Working with Purpose, on Purpose

A business that aims to make people happy needs to listen to what they think. At Eleven Madison Park, that meant listening to guests as well as the critic from The New York Times. Ignoring criticism can make you too comfortable with your decisions because you stop asking whether they still work.

But listening does not mean changing every decision someone dislikes. A business needs a clear point of view. Trying to satisfy everyone makes that point of view less clear, so you need to consider criticism rather than automatically agree with it.

Thinking through a decision again can help you grow. Someone else’s perspective may lead you to change your mind, or it may confirm that your original choice was right. Either way, you have reconsidered the choice instead of defending it out of habit.

Articulate Your Intentions

Will Guidara and chef Daniel Humm had spent hours discussing their ambitions for Eleven Madison Park. They understood what each other wanted without needing to explain it. But their 150 employees needed clear words to guide their work. They could not rely on an understanding that only the two leaders shared.

Guidara had learned from his father to make decisions with a purpose. Danny Meyer had shown him why he needed to explain that purpose to the team. When you put an ambition into words, others can understand it and make choices that help achieve it.

The restaurant repeatedly changed the experience it offered because its leaders wanted to give guests what they themselves would want to receive. As the leaders grew and their preferences changed, they changed the experience too. They wanted authenticity: an experience that reflected their own tastes, rather than something new just for the sake of being new.

Collaboration was the first quality they chose to pursue. They believed that involving the team could help them develop the other qualities they wanted the restaurant to have.

Strategy is for Everyone

Nordstrom, Apple, and JetBlue showed how this could work. All three held strategic planning meetings that brought people from across the company together to discuss ways to grow. Restaurants rarely held such meetings. At Eleven Madison Park, Guidara and Humm had been making decisions and setting goals themselves.

Their employees already cared about food, restaurants, and hospitality, so it made sense to hear their ideas. Inviting them to help set the goals would bring more ideas into the discussion. It would also make employees feel that the plans were theirs to carry out.

The first meeting asked one question: “What do we want to embody?” Employees divided into ten groups, each gathered around a notebook. Guidara visited the groups but held back from offering ideas because this was the employees’ discussion.

The managers had done their planning the day before. That meant employees could speak freely without their bosses in the group. During the staff meeting, sous-chefs took custom sandwich orders, and dining room managers prepared the sandwiches in the kitchen.

Some employees enjoyed making unusual requests of their bosses. One ordered turkey with one slice of untoasted wheat, one slice of toasted rye, and three dots of mayonnaise. Having the bosses make lunch gave the team room to speak, contribute, and have fun.

Four words became the main ideas guiding the restaurant’s plans and the way its people worked together:

• Education
• Passion
• Excellence
• Hospitality

These words gave employees shared priorities to guide their work. In later years, the strategic planning meetings became sessions where everyone could suggest ideas about what the restaurant should pursue in the coming year.

Choose Conflicting Goals

Excellence and hospitality can pull against each other. Eleven Madison Park needed to achieve both, so the team had to work out how to meet both goals rather than choose one and neglect the other.

Roger Martin calls this integrative thinking: finding ways to meet goals that conflict with each other. In When More Is Not Better, he argues that leaders should deliberately choose conflicting goals because the conflict forces them to find new solutions.

Southwest Airlines aimed to be the lowest-cost airline in America while also ranking first in customer and employee satisfaction. To meet both goals, it needed solutions that kept costs low while keeping customers and employees satisfied. Choosing only one goal would let the airline avoid that challenge.

Know Why Your Work is Important

Serving people can feel demeaning when you do not see why the work matters. Hospitality changes how that work feels because it gives meaning to the work for the person giving care as well as the person receiving it.

You will still have difficult days. But knowing how your work affects others gives you a reason to care beyond finishing the day’s tasks.

Whatever your job, you can make a difference in someone’s life. Saying what that difference is helps you understand why your work matters. It also helps you see how your work contributes to something beyond yourself.