708: Danny Meyer - How You Make People Feel: The Founder of Shake Shack & Union Square Hospitality Group on Culture as Soil, the 49/51 Hiring Formula, and Leading With Generosity

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www. LearningLeader.com https://www. LearningLeader.com My new book, The Price of Becoming https://amzn.to/4cNwKso, is a USA Today, LA Times, Success Magazine, and Publishers Weekly bestseller! I think you'll find it useful. Connect with me on Twitter/X: @RyanHawk12 https://x.com/RyanHawk12 Instagram: @RyanHawk12 https://www.instagram.com/ryanhawk12/?hl=en Sign up for Mindful Monday https://ryanhawk.kit.com/profile (it's free): This is brought to you by Insight Global https://insightglobal.com/learningleader/. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My guest: Danny Meyer is the founder of Union Square Hospitality Group and one of the most influential restaurateurs of his generation. He built New York landmarks like Union Square Cafe and Gramercy Tavern, and Shake Shack... He's the author of the classic Setting the Table and the new What Could Possibly Go Right? Key Learnings "Business, like life, is all about how you make people feel. It's that simple and it's that hard." "Optimists and pessimists die the same way. They just live differently." Shimon Peres. Danny prefers to live as an optimist. Most people respond to hope. A few will come out of a dark closet hopping on a pogo stick and a few will walk on the shady side no matter what. Most people start the day intending to make it better than yesterday, and they'll follow someone who shows them how that could happen. A growing business needs funding and leadership. It also needs soil. Like a plant needs sun and water and still needs something to grow in. The soil is the culture, and it determines whether anything you plant actually grows. Be explicit about which behaviors you celebrate and which you won't tolerate. Then be relentlessly consistent about both. That's how culture survives you not being in the room. Everyone is watching who gets hired, promoted, and paid. Every time you compromise on either the skills or the character, you send a message that you didn't mean any of the words. Probably unwittingly, but you send it. Curiosity is the behavior Danny celebrates most. If you want a team that treats every day as a chance to be better than yesterday, someone has to actually wonder what could be done differently. Entrepreneurs are upsighted. Danny's word. They only see what's up, only see what could possibly go right, and they look at existing problems that would make the world better if solved. A bad salesperson answers questions you never asked. Danny remembers a shoe store that hauled out everything from the back room regardless of what he wanted. The only two questions that mattered were does it fit and do I like it. A great one gets into your shoes and asks what you'd want. Sometimes they help you get to the question you actually have. There's no job that doesn't benefit from good sales skills, and good writing skills. Entrepreneurial athleticism is the trait Danny looks for in every leader. Talent gets you in the door. Athleticism is dedicating yourself to train plus the mental and emotional mettle to find a way to win. Day one mentality. The day a restaurant opens, nothing is scratched, every door works, nothing is smudged, and you assume everyone might be a critic. Day one of year 10 should be better than the original, because you have ten years of learning. Without that, it only goes backwards. The hiring formula is 49 and 51. Forty-nine percent is how well he thinks you can do the job, which is mostly technical and different for every role. Fifty-one percent is who you are. That 51 percent is Hospitality Quotient. The composite of optimistic warmth, curious intelligence, determined work ethic, empathy, self-awareness, and integrity. Someone with a high HQ is happier themselves when they make someone else feel better. "Cooking a great piece of fish only gets you to the 49-yard line." You need all 100, and it isn't just the servers who need it. It's everybody. A high HQ is a liability in an interview. Danny sometimes has to park his own at the door, because his job isn't to make the candidate feel good. It's to assess how they'll make the staff and the guests feel. Never ask if someone is self-aware. They'll say yes. Ask instead: "What's the greatest misperception other people have about you?" You can't answer it without self-awareness, because you have to know both what you are and what you're projecting. When hiring a chef, Danny already knows they can cook. What he's testing is the feedback loop. Will they get defensive? Grateful? He may well be wrong in the feedback, and he still wants to know early what it's going to be like to lead this person. Caitlin took a reservation and saved a woman's life. She was getting a phone number when the caller's voice started halting. Caitlin sensed something was wrong, asked permission to call 911, and got the address. It was a hemorrhagic stroke. The woman survived and had to relearn how to speak. Caitlin was so moved that she went back to school to become a speech therapist for people with aphasia. When the woman died recently, she left Caitlin the money to pay for it. A good employee books the