Danny Meyer: How to Hire the Right People and Build a Culture That Lasts

When you're doing a jigsaw puzzle with 1,000 pieces and you find a piece that sure looks right and you put it in and you know it's not quite right, but you keep jiggling it hoping that it is, it's not good for the puzzle piece, it's not good for the puzzle. Sometimes that's what happens when we make a mistake in hiring. Sometimes we just have to say, 'Look, you're an amazing jigsaw piece, but you're just not fitting with this puzzle.'

So when I wrote 'Setting the Table' 20 years ago, I was really on a journey of self-discovery to figure out what had been working so well over the first basically 25 years of my career. And it was hospitality. So between Union Square Cafe and Gramercy Tavern, we had just opened The Modern, I had one Shake Shack, but they were working. They were working really, really well. And I was trying to figure out what was going so right. Yeah, the food was really good, but almost everyone would tell me, 'You know what I really like the most? It's how your people make me feel.' And that was hospitality. But what 'Setting the Table' didn't teach me at all was now that you've grown, how do you protect the special sauce that got us here in the first place? How do you scale a feeling? How do you scale relationships? How do you scale a culture along with the growth of your company? And so 'What Could Possibly Go Right?' was really my journey to try to learn. And there's a lot of mistakes that we've made along the way, and I wanted to both learn from those mistakes and also teach from those mistakes.

I wish I could only boil it down to one. The first one was, Danny, you have to be present for every single meal, for every single guest that walks in the door. So by the time I was 30, you would have found me on the front door welcoming you to Union Square Cafe, my one restaurant, every single meal. And all of a sudden in 1994, when I was 37, I guess, or something like that, I opened my first second restaurant, which was Gramercy Tavern. And even though it was only four blocks away, I learned some crucial lessons, which is a really obvious one. Wherever I was, there was another place I wasn't. And therefore, how was I going to make sure that when I wasn't at a place, it was going to be run the same way I would have run it if I had only been there? And the biggest thing I learned at that point was I got to use my words. It's like stuff we used to teach our kids when they were really young. Use your words. I can't any longer lead simply by exemplifying or embodying the behaviors I wanted to see. I had to actually make them really clear for people. And then when I went from two to four restaurants four years later with Eleven Madison Park and Tabla, it really got tough. And the air got really, really thin. And now it was, I know why people love our restaurants. I know that they love the way we make them feel. The chefs were great. I had a different chef at every restaurant. Nobody in those days was ever complaining about the food, but every now and then they'd say, 'There's something that doesn't feel the same at this restaurant as felt at the other.' And that was like putting a dagger through my heart. And that's when I really started thinking about culture for the first time.

Your culture is ultimately what happens when you're not in the room. It's the way people who work there behave. It's the way your guests feel. It's the way your community welcomes or doesn't welcome having one of your places in their community, et cetera, et cetera. And so if the relationships and the experiences people are having with our restaurants are misaligned as we grow, our culture is also misaligned. Yes, I want them all to taste different. They all have a different, you know, point of view. Tabla had an Indian flavor. The Modern when it opened had an Alcean flavor. Maialino had a Roman flavor. That's great, but I wanted them each to have a thumbprint that felt like Danny had been there. So it starts off with the people that you hire because people self-select into a culture that is clear about who it is. It's up to me to be very clear who we are, where we're going, and then to make sure to hire people who have the emotional skills and the technical skills to thrive within that. So it starts with the people, but then it's really incumbent upon us as leaders of the company to say, 'Okay, now that you're here, 49% of your success is going to be, did you do the job well that we paid you to do?' So if you're a pasta cook, how'd you make the pasta? If you're a bookkeeper, I was going to say, how'd you cook the books? No. How did you do our profit and loss statements at the end of the month? That's only 49% of your job. The other 51% of your job is who are you while you're doing it? And we are really, really clear about the emotional skills that we're looking for that we believe make someone who's got a high hospitality quotient, a high HQ, and by really doing a good job of selecting those people and then telling them what we expect, it really moves our culture.

