Episode 8. The Human Touch

Listen on Spotify Apple Podcasts

The eighth episode takes up the chapter of The Luxury of Attention in which Rahim B. Kanani argues that the human touch is the one quality in either craft that cannot be taught. Aaron Kaupp opens the case: a hotel can teach someone to shake a martini or read a profit and loss statement, but it cannot teach someone to be a people person. The hosts work through Kanani’s definition, noticing the particular guest, and test it against Susanne Hatje’s wedding witness and slumber party suite at the Mandarin Oriental, New York, Kaupp’s hundred helium balloons at Le Royal Monceau, Graham Ledger’s surprise gin bar at Singita, and the calibrated evenings of Patrick O’Connell and Niki Nakayama. Philip Barnes and Pinar Kartal Timer frame hiring for the trait, and the episode follows the conditions that erode it, Ralph Radtke’s rule on technology, and how the standard passes to the next generation before pointing ahead to Knowing Your Guest.

In this episode

Aaron Kaupp and Philip Barnes on the one quality that cannot be taught.
Kanani’s definition: noticing the particular guest rather than generic warmth.
Susanne Hatje’s Central Park wedding witness and thirteenth birthday slumber party.
Kaupp’s hundred balloons, Ledger’s gin bar at the boma, Nakayama’s pacing.
Pinar Kartal Timer’s five pairs and the three conditions that erode the trait.
Ralph Radtke’s technology rule and how the standard is handed on.

Transcript

Automatically transcribed from the audio and lightly corrected. Speaker turns are not marked.

Read the full transcript (5192 words)