table accurately. A great one changes someone's night, or their life. Danny's point about Caitlin: nobody trained her for that. The culture did. Mind share is what marketing earns. Heart share is what hospitality earns. Mind share means people know you exist and think of you first. Heart share means they love you and tell everyone they know. The golden rule of hospitality is not the golden rule. Do unto others as you believe they would want done unto them. Service is one size fits all. Hospitality is one size fits one. The salmon that changed everything. Soon after Gramercy Tavern opened, a Union Square Cafe regular told Danny what happened was inexcusable. Her salmon came well done when she'd ordered it rare. Danny's first reaction was that an honest kitchen mistake didn't seem so bad. The mistake wasn't the problem. The response was. At Union Square Cafe, she said, the server would have noticed, quietly removed it, brought soup so her guests could keep eating, recooked it properly, and probably taken it off the bill. At Gramercy, nobody came over while she picked at it. A manager eventually took the plate, handed her a coat check, told her the rest would be waiting at the door, and left it on the bill. "If you don't have language, you cannot teach." For ten years Danny led one restaurant by embodying the behavior he wanted. With two, wherever he was, he wasn't at the other one. It was the first time he had to lead by using his words instead of just embodying what he wanted to see. Enlightened hospitality, in this order: Each other first. How the team treats each other, with generosity and charitable assumption. Then the guests. Then the community and the suppliers. Then the investors, who end up with more because of everything above. Break it anywhere, starting with how people care for each other, and it doesn't work. Lead with generosity. You're in business for tomorrow dollars, not today dollars. His staff charged that woman for the salmon because they were afraid she was working an angle. Danny's response: where is the charitable assumption that maybe we just overcooked it? Nice and kind are different. Nice isn't a bad thing, but sometimes nice is how you avoid addressing a problem. Kind means I'm on your side, which sometimes means holding up the mirror. If someone isn't measuring up and you let it go, that isn't kind and it isn't even nice. Kindness takes the courage to give honest feedback without demoralizing the person. Laying people off during the pandemic wasn't nice. Doing it one at a time was kind. Several hundred people, and nobody got laid off by tweet or mass email. Everyone was spoken to by their own boss. Shake Shack started because Danny asked what could possibly go right. An artist needed someone to run a hot dog cart under an installation in Madison Square Park. His team said they were too busy running four restaurants. Danny's argument was that the park was the front yard of two of them, and you take care of your front yard. They staffed it with their coat checkers and served Chicago-style on purpose. The coat checkers had no work until the weather turned cold, so this gave them a summer job. Chicago-style has eight toppings, which let them find out whether four coat checkers could remember how every regular liked it. The point was proving hospitality isn't only for fancy restaurants. They lost money two years running, and the community started calling it "our hot dog cart." Danny heard the word "our" and knew people felt shared ownership. Then he gave away the building. He built a $750,000 kiosk and donated it to the park, so the park owns the building and his company owns the business. A percentage of every sale goes back into keeping the park beautiful and safe. That first Shake Shack still pays just under a million dollars a year in rent to the park. Danny's champagne moment a year from now: that the book actually meant something to people. He wrote it to teach himself, because that's how he learns. If the lessons he picked up scraping his knees turn out to be useful to someone else, it was worth it. Reflection Questions Which behaviors does your team know for certain you celebrate, and which do they know you won't tolerate? If you asked five of them, would you get the same five answers? Look at your last promotion. Did that person clear the bar on both the 49 and the 51? What did everyone else learn from watching it? Where are you being nice right now when the situation calls for you to hold up the mirror? Podcast Chapters 00:00 Apply for the Learning Leader Circle 01:36 Meet Danny Meyer 03:23 "It's That Simple, and It's That Hard" 05:15 Optimists and Pessimists Die the Same Way 08:47 Culture Is the Soil 12:53 Why He Celebrates Curiosity 15:44 What Sales Taught Him 19:48 Entrepreneurial Athleticism 23:15 The 49 and 51 Hiring Formula 26:10 "What's the Greatest Misperception About You?" 28:32 Testing the Feedback Loop in an Interview 29:44 Caitlin Saves a Life 32:51 Mind Share vs. Heart Share 34:33 The Golden Rule of Hospitality 35:33 If You Don't Have Language, You Cannot Teach 39:10 Enlightened Hospitality 41:35 Nice vs. Kind 43:10 Laying People Off the Kind Way 45:03 How a Hot Dog Cart Became Shake Shack 50:08 The Champagne Question 52:08 EOPC

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Ryan Hawk?

