But in contrast, your response to the question, “Do you turn to this team member when you want extraordinary results?” is entirely reliable. With this question we are not asking you to stand above her, and outside of yourself, and opine dispassionately on her performance. Instead we are asking you to look inside yourself and tell us simply whether you feel confident to go to her when you want something done excellently. You cannot be wrong about this, because there is no right or wrong, only your feeling about what you would or wouldn’t do with this team member.

... Browne wondered:

1. How can we expect our employees to be extraordinary and differentiate the company if we use the same hiring and onboarding methods as competitors?

1. What characteristics describe our ideal workforce that our competitors could not or would not use to describe theirs?

It’s a cliché that culture can’t be taught; it has to be caught. And what better way to appreciate the exquisite nature of Daniel’s food than to spend six months ferrying plates from the kitchen to the table? More important, while we were teaching people the technical points a little bit at a time, it would give them the opportunity to fully absorb the culture we were building, long before they became point person with a guest. And how we chose which people to invite onto the team became central to our success.

I’m always interested in what others, and not just the esteemed critic from The New York Times, think about what we’re doing. If your business involves making people happy, then you can’t be good at it if you don’t care what people think. The day you stop reading your criticism is the day you grow complacent, and irrelevance won’t be far behind.

Most of us have no difficulty at all in delivering praise; that’s the fun part of being a boss. But it’s hard to criticize someone. So I spend a lot of time with my managers talking about criticism—how to deliver it, how to receive it, and maybe most important, how to think about it. We all want to be liked, and when you give someone a note about what they could be doing differently and better, you run the risk of losing their goodwill. That’s why I say there is no better way to show someone you care than by being willing to offer them a correction; it’s the purest expression of putting someone else’s needs above your own, which is what hospitality is all about. Praise is affirmation, but criticism is investment.”