We're working on having that because I think that you talk about scaling culture. First of all, you start by saying these emotional skills that make up a high HQ matter to us. One thing I wrote about in the book, 'What Could Possibly Go Right?' is how loath I am when I hear soft skills as a term used generally in a pejorative way, as if soft skills are anything but hard. And I think that as you just said, soft skills may be the most important skills at a time when what you know is discounted because everyone can now know what you know. Certainly the, quote, unquote, 'hard skills.' That's right. But I think if it's something you cannot take a picture of with your camera or you cannot look up on ChatGPT, which is how did I make you feel? I think those are the skills that are going to determine who succeeds the most in any business.

Okay, let's start from scratch. The first thing is I need to know what I believe are the six most important emotional skills that tend to indicate someone with a high HQ. And by the way, none of this is a value judgment on people. Any more than you could look at Danny and say, 'That guy's IQ is way lower than Jessi's,' right? Which is true. But you're not judging me for that, and I'm not judging someone whose HQ is higher or lower, but I do need to assess them on our team. So these six emotional skills that I'm asking questions about are the following. The first one is kind optimism. If I'm going to have someone who over and above being a really good fish cook or a really good server is kind and optimistic, that's a good start. I can look at someone's eyes and tell if they're kind. I don't even have to ask any question. But optimism is also important. By the way, optimism is first cousin to the word hope. Hope is at the root of the word hospitality. And why is that important? I need someone on the team who actually cares about making other people feel good and actually believes, optimistic that their behavior can impact the world for better. So that's only the first of six, kind optimism. The second one, curious intelligence. We are very proud to, I have no interest in perfection with any of our places 'cause that's a, for me, a recipe for unhappiness. But I'm very interested in the journey of excellence, which simply means honoring a handful of things we did well yesterday, mistakes and all, but what did we do well? And then starting every day with figuring out what could we do a little bit better today. It demands people who are curious. We want learn-it-alls, not know-it-alls. The third one, work ethic, doing the job as well as it can be done. Not just knowing it, but doing it and caring. The fourth one, real obvious, but it's crucial, is empathy. Having the unique ability to put yourself in the other person's shoes and to kind of convert the golden rule that we all grew up with, which is do unto others as you would have others do unto you, and convert that into the golden rule of hospitality, which I call it, which is do unto others as you believe that person wants done unto them. And that's a subtle but crucial shift and that takes someone with empathy. The next one is self-awareness, knowing what your own personal weather report is on a given day. What makes you tick? Knowing how you impact other people. Being aware of the wake you leave in your path as your boat goes through the water. And the sixth one and final one we look for is integrity, which is having the judgment to do the right thing even when it may not be in your own self-interest and especially when no one else is looking. So now, in an otherwise pretty challenging talent market, I can go find the best fill in the blank person, role in my company, but I can't hire them just for those 49% skills. I also have to find someone who I believe has those other six skills. So to answer your question, it starts by being aware that this matters. Okay, now that I've said what matters, I can come up with lots of questions, and I'm not, I promise you, I'm not going to say, 'Are you self-aware?' 'Cause the other person will say, 'You bet I am.' But I might ask a question like, 'What's the greatest misperception other people have about you?' And you cannot answer that question without A, being aware enough to know who you think you are, but also secondarily, being aware of what you're putting out there that makes other people feel a different way or the same way. So for me, that's one of my favorite questions.

Well, here's what's great. There's no right or wrong answer, and it leads to even richer conversations thereafter.

I have a lot of other great ones and they're all in, they're not all, but I think I listed at least 20 of them in the book 'What Could Possibly Go Right?' One that I love is talk about something that happened in your life by the time you were 13 that forever changed how you think about things going forward. Stops people. They're not going to answer, they didn't come ready with an answer to that question. And again, no right or wrong answer, but it leads us to understanding other things. And here's the other cool thing. In an interview, for better or for worse, I think it's important to note, I'm not doing most of the interviews in our company. And so I think I'm, in some ways, I'm great at interviewing and in some ways I'm horrible. I'll tell you, I'm great because I can almost read someone's HQ like a barometer reads where the temperature's going to be going or humidity or whatever. I'm really good at that. The problem is that's not scalable. Just 'cause I can do it doesn't mean others can. The other problem with it is I think I probably have a very high HQ.