  Applications are now open for our next Learning Leader Circle. You can go to learningleaderscircle.com to apply. I thought it would be helpful for you to hear from some current members of my Learning Leader Circle. Here they are.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  I chose Learning Leader Circle because I wanted to be around really winning professionals, people killing at work, but even better people.

• 0:25Speaker 02

  Ryan does such an amazing job of vetting the group. It's all A players. It is all amazing rock star people who want everybody to become their best and just add value to the group.

• 0:37Speaker 03

  We have people with agriculture backgrounds. We have people with white collar backgrounds, blue collar backgrounds, people in education.

• 0:43Speaker 04

  The totality of the room is very impressive with the amount of knowledge we have to be gained, but when you sit down and you break out with five, six, seven people, you can have that intimate, that in-depth conversation that allows you to go a little bit deeper.

• 0:55Speaker 05

  We got additional coaches this year. They live their lives according to what they teach. These guys will all jump in and get you back on course.

• 1:05Speaker 06

  Definitely do it. Don't think twice about it. Know that you're going to leave with new relationships, new takeaways to make you better at your job, better as a parent and as a person. So it was just a very intimate, very inclusive environment.

• 1:26Ryan Hawk?

  To apply for our next Learning Leader Circle, go to learningleaderscircle.com.

• 1:36Ryan Hawk?

  Welcome to the Learning Leader Show presented by Insight Global. I am your host, Ryan Hawke. Thank you so much for being here. Go to learningleader.com for show notes of this and all podcast episodes. Go to learningleader.com. Now on to tonight's featured leader. This one is 11 years in the making. It's the great Danny Meyer, one of the most influential leaders of our generation and the founder of Union Square Hospitality Group. Over the last four decades, he's opened landmark New York restaurants like Union Square Cafe and Gramercy Tavern and Shake Shack.

• 2:19Ryan Hawk?

  Now a global brand with 700 locations in 22 countries. He built it all on a single idea he calls enlightened hospitality. The conviction that business like life is all about how you make people feel. He's the author of the classic Setting the Table and his new book is called What Could Possibly Go Right?

• 2:43Ryan Hawk?

  During our conversation, we discussed the importance of the leader becoming a great writer and speaker. As he says, if you don't have language, you cannot teach. And if you cannot teach, you cannot lead. Then Danny shares what he means by entrepreneurial athleticism and why it's the first thing he looks for when hiring a leader. Then Danny tells the incredible story of how Shake Shack got started as a hot dog stand in an effort to support Madison Square Park. It's so, so good. Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy my conversation with Danny Meyer. One of my favorite quotes of all time, business like life is all about how you make people

• 3:28Ryan Hawk?

  feel. It's that simple and it's that hard. I've repeated that a million times over the years. Where does that come from, Danny?

• 3:37Speaker 07

  Well, you know, when I wrote Setting the Table, it was really to try to teach me. I didn't come up with that one day and say, I've got to write that idea down. The process of writing for me is what gets things out of my heart and out of my head. And when I wrote that one sentence, which is right in the introduction of the book, I said, I don't know if I can do any better than that. It really is why we do what we do. We spend a lot of effort trying to make great food and find wonderful wines to pour for people and design beautiful dining rooms. But at the end of the day, it's the human life that happens within those walls and the relationships that get built and the memories that get created that really make people feel like they're part of that community, like they belong.

• 4:22Speaker 07

  So that's why I wrote it and I'm sticking to it.

• 4:26Ryan Hawk?

  Do you remember the moment you wrote it? Cause now everyone would say, well, that had to be like AI or something. It's just too good. It's too good. Do you remember after it and thinking like, oh my goodness, this is it?

• 4:36Speaker 07

  Yeah, we barely had the internet 20 years ago. I'm just kidding about that. We certainly didn't have AI. You know, one of the things that no one tells you about when you're writing a book is that you don't write the introduction till after you've written the whole book because you don't really know what you're introducing. At least that's the way I write. I don't really know where a book is going to go. I just start thinking about what ideas mean a lot to me and have meant a lot to me and then try to make an order out of them and some organization that's going to make it fun for people to flip the pages. And I'm really grateful that happened with Setting the Table. And now I'm excited to get what could possibly go right out into the world.