Imagine walking into a hotel room halfway across the world. You are traveling solo for business. You're missing your fiance terribly. And when you open the door, you find 100 helium balloons just floating against the ceiling. Right, which is already a lot to take in. Yeah, but then tied to the ribbon of every single balloon is a photograph of his face.Oh, wow. I mean, is that incredible, unforgettable service? Or is that like completely unhinged? It is a profound risk, is what it is. And that risk is the exact dividing line between standard service and luxury hospitality. Welcome to this deep dive into the eighth installment of our 14-part series.We are basing this entirely on Rahim B. Kanani's book, The Luxury of Attention. we are looking exclusively at chapter eight, which is titled The Human Touch. Exactly. And for you, the listener, our mission is to unpack the single most valuable attribute in luxury hospitality and the culinary arts. It is this incredibly elusive trait that audits cannot grade, schools cannot teach, and technology, well, it just cannot replicate it.No, it really can't. So we are going to explore how to spot this elusive quality, how to hire for it, and crucially, how to protect it in any team environment. And we really have to start with the foundational premise that makes this particular trait so complicated for leaders. Because, I mean, almost every other quality discussed in the previous chapters, things like leadership by example, the discipline of empowerment, the pursuit of perfection, they can all be modeled. Right, they can be proceduralized. Exactly.But The Human Touch is the exception. Which brings us to a quote from Aaron Kaupp that just perfectly sets the stakes. Kaupp says, 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. That sentence. That is the anchor for everything we are going to explore. Kanani notes that the crucial clause doing all the heavy lifting in that sentence is the second half.The part about what we cannot teach. Right. You can drill a bartender on the exact ratios of gin to vermouth, you know, or the precise temperature of a glass. You can send a manager to courses on financial modeling. Because those are technical competencies. Precisely.But The Human Touch operates on a completely different frequency. As Kanani points out, it either arrives with the candidate or it does not arrive at all. Okay, let's unpack this. If this trait is entirely unteachable, the very first question we have to answer is what exactly is The Human Touch? Because as Kanani writes, the phrase has been severely diluted by marketing overuse. Oh, absolutely.You see it on every corporate brochure. It's become a meaningless cliche in most corporate literature, really. It has. So Kanani provides a very rigorous operating definition to just strip away that marketing fluff. He argues that The Human Touch is not generic warmth. Oh wait, what does he mean by generic warmth?Well, it is not the broad smile when you walk through the door or the welcome champagne handed to you in the lobby or even the templated personalized notes slid under your door at turn down. Right, because those things can just be scripted. They're visible artifacts. Exactly. You can write a manual that says, smile at the guest within 10 feet, offer champagne within 30 seconds. Any competent manager can enforce that.Yeah, that's standard operating procedure. Yeah. The actual substance of The Human Touch, Kanani writes, is the discipline of noticing the particular guest in front of you, registering what they actually need at this exact moment and then acting on that noticing. So it's about making the guest feel seen as a person rather than processed as an account number. Yes, seen as a person rather than processed as an account number. That distinction is huge.It moves the concept away from just being nice and turns it into an active discipline of observation. And the book gives us these incredible concrete examples from hoteliers to show exactly what this specific noticing looks like in action. Let's talk about Susanne Hatje. Oh, the Central Park story. Yeah. There is the story of a couple who decided, completely on a whim to get married at the ladies pavilion in Central Park.Hatje says, we quickly arranged for a last minute Justice of the Peace, a photographer, and a horse and carriage. Our chief concierge Kenneth Abisror served as the couple's witness. What's fascinating here is Kanani's analysis of that event. He points out that the specificity is what does the work in that story. How so? Well, a property that simply arranges a fast wedding.They get the photographer, they book the carriage. That property will be remembered for the wedding. It is great logistical execution. Right. They did their job really well. But a property whose chief concierge physically steps in to become the witness, that property will be remembered for him.Oh, I see. That is the human touch. It bridges the gap between logistical execution and profound human connection. It transforms the hotel staff from service providers into actual participants in a major life event. But I want to go back to the scenario I brought up at the very beginning, the story from Aaron Kaupp with the fiancee and the balloons. Yeah, that's a wild one.Because when I read that, I had a very mixed reaction. Let's get the details on the table. A guest is traveling solo for business. She is recently engaged, and she is missing her fiance. The team notices this. Right.And while she is out for dinner, they fill her bedroom with 100 helium balloons. And tied to each balloon is a photo of her soon-to-be husband. Kaupp noted that the guest was, quote, not only shocked, but moved that we had gone above and beyond to touch her heart in a way that she will truly never forget. It is an extraordinary gesture. And I mean, it requires an immense amount of behind the scenes coordination to pull off while a guest is simply out to dinner. Wait, hold on.But if a hotel did that for me, I think I would be a little creeped out. You're not the only one. How do they know where the line is between being incredibly attentive and basically being a stalker? 