No. The hoteliers and chefs I interviewed were unanimous that the human touch arrives with the person or does not arrive at all. What a leader can do is hire for it, create the conditions in which it flourishes, and pass the standard on by keeping the next generation close enough to watch.
This is the chapter every subject in the book gave me a version of without being asked. Across continents and across the two crafts, in nearly identical language, the answer was the same. You can teach almost anything in a hotel or a kitchen. You cannot teach a person to care.
“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
Philip Barnes, then general manager of The Savoy, said the same thing from the other direction: if a candidate has the presence, manners and wherewithal, the hotel can teach them pretty much anything else. Marc von Arnim, then general manager of Park Hyatt Sydney, described the interview as nothing more sophisticated than using your intuition to tell whether the candidate speaks from the heart. Pinar Kartal Timer, then general manager of Pera Palace Hotel, Jumeirah, interviewed every hire into the hotel, down to the most junior position, because twenty minutes in a room told her what no resume could.
So the honest answer to the question is no, and the useful answer is what follows from it. If care cannot be taught, then three other things become the leader’s whole job.
The first is hiring for it. The practices differ, and the book treats them in detail elsewhere, but they share one conviction. The trait is read in person, by someone who has it themselves, and the reading cannot be delegated to a screening tool.
The second is protecting it, and this is the part leaders most often get wrong. The human touch erodes under bad conditions, and the conditions that erode it are frequently ones the leader has created with the best intentions. A culture of fear erodes it: the employee who is afraid of their manager cannot be fully present with the guest because part of their attention is on the consequence. Exhaustion erodes it: too many doubles, too many short staffed shifts, too many seasons without rest deplete the exact muscle the work requires. Poor shielding erodes it: the team member repeatedly exposed to abusive guests or impatient owners without the leader stepping in develops a defensive posture that is the opposite of the open one care needs. Even the workspace matters. A bad chair, poor light and a ten minute walk to the nearest bathroom will have the warmest person in the building operating at a fraction of their capacity by hour six.
Kaupp’s own story illustrates the protection move. Early in his career a manager sent him home from a shift, the team absorbing the work, because the manager understood that Kaupp’s capacity to be present with guests over the coming decades depended on rest now. By Kaupp’s own accounting that investment paid back for forty years.
The third is transmission. Care is not passed on in a training program. It is passed on in the thousands of small moments a junior leader watches a senior one handle: the difficult guest absorbed without drama, the mistake managed without humiliation, the comp extended that no policy required, the choice to leave the office at midnight to greet a late arrival. A leader who keeps the next generation close enough to see those moments, in the same room and at the same pass, for long enough, will find the standard survives them. A leader who does not will watch it leave with them.
Eric Ripert’s transformation of the kitchen culture at Le Bernardin around the year 2000 is the book’s clearest case. The care the restaurant is now known for was not incidental to that change. It was the precondition for it.
Chapter 8, The Human Touch, sets out what the quality consists of, how the best operators hire for it, the conditions that erode it, where technology helps and where it erases, and how the standard is carried forward.