Hospitality at its best teaches that leadership is presence, that teams are hired for character and protected afterward, that a standard is held daily rather than audited, and that attention to the person in front of you is the product. Every enterprise whose work is done by people for people runs on the same disciplines.
I have spent most of my own working life outside hospitality, and I have also spent years in conversation with the people who run the world’s best hotels and kitchens. The longer I do both, the more convinced I am that the second group has something to teach the first, and every other field whose work is, in the end, the work of being attended to by people who are good at it.
The first lesson is that leadership is physical presence. The general manager walks the lobby before seven in the morning. The chef stands at the pass through service. Neither is there to supervise in the ordinary sense. They are there to catch what the people closest to the work have stopped seeing, and to show the team, by what they pick up and what they let pass, where the standard sits. Aaron Kaupp, then general manager of Le Royal Monceau, Raffles Paris, told me that a general manager who picks up an empty coffee cup on his way through the lobby has performed the whole of leadership in a single gesture. The executive who runs a company from a calendar of meetings and a dashboard has no equivalent gesture, and the team knows it.
The second lesson is to hire for the thing you cannot teach and train for the rest. Every hotelier and chef I interviewed said some version of this without being prompted. Pinar Kartal Timer, then general manager of Pera Palace Hotel, Jumeirah in Istanbul, interviewed every hire into the hotel personally, and she gave me the most useful interviewer’s checklist I have heard in any industry.
“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, Pera Palace Hotel, Jumeirah, Istanbul
Substitute your own job title for hotel employee and the checklist still works. Each pair names a quality and the distortion it slides into, and the person you want can hold the quality without the slide.
The third lesson is that the hire is only the beginning. The quality you hired for erodes under predictable conditions: fear of the leader, exhaustion, exposure to difficult clients or impatient owners without the leader stepping in front. The best hoteliers and chefs treat the team’s protection as their own job, and they do it because the team is the medium through which the customer experiences the company. A team treated with dignity extends the same dignity outward without a script. A team run on fear cannot, however talented. Eric Ripert’s transformation of the kitchen culture at Le Bernardin around the year 2000 is the clearest case in the book, and it was the precondition for everything the restaurant is now known for.
The fourth lesson is about money, and Kai Speth, then general manager of The Reverie Saigon, put it in terms any chief financial officer will recognize.
“A true luxury offering cannot be achieved if cost cutting is the norm. Success can only come from investing in people, new product offerings and new service ideas.” Kai Speth, then General Manager, The Reverie Saigon
The fifth lesson is the one the whole book is named for. What these operators have spent thirty, forty and fifty years practicing, the unforced attention of one person to another, is becoming more valuable in a world that is more automated and more distracted than the one they trained in. A reasonable reader will object that the same architecture is visible in surgery, in orchestral conducting, in trial advocacy and in military command, anywhere a trained team rehearses for a high stakes moment under a standard held by a senior person on the floor. That is fair, and it is the point. Hospitality simply makes the disciplines visible in a form a leader in any field can borrow on Monday.
The Introduction lays out this argument, and Chapter 4, First the Team, follows the hiring, culture and protection that every other lesson depends on.