100 photos of my partner waiting for me in a dark room from the outside that sounds borderline invasive if executed poorly. It's like the difference between giving a colleague a generic Starbucks gift card versus tracking down a sign out of print copy of their favorite childhood book. That is a great analogy.Right. One is polite and safe. The other requires borderline obsessive attention. And that is exactly the pushback Kanani anticipates. You are right. It carries a massive risk.Kanani points out that the gesture might look preposterous on the page, but it was exactly right in the room. So how do they ensure it's right in the room? What is the mechanic of making sure that gesture lands is heartwarming instead of terrifying? It goes back to the core definition we talked about. Specific noticing. The team didn't just generically pamper a solo traveler with a standard amenity like a fruit plate or a complimentary bottle of wine.Which is what most luxury hotels would do. Exactly. They identified the specific source of her loneliness and acted on it. So they were reading the subtle cues. Right. The human touch is not just the execution of the surprise.It is the emotional intelligence required to gauge whether the guest will actually receive it well. It is the difference between treating a demographic and treating a human being. Yes. And we see this exact pattern repeated in wilderness luxury as well. Graham Ledger describes a quieter but equally specific version of this. Oh, the gin and tonic story.Yeah. He says that if a guest regularly orders a gin and tonic, they will add that cocktail to the drink box for the guide to share with them during a game drive. Or they might even prepare a surprise gin bar during the Bush dinner at the Boma. Just for our listeners who might not be familiar with safari terminology, a Boma is essentially an outdoor enclosure often used for dining under the stars around a fire, right? Correct. It is a traditional community gathering space in many parts of Africa.So if I'm understanding the mechanic here, the hotel tracks with the guest drinks. But the data point itself, the gin preference is completely generic. Right. Any CRM software can do that. Every hotel's software tracks what you order. But taking that data and physically manifesting a surprise gin bar out in the African Bush, that transforms a simple database entry into a moment of pure magic.Exactly. The specificity of the response to the context is what separates the human touch from just templated personalization. The data is just the raw material. That's what you do with it. Yes, the human touch is the creative application of that data. And to drive this home, Hatje offers another story that I love.I guess where it did out one of the hotel's signature suites for their daughter's 13th birthday. Well, let me guess, they sent up a really nice birthday cake with her name on it. They could have. And honestly, that would have been fine. But Hatje's team didn't just provide a nice room in a standard amenity. They threw an actual slumber party for her and her friends.Oh, wow. Hatje says, in addition to sleeping bags and lots of pillows so they could watch movies all night, we brought in a popcorn machine and ice cream cart. I love the mechanics of that decision because the input was just a corporate event sweet rental. Right, a standard contract. It was a standard procedure. But the hotel didn't just fulfill the contract.Kanani writes that they asked themselves in effect, what does a 13-year-old's perfect sleepover actually look like? And then they acted on that answer. They produced the actual party. Kanani synthesizes the pattern across all these stories perfectly. Generic noticing produces generic service. Specific noticing produces the kind of moment that becomes reliable marketing decades later.So we've seen how this plays out on the hotel floor with concierges and room setups. But the book emphasizes that this isn't just about hotels. No, not at all. The culinary world, the great chefs, they operate on the exact same frequency. Patrick O'Connell views his work through this exact lens. He says, quote, in its highest sense, I regard my work as a healing art form.It's a beautiful way to phrase it. It really is. And that being said, he describes the experience as, quote, stage set for a magical interlude out of time and place where worldly cares can be suspended, our faith in humanity restored. The phrasing is grand, almost philosophical, but Kanani grounds it by explaining how this works operationally. Because it operates on the same discipline of specific noticing. How does that translate to a restaurant, though?Well, every element, the plate, the room, the welcome, the moment of departure is a chance to register what the diner needs. So a diner who arrives exhausted from an incredibly difficult week receives a fundamentally different evening than a diner who arrives in a vibrant, celebrating mood. That makes sense. The kitchen and the floor have to calibrate together to deliver that. That calibration is fascinating. Niki Nakayama does something similar with pacing at n/naka, right?She does. In the kaiseki tradition, which is a highly structured, multi-course Japanese dinner, the chef reads each diner's needs across the progression of the meal. So it's not just a set timer for everyone? Not at all. If a diner is lingering over their third course, maybe they're engaged in deep conversation, the kitchen imperceptibly delays the fourth course. If a diner is moving briskly, the course is arrived sooner, and the guests never see this calibration happening.What are the mechanical difficulties of pulling that off? Because in a commercial kitchen, you're trying to push plates out efficiently. It seems incredibly difficult to pause a hot dish just because the guest is telling a long story at the table. Oh, it is remarkably