A damn: Give it!

A damn: Give It!

Although I do the cooking in our household, I’ve never considered myself a foodie. My only real interest in food is making sure it tastes good enough to keep my family alive. They are picky eaters, so I tend to stick with what works. However, over the last week, I’ve been reading Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara, a book about how Will and his team created the best restaurant in the world, Eleven Madison Park in New York City. It is a fantastic book! You would expect that a book about the “World Champion restaurant” would revolve around food, wine, deserts and such, but actually, Will spends about 85-90% of the book talking about people. Business partners, employees, chefs, waiters, reviewers and mostly clients. I did not expect that.

This restaurant serves great food, but the most prominent part of the exceptional experience they create is the result of the way the employees work together (attention to detail on a level you cannot imagine!). They refer to what they do as “enlightened hospitality” and a central part of achieving this is by “taking care of each other first”. A massive portion of the experience stems from getting the 150-odd people working together like a finely tuned machine – creating a sense of belonging, connection and teamness.

If you have been following along over the past six weeks, you would know that we’ve been sharing our thoughts on what the Springboks are getting right to help them become back-to-back World Champions. This week we finish our series called The Bok Way with part seven: They give a damn. The world’s best restaurant and rugby team have something in common it seems…

Whether you are a leader, a manager or a colleague, ask yourself how well you do the following:

• Know your people – their story, their background and where they came from, what and who they care about, what fires them up and what they are trying to achieve in life. Guidara shares multiple examples of how they enhanced certain aspects of their restaurant by using people in the areas they were passionate about, which were in almost all cases not what they were initially hired to do. by getting to know the people they could better utilize them to the benefit of the whole.
• Get to know their families, their partners, kids’ and pets’ names and the main things that are happening in their lives. The Springboks, for example, bring their families along when they go on tour or play away from home. The families know each other, they take care of each other’s kids. They integrate many aspects of life into their work.
• Paying close enough attention to realize when someone is off their game and needs assistance or encouragement. Not that you need to solve everybody’s problems, but being aware of and recognising the humanity of the people around you builds trust and camaraderie. At Eleven Madison Park they designed a very subtle but specific system of sign language (like they use in baseball) to signal each other when help is required. The customers would never notice it, but all staff members know how to look out for each other.

The best coaches and leaders are brilliant people managers, knowing exactly how to approach each contributor to get the very best out of them. In a small team, this can be one person’s responsibility, but ideally, everybody needs to play their part. This is why Guidara and his team (and the Springboks) focus on taking care of each other first. Earlier this week I spoke with somebody who works for an organisation where the leaders care very little for the people and unsurprisingly, it is a less-than-ideal environment to work in. A side-effect of this is that the staff have formed very strong bonds of care for each other, something they jokingly refer to as “trauma bonding”. Ideally, it should start at the top, but care is everyone’s baby.

It’s a team effort to be a great team. Need help with your team? 

Get it touch… You can reach us at info@purposeworks.co.za.

At PurposeWorks we are all about Making You and Your Work Rock. Our focus is on Organisational Health and Design, Employee Centered Culture, Leadership Development and Performance Coaching. For more information on how we can help you create a work environment that rocks, develop a great team, become an inspiring leader or unlock your personal excellence talk to us at info@purposeworks.co.za.