• 5:15Ryan Hawk?

  I love the title and I love this ethos of, I may pronounce the name wrong. Is it Shimon or Shemine?

• 5:22Speaker 07

  No, you got it.

• 5:23Ryan Hawk?

  Okay. Optimists and pessimists die the same way. They just live differently. I prefer to live as an optimist. Even from the second we connected, I sensed just your aura is one of optimism, of believing things will go well and certainly reading your books and studying your work for a while. I think that's just makes for an excellent attribute of a leader as well as someone that people would want to get in line and follow, a belief that it's going to go well, a belief of optimism. Where does that come from?

• 6:00Speaker 07

  Some of it is, I think, wired in people. I do believe that there are people, it's like a bill curve. I believe there are people who are just, you know, you could put them in a closet with no light for a year and they'd, you open the door and they'd be out there hopping on a pogo stick. Not that many people like that. Then you could shine the sun on some people forever and they're just going to walk on the shady side of the street. That's the other end of the spectrum. I do believe that most people respond to hope and optimism. I think that people go to work every day or people start their day at home every day or whatever it is they're doing, intending to make it a better day than yesterday or hoping that it will be, right?

• 6:41Speaker 07

  And I just think that if you can show people that there is a way that that could happen and that they can actually have an impact on that with the approach they bring, it works and it's not a calculated business strategy. I did get some of this, I think, the first time I ever had a job where I was a manager of people, 100% of the people were volunteers. I was working in a political campaign and nobody was getting a paycheck, right? They were all volunteers and therefore each and every single day as their boss, the only way I could motivate them was to talk about the possibility and the hope that something good could happen if the candidate were to be elected.

• 7:23Speaker 07

  And I think I learned that if you can name what the higher purpose is of your organization. I mean, I know families that actually have their own family pact and they have a higher purpose in their family. This is what we stand for. This is how we do things around here. I think that people really, they follow. They want to follow that kind of a lead. The first book I wrote, Setting the Table, is about the power of hospitality. It is a fact that the root of the word hospitality is hope. And I think that people who are really good at hospitality, in other words, making other people feel like you're on their side are people that exude a sense of hope and they hope that their own actions can make the world better for people.

• 8:08Speaker 07

  So again, the quote you just read comes from the introduction to What Could Possibly Go Right? And I didn't write that until after I had written the book. They should really call introductions epilogues if I'm the guy writing the book. But I realized that you called it the ethos, the through line of what could possibly go right is that things don't in fact always go right. They don't. There is no straight line between point A and point B. But I do believe that you can, as a leader or as just a player, you can impact the outcome by bringing a sense of possibility to every single thing you do.

• 8:47Ryan Hawk?

  One of the, I think, things that people struggle with is how to advance their culture as something grows from maybe small or one restaurant to this big business or big organization. And it's something you've done really, really well. And this book has a lot of teachings to help people try to do that. Is that even the right question to ask? Or is there a different way to view this when somebody is building something and they go, wait a second, I can't physically be there every day to influence the culture or influence the behavior because now we have multiple locations, we're all over the place, or some leaders are working in a more remote world and they still want to have that type of culture?

• 9:33Ryan Hawk?

  How do you view this, growing the culture as a business scales?

• 9:37Speaker 07

  It's the absolute right question to be asking because I think that when people have a successful business or organization of any type and it's doing good things for people, why would you not want to do more of it? And once you make a choice to scale it, as you just said, or to do more of it, then there's kind of two things you know you're going to need. It's kind of like a plant is going to need sunlight and water, right? Well, I think for a business to grow, it's going to need funding. And it's going to need leadership. It's going to need a kind of inspiring leadership that makes people want to go someplace with it. And when you put all that together,

• 10:19Speaker 07

  you end up having the possibility to grow a business. And yet, there's still one other crucial thing that the plant needs. It's not just the water, and it's not just the sunlight. It needs the soil. And the soil is the culture. The culture is what the plant is growing in. The culture is what the business is going to either grow in or not grow in. And you can have the best business in the world, but if the way people feel working there isn't great, or if the way people feel doing business with you doesn't feel great to them, or if it doesn't feel great for your community, your culture is not actually additive to your growth. So, if I've learned any one thing through all these years, it's to tend to the soil, tend