difficult. It requires seamless communication between the front of house staff observing the table and the chefs managing the temperature and preparation of the food. It kind of defies the whole logic of a production line.It absolutely does. But as Kanani beautifully puts it, the meal is being eaten by individuals, not by covers. And just for anyone outside the restaurant industry, when she says eaten by individuals, not by covers, a cover just means a paying guest or a seat at a table, right? It's the metric a restaurant uses to count its volume. Exactly. Treating someone as a cover means rushing them through so you can turn the table and seat the next party.Which is what most places do. Right. Treating them as an individual means subjugating the restaurant's operational efficiency to the guest's emotional experience. Okay, so we've established that this level of attention is basically an art form. We see what it looks like in action, but earlier we agreed it is entirely unteachable. Yes.So if I'm a manager and I cannot teach the specific noticing to my staff, how on earth do I find people who already have it? What does that interview even look like? Well, the first thing to understand is that operators are remarkably aligned at this point. The interview process has to change entirely. It can no longer be a simple credential check. Right.It becomes a stress test for a character trait that a resume simply cannot show. Philip Barnes puts this perfectly. What does he say? He says, we're not in the business of saving lives, nor are we trying to put a man on the moon. And the one thing we can't teach is the right attitude. If they have the presence, manners, and wherewithal, we can teach them pretty much anything else.That is a bold statement. We can teach them pretty much anything else. So you are essentially interviewing to find out if the person possesses the baseline neurological wiring to care about the stranger in front of them. That's exactly it. But how do you actually spot that in a 30 minute interview where everyone is on their absolute best behavior? Are there trick questions?It is not about trick questions. It is about listening for a very specific frequency of human interaction. And the book gives us an incredible framework from Pinar Kartal Timer for how to listen for that. Yes, the five pairs. It is one of the most memorable formulations in the text. She says, 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.Here's where it gets really interesting because Kanani spends time analyzing this. And it sounds like asking someone to walk an impossible behavioral tightrope. It is a tightrope. Let's really dig into the mechanics of these pairs because I think anyone who manages a team can use this. Let's start with the first one, friendly, but not pally. Think about it from the guest's perspective.Kanani points out that each pair names a specific quality and then immediately names its possible distortion. Okay. You want warmth, you wanna feel welcomed. That is friendly. But pally implies a forced intimacy, an assumption of closeness that hasn't been earned. It's the server who sits down in the empty chair at your table to take your order, treating you like an old buddy when you just wanna have a quiet dinner.Exactly. The ideal candidate has the emotional intelligence to project warmth without crossing that professional boundary. So in an interview, you look for how they engage with you. Are they warm and professional, or do they immediately assume a casual familiarity that feels presumptuous? That makes perfect sense. How about the second pair, assertive but not rude?How do you test for that? Do you role play a difficult guest scenario in the interview? You absolutely could. In luxury hospitality, things go wrong. A guest might be demanding something impossible or behaving inappropriately. Which happens all the time.Right, and the team member needs to be assertive enough to hold the property standard to protect the environment, but without ever crossing into rudeness, which would betray the ethos of hospitality. They have to hold the line with grace. So how do you listen for that? If you ask a candidate how they handled a furious customer in the past, you listen to their tone. Are they defensive and aggressive in their recounting of the story? Or do they calmly explain how they maintain the boundary without escalating the conflict?That is such a subtle distinction to listen for. It's really about their internal posture. Yes. Okay, the third pair is kind but not weak. Kindness is the impulse to help. But weakness means you get rolled over, that you cannot manage the flow of service because you are too busy accommodating every single whim, even at the expense of other guests or the team.Because if you just say yes to everything, the whole system collapses. Exactly. True hospitality requires strength. A weak employee might promise a guest something the kitchen simply cannot deliver just to avoid conflict in the moment, which just creates a massive problem later. Right, because true kindness sometimes means telling the guest, no, in a way that makes them feel cared for, rather than just caving to every demand. Then we have humble but not timid.Humility is recognizing that you are there in service of the guests' experience. The spotlight is on them, not you. But timidity means you lack the confidence to step in, to make a recommendation, to fix a problem. So you need a balance. You need to be humble enough to serve, but confident enough to lead the interaction. A timid employee will avoid approaching a guest who looks lost.A humble but confident employee will walk right up and offer assistance. And finally, proud but not arrogant. Pride in the craft is essential. It is what ensures the silver is polished and the mise en place is perfect. And just for clarity, mise en place is the culinary term for having all your ingredients and tools perfectly organized and prepped for cooking begins, right? Correct.It is a profound respect for the