First the team is the conviction that the team is the work itself rather than a resource used to produce it, so the leader's first responsibility is to select the team for character, develop it deliberately and defend it from the forces that erode it. The guest's experience is whatever the team has been given the conditions to deliver.
The team was the most discussed subject across the eighty interviews, by a margin that surprised me when I first noticed it. Joan Roca grew the kitchen at El Celler de Can Roca from two cooks in 1986 to forty at the height of its operation while twice being named the best restaurant in the world, and the arithmetic of that growth rests on a single thesis.
“Human capital is the most important capital in the restaurant, and we invest heavily in our team and resources to take care of our staff.” Joan Roca, chef, El Celler de Can Roca, Girona
In a hotel the idea looks like a manager in Europe in the late 1980s who could see that a young Aaron Kaupp, after too many shifts in a row, was about to tip into a fatigue that would not recover in time for an arrival three days out. The manager took him to lunch, sent him home and finished the shift himself, and the shift was never mentioned again. Kaupp is now in his sixties and still tells the story. In a kitchen it looks like Nicolai Nørregaard closing Kadeau Copenhagen every summer and moving the whole staff to a farmhouse on Bornholm to work the high season together, on the understanding that the bond built in that house is as much a part of the restaurant’s stars as the kitchen is.
The idea is often confused with being soft, and the operators who practice it are among the most demanding people in either craft. Hiring for character means forgoing the technically superior candidate for the one who, in Marc von Arnim’s phrase, speaks from the heart, and carrying the technical gap personally for months because the character gap would never have closed at all. Graham Ledger inducts new staff at Singita for up to three weeks and treats a poorly inducted employee as a failure of fairness on the property’s part. Patrizio Cipollini shared the hotel’s financial results with every member of staff at Four Seasons Hotel Firenze. All of this is capital expenditure on the only asset a competitor across the street cannot copy within eighteen months.
What the idea asks of a leader distills into three disciplines. Select: hire for character, and keep the requisition open until the right person walks through the door. Develop: onboard over days rather than hours, assign a coach for the first hundred days, show the team the numbers. Defend: stand between the team and the difficult guest, the impatient owner and the visiting inspector, and absorb what the team would otherwise have to absorb. The team can always tell which kind of leader they have, and a team that has been thrown to the wolves once will spend the rest of its tenure quietly disengaging. The same discipline governs the departure. Letting someone go privately, promptly and with real support is the last act of leadership the remaining team watches most closely.
The idea runs through Chapter 4, First the Team, and continues directly into Chapter 5, Giving the Keys, which asks whether the leader will actually give a team hired for character the room to act on it.