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A Case Study
I really believe in the power of language. I think that words matter. And taking the time as a leader to thoughtfully articulate as many things as you possibly can is an unbelievably meaningful investment that you can make. About three months after I got to Eleven Madison Park, we were craving language. The language required to articulate where we were going as a restaurant. Up until that point, it was just me and my business partner in the office making all the decisions that would guide the restaurant forward when we had one hundred and fifty people on that team. And so we decided to figure out whether we could harness the collective brainpower of the team as a whole.
One hundred and fifty people spent a full day talking about words. And at the end, we came up with four. We decided if we can embody them cohesively, simultaneously, they would be game-changing. The first was hospitality. We wanted to be the kind of people who derove significant and genuine pleasure out of bestowing graciousness upon others. Not for some financial gain but just because the idea of doing something nice for someone else made your day better.
The second was excellence. We were striving for perfection with the understanding that perfection is unattainable, that with that realization people do one of two things. They either stop pursuing it or they try to get closer to it than anyone else has. And if we could break down our pursuit of perfection into all its individual parts, we could get pretty far down the road.
The third was education. If we could create a culture of education where everyone on the team was charged with the responsibility to learn but also with the responsibility to teach, every one of us would learn something new every single day. And the fourth was passion, which was our way of saying that we wanted to surround ourselves with and be the kind of people who were hospitable and were pursuing excellence and wanted to learn not because it was a part of our job description but because that’s just who we were. See, those four words helped guide us as we hired thousands of people in the years to follow but the real power of them was that our entire team helped us articulate them.
Articulating Your Core Values (and Living by Them)
It’s very, very important to take the time to articulate what your core values are. What are your nonnegotiables? What is it that makes the work you are asking your team to do important and impactful?
Get as many people as humanly possible in the room to help you decide what those words should be. Because the greater sense of ownership your entire team has over the things you’ve decided are important to you, the more incentivized they will be to uphold and embody those virtues. And then once you have, communicate that to them over and over again.
I believe in repetition. If you believe in an idea, you better say it enough times that you grow sick of hearing yourself say it. Otherwise, you have not said it enough for it to fully bleed into the culture you’re trying to create.