I've highlighted the parts (in bold) that I think are particularly applicable to software development. Here's a summary of what I think are the important lessons:
- Hire the best people, assembling a team that is passionate about delivering satisfaction to the customer, as well as being technically competent.
- Constantly build the team, putting development of emotional skills, technical skills, and team cohesiveness first; customer satisfaction will be the natural byproduct.
- Gain customer confidence by developing a mutually respectful relationship based on honesty and trust; communication and feedback goes both ways.
Here's the transcript of the interview:
Where the Heck Is My Waiter?
KCRW's Good Food host Evan Kleiman interviews Restauranteur Danny Meyer
(15:55-24:02 segment on podcast)
Evan: Restauranteur Danny Meyer's committent to hospitality is legendary. His New York restaurants Tabla, Gramercy Tavern, Union Square Cafe, Eleven Madison Park, and his latest venture, Blue Smoke are benchmarks of how restaurants should be run. He manages to combine great food with a welcoming embrace. This embrace of the customer is his genius. The understanding that people want a place where they feel they belong and are welcome. Danny's finally written a book for all of us in business, whether you're in the restaurant business or not, it's called "Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business". I'm so glad you're here today, Denny.
Danny: Thank you for welcoming me.
Evan: Let's just talk for a minute about this word, "hospitality". How does hospitality differ from service?
Danny: Dramatically, and that actually came as a huge surprise to me. A number of years ago I decided instead of doing what I always do, which is to try to figure out what we're doing wrong, our restaurants kept doing pretty well, and I said, "You know, this is a business with a pretty high mortality rate. What if I could focus on what was going right?" And we were constantly getting praise for having this great service, and I saw the mistakes we were making. You know, we'd get the wrong food to the wrong person and sometimes make people wait too long for their reservations; this goes back into the early nineties. And I said, "Well, why do they keep praising us for something that I think we could be doing better?" And I figured out that what they were really loving, far beyond our service, was our hospitality, and what they were really responding to was the way we made them feel while they were on the receiving end of our service.
Evan: I would imagine that employees are the key component to that.
Danny: Yeah, it always is going to depend on who you hire on the front line, and I've been traveling around the country quite a bit recently. My entire feeling about a hotel chain, or a rent-a-car chain, or an airline, or a restaurant, has to do with the human being with whom I had my first point of contact. And it just seems so silly, if you think about it, that restauranteurs, for example, spend so much money trying to get the best chef out there, trying to get the best design for their restaurants - why in the world wouldn't they put the same amount of effort into the quality of the human beings who work in their restaurant? And it's really emotional skills that we look for, even more than technical skills.
Evan: Could you talk about those emotional skills?
Danny: I can; they're together they're something that I call having a high "HQ", or "Hospitality Quotient". And it's basically five skill sets that I don't know how to teach, but they can be identified, and if you can see these, and hire them on your team, you just stand a much, much higher rate of success in terms of making people feel welcome. And you're looking for people who are naturally kind and optimistic; hopeful, I think is at the root of the word hospitality. You're looking for people who are curious about learning, who have an extarordinary work ethic. Empathy is a huge emotional skill in a high hospitality quotient, and then, at last, integrity, which is possessing the judgement in any circumstance to do the right thing. And if we can get somebody who knows how to cook really well, that gets us to about the forty-nine
yard line. Now what we need for the next fifty-one yards are the compendium of those emotional skills I just outlined.
Evan: How do you go about hiring that? Do you do some sort of really sophisticated psychological testing?
Danny: Absolutely not. I wouldn't pay anyone a dime for that. I spend a lot of my time trying to hire leaders, and I put my focus on hiring the people who will be doing the hiring in our company.
Evan: Where is the customer in all of this? Is the customer always right?
Danny: Well, obviously we come to work with the hoped-for goal that the customer leaves raving about the experience. Just like any customer comes to a restaurant hoping to leave raving, we have found, sort of counterintuitively, that the best way to bring about that outcome is actually to put the customer second. I had always been taught growing up that the customer always comes first. When our staff feels really jazzed about coming to work with one another every single day, and they feel a sense of mutual respect and trust, we think the chances of customer satisfaction are way, way enhanced.
Now what that means is that there are occasions in which when the customer is not right. And I knew that even when I was, you know, a pretty young entrepreneur, and someone would come up to me and say, "Hey, Meursault is not a Chardonnay", and I know that the grape Chardonnay is the only grape in the French wine Meursault. So that customer wasn't right, but what I learned was that really the best thing to do is to just let the customer always feel heard; they don't always have to be right.
And then, furthermore, sometimes the customer is not right when they treat one of our staff members with disrespect. And for me I've found that in those rare instances, in fact we had one of those last night at one of our restaurants and I had to step in, where a customer was treating one of our lead staff members incredibly disrespectfully, and I came to the defense of my own staff member. I would much rather constantly build the team, who's responsible for providing all this excellence and hospitality.
Evan: Could you relate an instance of something that you heard your staff did for a guest that to you just made you feel so happy?
Danny: I got a letter just yesterday from somebody who raved about his meal at Gramercy Tavern, not for the lovely environment that we've put so much into, not even for the quality of the food; in fact, not even for the service. But instead, he took the time to write a whole letter to me because his back waiter, alright, this is the guy who's like a busboy, overheard that he really likes the crust part of the bread. And this back waiter brings him a whole tray of the ends of this wonderful bread that we serve at Gramercy Tavern. Now who in the world could have trained for that? All I could do, in retrospect, would have been to hire somebody who is thoughtful, somebody who thinks and feels, and then acts.
Evan: How can the guest enhance their own restaurant experience?
Denny: The best thing a guest can do is to be forthright. Realize that restaurants are really a laboratory for making mistakes, whether we like it or not. Every single two-hour meal in any of my restaurants today, I guarantee you, we're gonna probably make ten to twelve mistakes. If we're really on our game, you will not know about ten of 'em, 'cause we'll figure out ways to overcome before you even know, but you might get a salmon that's slightly undercooked or overcooked, but the key thing is this: rather than having an adversarial relationship with us, or with the restaurant, realze that we want you to leave happy. So if you'll just tell us while you're there, I want you to judge us not by the fact that we are or are not perfect, but rather how well and how graciously did we overcome a mistake once you told us. We are not great mind readers.
Evan: Thanks a lot for spending the morning with us.
Danny: Thank you so much, Evan.
Evan: Danny Meyer owns five of New York City's best and most popular restaurants: Tabla, Gramercy Tavern, Union Square Cafe, 11 Madison Park, and his latest venture, Blue Smoke. He's the author of Setting the Table: Transforming the Power of Hospitality and Business."
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