses for inspection. The leader is there to see. What they see, they act on, and the team watches both the seeing and the acting.
In a hotel the discipline looks like Susanne Hatje’s mornings at Mandarin Oriental, New York, greeting staff in the heart of house before discussing menus with the kitchen, on the conviction that a general manager who is rigorous about rooms and absent from food and beverage has just told the team which parts of the property are allowed to slip. In a kitchen it looks like the chef who tastes the third spoonful of the same sauce that night and knows whether it tastes the way the first did, or who reads the body language of a saucier whose station is beginning to fall behind and moves before the station fails.
The discipline is often confused with supervision, and the two feel completely different to the people on the receiving end. Supervision is being watched. Attention is being known. The leader who can name the housekeeper on the third floor and the demi chef on the cold station is practicing attention. The leader who walks the lobby registering no faces, or who sits in a morning meeting without acknowledging the supervisor whose mother is in hospital, is also sending a signal, and the team reads it with the same fluency as any other. Philip Barnes, who was running The Savoy in London when we spoke, gave the discipline its sharpest form.
“If you walk by a problem, then you are the problem.” Philip Barnes, then General Manager, The Savoy, London
What this asks of a leader is consistency rather than charisma. The empty coffee cup on the arm of a lobby chair is lifted every time, including the days when nobody appears to be watching, because the team concludes from the one time it is left that the fault is now tolerated. Attention of this kind is a daily deposit. When a crisis arrives, a pandemic or a revolution in the country where the property stands, the leader who has deposited will find a team willing to follow, and the leader who has not will find the account empty.
The idea runs through Chapter 3, Leading by Example, and returns in Chapter 9, Knowing Your Guest, where the same noticing is turned outward toward the guest, and in the Introduction, which names it as the discipline the two crafts share.