preparation of the work. But arrogance makes the experience about the ego of the creator rather than the pleasure of the recipient. And the chef who gets mad if you ask for salt. Exactly. The candidate the operator is looking for can hold the quality without sliding into the distortion. Kanani elaborates that these pairs serve as a highly effective interviewer's checklist for the human touch.They describe a register of human relationship that is the daily ground of the craft. So you've used the five pairs. You've sat across from candidates. You've listened for the person who speaks from the heart and you found the perfect hire who innately possesses this unteachable human touch. You bring them onto the team. You've solved the problem, right?You're done. Kanani argues absolutely not. Really? Yes. And this is perhaps the hardest claim in the chapter because acquiring the talent is only the first step. Which brings us to a really difficult concept.The idea that the very conditions leaders create often destroy the exact trait they just work so hard to hire for. Yes, the erosion of the human touch. But it makes me wonder though, if someone is naturally a people person, can you really ruin them? Like if I put a brilliant deeply empathetic concierge in a terribly managed hotel, do they actually lose that touch? They do. The human touch hire is not a one-time acquisition.It is as Kanani insists, an ongoing investment in the conditions under which that capacity continues to flourish. So the environment matters just as much as the person? Absolutely. A brilliant team placed in a bad environment will quickly degrade to the level of a mediocre team. The only difference is that the operator will have spent more money to acquire them and there will be a greater cost and disappointment built into the experience. So what exactly are these conditions that erode the human touch?The book outlines three main ones plus one invisible cost that I think every manager in every industry needs to hear. Let's start with the first condition. Okay. A culture of fear. Right. Kanani points back to a previous chapter.Recalling Eric Ripert repudiating his authoritative kitchen culture around the year 2000 where hands are literally shaking from fear. Yes. A team member who is afraid of their leader simply cannot be present with a guest in the way the human touch requires. Fear splits attention. Because biologically, their brain is literally occupied with survival. If I am terrified that my boss is going to scream at me because a fork is out of place, I am not going to notice that a solo traveler is missing her fiance.I am just going to be staring at the fork. Exactly. Their attention is partly on the guest in front of them, but it is heavily focused on the consequence the leader will impose if something goes wrong. It makes total sense. The human touch requires full presence, which fear makes impossible. You cannot execute a delicate, specific noticing of a guest's emotional state if you are terrified.The result is that the human touch capacity of your best hires will diminish. This leads right into the second eroding condition. Exhaustion. Exhaustion depletes the specific muscle the work requires. A team member who has been worked through too many double shifts, too many short staff shifts, they lose their capacity to notice. No matter how talented they are.Right, no matter how richly endowed they are with native human touch capacity, the fatigue will blind them to the guest's subtle cues. This reminds me of that foundational story about Aaron Kaupp from an earlier chapter. Kaupp was a young hotelier working too many shifts and he was just exhausted. Yes, the protection move. Right, his manager saw that another double shift would tip him into total fatigue and knew the department needed Kaupp at his best in three days for a major arrival. So the manager sent Kaupp home and physically finished Kaupp shift himself to prevent him from burning out.Kanani explains this protection move perfectly. The manager understood that Kaupp's capacity to be present with guests depended on being given rest and the team, in this case the manager, absorbed that load on his behalf. Okay, so we have fear and exhaustion. The third eroding condition in the book names is bad shielding. What does that mean mechanically on the floor? Bad shielding happens when a leader fails to interpose themselves between the team and external pressures.Like what kind of pressures? Well, if a team member is repeatedly exposed to difficult guests, demanding owners, or impatient investors, without the leader stepping in to protect them, that team member will inevitably develop a defensive posture. And a defensive posture is the exact opposite of the open vulnerable posture required for the human touch. If you are constantly bracing for an attack, you are just trying to survive the shift. Exactly. And this isn't just about demanding hotel guests either.Think about managing a software engineering team. If you don't shield your developers from an impatient marketing department demanding impossible deadlines, those developers are going to get defensive, burn out, and stop doing their best creative work. The mechanic is exactly the same. It is a universal leadership principle. To combat this, Kanani cites Patrizio Cipollini's concept of paternal warmth. Paternal warmth, yes.It's the exact operating posture that protects against this erosion. The leader who treats the team's well-being as part of their own job is the leader whose team can keep showing up to the guest with the openness the work requires. And then there is this fourth point, the invisible cost, workspace ergonomics. Oh, this is such a great point. When I read this, it stopped me in my tracks because it is so rarely talked about in leadership books. We talk endlessly about culture, vision, and mission statements, but we almost never talk about the physical chairs people sit in.It is a brilliant practical observation by Kanani. He points out that a team member