What I learned from the best restaurant in the world

“You've had some of the brilliant minds in the world on the stage today. You will again tomorrow. You have to ask, why did they bring a restaurant guy to talk to you?”

That was Will Guidera at Nordic Business Forum this week, addressing the elephant in the room. This was a conference with some true rock stars from the world of business talking. Adam Grant. Brene Brown. Chris Voss. Buried in the lineup, at the end of day one, was a guy I’m sure most of us had never heard of, coming from a totally different industry than the majority of the audience. What was he going to bring?

Yet… 

• This talk was the one I have told everyone about. 

• This is the one I rewatched to get all my quotes straight. 

• This is one where I bought the book immediately afterwards. 

• This is the one that made me well up at one point. Anyone that was there will know the bit that I mean.

Will spoke about his journey taking a, in his words, middling brasserie in New York city through the ranks of Michelin stars to eventually be awarded the honor of being the best restaurant in the world. He achieved this by focussing his team in excruciating detail on every point of the customer journey, and on how to make it exceptional. You could hear the passion in his voice as he spoke about the energy and drive that this gave his entire team. A standout quote for me from his talk was:

It was just great for our team, because for the first time they had agency. They were empowered. The people that worked in my dining room. The people who can make or break an experience. They were no longer just bringing a plate of food that someone else created from one place to another, they were imbuing the experience with their own creativity, and I have yet to meet a single individual that will not give more of themselves to help make something great them once they feel even the smallest hand in helping to define what that thing is.

The line that really made me sit up though was directly addressing one of the great challenges that I have seen. Will spoke about empowering teams with the agency, engaging their creativity in order to grow the customer experience. Then he called out the elephant in the room.

I bet if I surveyed this entire room everyone would say that they want hospitality. Better customer service. And yet, it's the thing that we struggle to invest in.

This completely resonated with me. In the tech industry, customer service teams are often underfunded compared to teams that bring in revenue. Revenue generating teams are touted as the public faces of the company, when it’s actually the customer support team.

So what are my takeaways from the talk?

• Always remember that you can learn from other industries. As an old karate teacher of mine once said to a class coming from a different style “This might not be for you, but give me ninety minutes. I hope you learn something. If you don't, you don’t have to come back.”

• You can empower everyone in your organization to contribute to customer experience. If you give them agency and let them use their creativity, then this will give them energy and joy.

• You can’t expect functions to excel if you don’t give them funding and investment. If they are constantly working at the day job, they won’t have capacity to think beyond that. As I write this, I realize that this is a textbook example of how to be a diminishing leader, as Liz Wiseman said in an earlier talk.