• 11:01Speaker 07

  to the culture. And there are ways that you can scale that. And I've found that the biggest way to do that is to be really, really clear with everyone in the company, which behaviors we are going to celebrate, and which behaviors we are not going to tolerate. When you put all that together, and you really are consistent with people, and you do celebrate the stuff you want more of, and you don't tolerate the stuff you want less of, you find that the culture can actually flourish. And then I would add one more thing to that. When you're growing, you need more people, obviously. And if I've learned any one thing there, it's that when we promote people, or when we hire people, everyone else in the organization

• 11:46Speaker 07

  is watching very carefully, who's getting the promotions, who's getting the raises, who's getting hired. Everyone's watching. And you better make sure that the people you're bringing in, and/or the people you're promoting, are not only the people who are best at the stuff they do, but crucially, they are the best at who they are for your culture. Because every time you compromise on either one of those, you're sending a powerful message, maybe unwittingly, but you are sending a powerful message to everybody else. We didn't really mean all those words we were talking about, because otherwise, we wouldn't have promoted this guy. So, those are the things I really try to focus on as we grow. And we're very, very conscious. Like, the thing that gets me out of bed every single

• 12:30Speaker 07

  morning, and really, the reason I wrote this book, is I was trying to learn, over the past 20 years, because we were growing. And it wasn't always easy. And I was trying to learn when it worked really well, what was working really well, and when it didn't work really well, where were we failing? And it always came back to who we hired, and how we did business.

• 12:53Ryan Hawk?

  All right. I can't wait to get to some of the hiring stuff, because that's rich in your book, and I have tons of notes. But before that, my curiosity is getting the best of me. What are some of the specific behaviors that you celebrate? I think that's a really critical point of honoring the people who do it right, and celebrating it, not only so that they feel it, but so everybody else sees it and feels it as well. So, what are some of those specific behaviors that you celebrate?

• 13:19Speaker 07

  Well, I would celebrate you, because embedded in your question, you said your curiosity is getting the best of you. I really honor curiosity. And, you know, if you're going to be the kind of organization that looks at every day as an opportunity to improve on how well you did it yesterday, you did your best yesterday, but you probably could do it a little bit better. It starts with curiosity. You've got to actually wonder, what could we do differently? How could we do it differently? What more can we learn? What more can we teach? So, that's crucially, a behavior that we celebrate.

• 13:51Ryan Hawk?

  Does that look and sound like somebody asking questions, somebody like good eye contact, somebody thinking of new ways to do something in a way that maybe has never been done before, because they read a book, or they talked to a mentor? What does curiosity actually look and feel like?

• 14:06Speaker 07

  Well, everything you said would be part of my answer. And I think that curiosity is the crucial fuel for entrepreneurial spirit. Because what an entrepreneur does, there's a couple of things. First of all, these reading glasses I have on, I only wear when I'm reading, really, or if I'm looking at my computer screen. But whatever it is they're correcting is very different than the kind of glasses an entrepreneur wears. An entrepreneur wears glasses because they're upsided. They only see what's up. They only see what could possibly go right. And they're always looking at existing problems that if only they were solved,

• 14:47Speaker 07

  would make the world better. So, think about every great innovation you've ever seen in your life, started with somebody saying, "That could be done better. And I bet I've got a solution for it." And furthermore, and this is one of the most understated things, I think, about leadership, and curiosity infuses all these things. You've got to wonder, right? Wonder is really the kiss and cousin to curiosity. But you've got to be the kind of person that can actually persuade others to come along for the ride with you. Because there's not many jobs I know of that don't involve some kind of team. And so, it starts with curiosity, seeing problems before others see them, coming up with a solution before

• 15:32Speaker 07

  others did that, and then persuading a bunch of really gifted people who are like-hearted and like-minded to come along for the ride and help you get there. Because very few things we can get done on our own.

• 15:44Ryan Hawk?

  I watched an interview you did on a show at one point, and I think one of your first jobs was a sales job. That was my first job as well. And I'm so grateful. I didn't love all of the elements, but I got good at it. And I think developing those skills has helped me for the rest of my life ever since. I'm curious, because we're all in sales every day. Dan Pink has written a lot about that. He's been on the show, talking about we're all in sales all the time. How did that, one of those first jobs you have, doing really well as a sales professional, how did that help you for the rest of your career?