who is physically uncomfortable at their station, maybe they have a bad chair, poor lighting, or they have to walk 10 minutes just to use the bathroom, that person will be operating at a fraction of their potential by hour six of their shift. It just drains your physical battery so much faster. If my back hurts because my workstation is poorly designed, my emotional bandwidth to deal with a complicated guest request is basically zero. Yes. And the tragedy is that Kanani's analysis shows properties under invest here.Why? Why wouldn't they just buy better chairs? Because the cost of a new ergonomic chair or redesigning the back of house layout is highly visible on a spreadsheet. But the return, the retained energy of the staff member resulting in a better guest interaction at hour seven is entirely invisible on that same spreadsheet. So if a manager recognizes these eroding conditions, what is the ultimate investment? Kanani draws a striking conclusion here.He points out that the conditions protecting the human touch are identical to the conditions that protect any creative practice. Meaning what exactly? Adequate rest, psychological safety, predictable schedules, protection. Crucially, Kanani insists that none of these are luxury investments. They are operational preconditions. Wow.If you don't have them, the human touch cannot survive. That is a sobering thought. But this brings up a huge question. If exhaustion and operational friction are constantly eroding the human touch, it's natural to wonder if we can just use technology to automate the friction away. Oh, the technology question. Right.Because humans are fragile and expensive to maintain, can't we just use machines? But Kanani warns that technology is a heavily contested ground. He does, because there is no clean easy answer. Some technology massively helps the human touch, but some technology quietly erases exactly what the operator is being paid to deliver. So how do you tell the difference? Where is the technological line?Because every company is looking at automation, self-service kiosks, app-based check-ins. It is very easy for operators to get swept away. Kanani draws the rule directly from Ralph Radtke. Radtke says, technology must be carefully integrated into the guest experience, but only in so far as it adds to that experience, rather than becoming an end unto itself. Only in so far as it adds to that experience. So what does this all mean for a property looking to upgrade?What does it mean mechanically? Kanani breaks it down into a very simple diagnostic test. Technology that adds to the human experience belongs. Technology that substitutes for the human experience does not. Can you give me an example of the difference? Think about the CRM software we mentioned earlier that tracks the guest who loves a specific gin.Right, the BOMA story. The software does the heavy lifting of remembering a data point from a visit two years ago. It adds to the human experience, because it equips the staff member to create that surprise gin bar. It frees up a human being to be more present with the guest. So it enhances the human's ability to care. Exactly.But if a tool replaces the human interaction entirely in a moment where the guest wants to feel seen, it is substituting for the human experience. Like forcing someone to use a check-in kiosk when they're exhausted. Right. Kanani notes that the deeper mechanics of how to apply this rule are deferred to a later chapter, the digital discipline. But the baseline principle is established here. Okay, this brings us to a massive dilemma for any leader deeply invested in the human touch.The dilemma of succession. Yes, the ultimate question. If you have spent your career mastering this specific noticing and you protect your team, what happens when the leader who embodies this standard is no longer in the room? How does a property not lose its soul? Kanani is very clear on this point. The transmission of the human touch standard does not happen in a training program.Because it's unteachable. Right. We established that at the very beginning with the Aaron Kaupp quote. Exactly. So if it cannot be taught, how is it transmitted? It happens through 10,000 small observed moments.What kind of moments are we talking about? It is the next generation watching the senior leader absorb a difficult guest without theater or manage a mistake without humiliation or leave the office at midnight to greet a late arrival. Transmission through proximity. Yes. Properties maintain this standard by keeping the next generation of leaders close enough for long enough to absorb these unwritten reflexes. Let's bring all of this together.We started with Aaron Kaupp saying, we can teach a martini but not a people person. And Kanani has shown us that the human touch is the difference between good and great. It really is. And Kanani makes a profound synthesis at the end of the chapter. He notes that Kaupp's balloons and Hatje's slumber party are fundamentally the same gesture. Even though they look totally different on the surface?Yes, because they represent care as an operating ethic, not just marketing copy. Personalization is the proof of attention and none of these gestures were scripted. Personalization is the proof of attention. That is an incredible summary. And it brings us to a final provocative thought for you the listener to mull over. Think about your own workplace or your own team.In a world where screens and automated systems are designed to break our concentration into smaller and smaller fragments, true, unforced attention is becoming the rarest commodity on earth. It absolutely is. Are you creating an environment where your team can actually notice the people they serve? Or are you accidentally managing the human touch right out of them? That is the question every leader has to face. It really is.Thank you for joining us for this deep dive. Join us next time for episode nine, knowing your guest.

In this episode

Transcript

Read what the episode discusses