Ready To Be Unreasonable?
My review - plus takeaways and action steps - prompted by the book, Unreasonable Hospitality.
My experience in the restaurant industry spans about four years as a server while in college. The amount I learned in that time - about the many moving parts of a restaurant, about quality service, and about people in general - remains with me to this day. I often say that if everyone engaged in restaurant work, even briefly, we would all likely leave much larger tips!
Although I personally no longer work in the restaurant business, I thoroughly enjoyed reading about Will Guidara’s experience in Unreasonable Hospitality. The book outlines the transformation of the restaurant he helped lead over the period of a decade or so, eventually earning the #1 spot in the World’s 50 Best Restaurants awards. With his focus on culture, leadership, and helping people feel truly seen, I took away a number of ideas and action steps that could apply to many leaders and service-based professionals.
Below are three such ideas. As you read, I encourage you to consider how you might apply or adapt some of these principles to support you in your work, as well.
1. Ask different questions.
A big part of my work as an executive + life coach involves asking questions that help clients think differently, view situations from alternative perspectives, and perhaps take new or different actions. We’ve all probably heard the saying about the futility of doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results? The same can often be said of asking the same questions over and over.
Right in the first chapter, Guidara offers a few of the questions he began asking early in his leadership and which he continued to refresh, add to, and ask in different ways over time:
“How do you make the people who work for you and the people you serve feel seen and valued? How do you give them a sense of belonging? How do you make them feel part of something bigger than themselves? How do you make them feel welcome?”
Whether you welcome people into a restaurant, help them purchase their next home, teach them in a classroom, or interact with them briefly over the phone, answering questions like these for yourself - and continuing to ask different, thought-provoking, innovative ones - can truly transform your actions.
On a side note, I also appreciated this comment from Guidara which appears several chapters later, about one question in particular: “When you ask, ‘Why do we do it this way?’ and the only answer is ‘Because that’s how it’s always been done,’ that rule deserves another look.”
2. Envision the ideal experience.
One of my all-time favorite quotes, and one that I keep in front of me particularly when preparing for speaking engagements, is credited to the wise Maya Angelou: “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Communication isn’t just about what we say; it’s about the experience we create, the way we listen, and how our words and actions impact others.
Through much of Unreasonable Hospitality, Guidara emphasizes the importance of envisioning, and then working to develop and communicate, a certain environment and overall experience. For instance, he always wanted his colleagues, team, and guests to feel good about the time spent at the restaurant. “[E]very day, we saw guests leaving our restaurants contented, refreshed, and restored,” he explains. “They couldn’t wait to come back, and neither could we.”
This does not tend to happen by accident.
I often coach clients - before they hold a meeting or engage in a challenging conversation, for example - to consider the environment they wish to create, how they ideally would like the interaction to go, and what they want others to feel, experience, or remember from it. In life and in leadership, our legacy isn’t created suddenly a hundred years from now; we create it every single day with the choices we make and the actions we take.
3. Decide who you are as a leader.
If you search for the top five most important qualities in a leader, you will probably get hundreds, if not thousands (if not millions!), of different answers and combinations. Ask trusted experts and consult valid resources - but don’t forget to ask yourself, too: Who do you want to be as a leader? What do you want your leadership to represent?
Throughout his book, Guidara highlights what he considers important as a leader. A big component for him is consistency, which he considers both a crucial and underrated aspect of leadership. I enjoyed how he related this to when food critics would come in for a meal, and how you can’t magically serve up a perfect meal if you’ve been serving mediocre ones every day up to that point. “No football team phones it in for twenty games, then steps it all the way up for the Super Bowl,” he writes.
I also appreciated his perspective around letting team members try new things and experiment with innovative actions, even if that sometimes means mistakes. Yes, it’s often easier to simply do something ourselves rather than the time, effort, and risk for error involved in entrusting it to someone else, but we’re also not doing much to develop the leaders around us if we never allow for experimentation and room to grow. One of my favorite lines in the whole book is this: “It’s always been my belief that ‘It might not work’ is a terrible reason not to try an idea.”
Overall, I found this book quite inspiring with its thought-provoking examples, stories, and results shared along the way. Guidara’s ambition blended with his desire to serve people well makes for a powerful combination! And on a semantic level, I love how he takes a word like ‘unreasonable’ - generally considered with a negative connotation - and redesigns it to support his vision.
While I believe this book is widely readable, I’d particularly recommend it to leaders and service-based professionals who wish to expand their sense of what could be, create a culture that helps everyone feel valued, and ‘lead outside the box’ - or ‘unreasonably,’ as Guidara might say.
And in addition to the action items I’ve shared above, here’s one more: The next time you enjoy a meal at a restaurant, take a moment to look around and consider all the moving parts - from hosts to servers to cooks to scheduling managers to suppliers to cleaning crews and on and on. Then, like Guidara and his team aimed for the #1 award in their industry, strive to be the absolute best guest ever. It could change your whole experience, while also making a positive, purposeful difference to all those around you!
Have you read this book? Do you think you might? What’s another book that has inspired you lately?