Recent hires will have fresh eyes that lead them to notice things longer-term employees have come to accept.

Meanwhile, all 35,000 Ritz-Carlton employees participate in some kind of Daily Line-Up at their local hotels. (A great deal has been written about their Line-Ups. It is worth searching for information online.)

Smith, forty-two, was youthful and energetic, with curly hair and a boyish face. He liked to question operational decisions in excruciating detail: he once managed to replace the entire twelve-person board of Darden Restaurants while holding less than 6 percent of the company’s stock on the basis of a 294-slide plan to turn around the struggling Olive Garden chain. Starboard’s Olive Garden slideshow became a legendary document among equity analysts, particularly slide 104, which criticized the restaurant’s breadstick strategy. (Historically, Olive Garden waiters would bring one breadstick for every guest, plus one for the table; they would then refill the breadstick container as needed. But over time the quality of service deteriorated, and servers just started dumping a bunch of breadsticks on the table, reducing the amount of food that customers ordered.) Slide 163 noted Olive Garden had also stopped salting the pasta water in a misguided effort to extend the life of the cookware. “How can management of the world’s largest Italian restaurant chain think it is OK to serve poorly prepared pasta?” Starboard asked.

Invite Your Team Along

There’s a fascinating and possibly overlooked advantage that businesses with strong cultures have: when an employee comes up in the organization, any other way of doing things just feels wrong.

And wrong is how EMP felt when I walked in on my first day.

In retrospect, I can now name everything that was going sideways and tell you what I did by way of correction. In the heroic version of this story, I struck a masterful pose and enumerated a number of inspirational management tenets, all of which transformed the restaurant within the week.

But the truth is, Danny’s way of doing things—the way he treated his employees and guests—was so baked into my consciousness that for the first few months I was acting on instinct alone.

Mostly, the team needed to be brought along. They needed to feel seen and appreciated. They needed expectations to be clearly laid out and explained. They needed discipline to be consistent. They needed to feel like vital and important parts of an exciting sea change, not obstacles to making it happen.

From a management perspective, we needed to return to first principles, and at Union Square Hospitality Group, the first principle is to take care of one another. The fine-dining squad hadn’t come from within USHG—and even if they had been able to absorb this crucial, employee-centered aspect of the culture, they’d been so focused on making their mark on the restaurant that they’d let this central principle fall by the wayside. That’s why Danny had insisted the next GM come from within the company; for him, that aspect of the culture was not negotiable.

To bridge the gap between the two factions, improving communication was going to be key. At the same time, we needed systems, so everybody would know what they were supposed to be doing and how they were supposed to be doing it.

It was my hope that both fixes would make the team feel safer—and inspire them to come along on our mission. There was a lot to be done to make the restaurant better, but there would be no point to doing any of it if the people who worked there didn’t love coming to work. If I couldn’t succeed in getting hearts and minds on board for the bigger project, then the grand vision of a push toward excellence would be dead on arrival.

Not every guest wanted a history lesson during their dinner. Many were charmed and wanted to engage with us. But some people were there to talk to their companions or to eat; they wanted us to drop off their food and leave them alone. I had stripped the team of their authority to read the table and deliver an appropriate level of detail—to tailor the service experience to the guest. In my pursuit of a sense of place, I’d actually made the meal less hospitable.

Worse, it was essentially the same mistake I’d made the year before, when I’d hesitated to promote a general manager. Once again, the guy known for talking about how much he trusted his team had acted as if he didn’t trust them at all.

In truth, I’m not surprised I made this mistake—and I’m almost certain I’ll make it again in the future. My compulsive attention to detail is one of my superpowers; it’s how I take aim at perfection. But that tendency also means I’m always walking a tightrope between my desire to guarantee excellence by controlling everything and knowing I want to create an environment of empowerment and collaboration and trust among the people who work for me. Like excellence and hospitality, these two qualities—control and trust—are not friends.