For more than 30 years, I have been part of the leadership team at CTaccess. Our culture is all about service and making a difference in the lives of others. Recently, though, I have been inspired by Will Guidara’s book Unreasonable Hospitality, which has challenged me in unexpected ways.

I hadn’t considered hospitality in terms of how we conduct business. To me, hospitality meant inviting people over for dinner or cooking a meal for someone with a family member in a health crisis.

Will Guidara relates his experiences running his very high-end restaurant, Eleven Madison Park (EMP), in a relatable and challenging way. He tells the story of how he and his chef partner elevated their New York restaurant from a struggling one-star restaurant to being ranked #1 in the world in Restaurant magazine’s World’s 50 Best Restaurants. While food is an important part of this award, Will relates the unrelenting pursuit of unreasonable hospitality as the driving force to get them there.

It turns out that unreasonable hospitality is more about a relentless focus on making people feel welcome, seen, and important than it is about the hospitality industry. The journey of unreasonable hospitality becomes fulfilling in the tradition of “it is better to give than receive.”

HERE ARE A FEW OF MY TAKEAWAYS:

1. Hospitality turns your services from black and white to full color. I’ve seen this play out over the years. Especially in technology, where people often are made to feel stupid or less-than, paying attention to people and how you make them feel is so important.

2. We should learn the power of a genuinely gracious welcome! In the book, at one point, they got rid of the reservation podium and researched their customers before they arrived for their reservation. They then greeted them as if they were friends coming over for dinner.  What an opportunity to practice this in business and life to greet people by getting up, approaching them, and using enthusiasm!

3. Make the charitable assumption. Always thinking the best about others leads to a different way of treating everyone. If someone is rude or short, assume something is going badly about their day or year and treat them with compassion and understanding. Always thinking the best doesn’t harm us, and it grants grace that seems rare in our world today.

4. Hire the person who would chase down someone on the street to give them back the scarf that they dropped. Hiring people who care about people seems simple but are we prioritizing this in our selection process?

5. Create a culture of caring. Will tells about how suddenly it was cool to care at EMP. How great is it to have a culture where people have discovered that it is cool to care about your coworkers, customers, and even strangers you bump into?

6. Service is a noble thing. We sometimes treat people in service jobs as less than, but what a noble thing to serve those around you.  We have the opportunity to make an impact every day. Teach, repeat, and emphasize to your team the nobility of serving!

7. Challenge people with responsibility just a bit before they are ready. So often, we wait too long to ask people to step up. Give them that new position or that project just a step early and invest in their success. They will work hard to prove you right, and it conveys your trust and appreciation for them.

8. Look for regular opportunities for hospitality. All of us have regular interactions that are part of our business. Look at these things and figure out a way to be unreasonable in how well you treat people at this regular interaction. EMP did this in so many ways. One was eliminating the coat check numbering system and instead “knowing” whose coats were whose and meeting them at the exit with them in hand.

9. Envision the possibility first and then figure out how. At EMP, they did unreasonable things to make their customers feel special, things that seemed impossible at first. Their key was to grab hold of the possibility first and then figure out how.  Don’t let the seeming impossibility stop you from considering that thing that could transform the way you serve your customers.

10. One size fits one. The more specific you are with hospitality, the more recognized people feel. This requires knowing people and what is meaningful or important to them.  That standard bottle of wine, thank you, might mean something to some people, but to others, it is a throw-away.  Know your people and adjust your hospitality to them. They will be blown away.

Jesus famously stated what we now know as the golden rule, “Do to others whatever you would like them to do to you.” Unreasonable hospitality comes from the same heart. Will Guidara encourages us to ask, “What is the hospitality solution?”.  Let’s all find a way to be a little unreasonable in our pursuit of serving others!