• 16:17Speaker 07

  It mostly helps me, and I'll try to explain that. If I were really good at it, though, I'd have a copy of What Could Possibly Go Right in the picture right now, because then all of your viewers could see how beautiful the cover is for what... So, I'm going to try to get better at sales. But what it taught me more than anything is really kind of connected to one of the first questions you asked, which is that sales, like anything else, is building relationships with people. And, you know, I remember going to a shoe store when I was younger, and it didn't matter what shoe I wanted, the person brought out everything from the back room that they wanted to sell. And the two questions were, does it fit, and do I like it? And even when they fit, if I didn't like it, it didn't

• 17:00Speaker 07

  matter. So, what a great salesman does, a great salesperson is, they really try to put themselves in your shoes. And they ask, "If I were that person, what would I want right now?" And they don't answer questions that you're not asking. They answer a question that you actually have. And a great salesperson actually sometimes helps you get to that question. I got good at connecting dots also. So, for example, yeah, I was, I think, 23 when I first started as a salesperson in New York City, and I had, I had a massive territory. I was selling electronic tags to stop shoplifters, of all things. But I

• 17:38Speaker 07

  had, when I first started, I had all of Manhattan, I had Bergen County, New Jersey, I had Suffolk County. We didn't have the internet back then. So, everything I got to know was by being curious. And I drove my little company car, which was a powder blue Volkswagen Rabbit. And if I stopped into a dress store, and learned that they were having a shoplifting problem, and I ended up selling a system to this person, I found out that his cousin had a health and beauty aid store across town. And I found out that his best customer had a food store, right? And I just kept connecting dots and making relationships

• 18:21Speaker 07

  with people. I also learned that I was willing to put myself out there, in a way that I hadn't when I was much younger. Sales is kind of a, it's kind of a gamble. It's a risky thing, because what if they say no? And more often than not, they do. So, it was just like one of the best growing experiences ever. And through it all, I think I learned that I loved to compete. But I mostly, I wasn't trying to beat anybody. For whatever number of sales I got last week, I wanted to do a little bit better this week. So, I learned a lot about my own competitive spirit as well.

• 18:53Ryan Hawk?

  It's similar to entrepreneurship, because especially a lot of the sales jobs, there's a variable compensation component, meaning if you don't sell, you don't eat, you don't get any money. And so, you're betting on yourself every day. And that's what you do when you start a business, is you're betting on yourself and your ability to rally people around a mission, and to go make something happen. And so, that's why I think, if there's any, like, young person who isn't quite sure what they want to do when they graduate college, I tell them to get a sales job, because you probably won't love it, it'll be hard. Maybe you'll like it, I hope so, but you probably won't. But if you work hard to get good at it, those skills are portable to whatever the thing is you do next. And so, that's why I think it's useful.

• 19:38Speaker 07

  100%. There's no job I've ever seen that doesn't benefit from good sales skills, and good writing skills, I might add.

• 19:45Ryan Hawk?

  Yes. Yeah. Well, obviously, you've shown, you've got that. Okay, let's get some of the hiring stuff. One of the phrases that I loved, my background's in athletics, played football, growing up in college, a little bit afterwards. And so, when you write about...

• 19:58Speaker 07

  You were pretty famous, weren't you?

• 20:00Ryan Hawk?

  No. I'd be good enough to have my college paid for, which is great. My parents loved it. And I was proud to do that for them. But entrepreneurial athleticism, it's a trait we look for in anyone that you consider for a leadership role in your organization. So, can you define this entrepreneurial athleticism, and how important that trait is for you?

• 20:20Speaker 07

  Absolutely. So, you wouldn't have gotten as far as you got, you're a quarterback, yeah?

• 20:25Ryan Hawk?

  Yeah.

• 20:25Speaker 07

  Okay. So, you would not have gotten as far as you got, without some God-given physical talent. But you also wouldn't have, you probably wouldn't have gotten nearly as far as you had gotten, if you didn't also have athleticism. When I use the expression athleticism, it's not only what happens in sports, it's what happens anywhere, which is that with whatever gifts I got naturally, I'm going to actually dedicate myself, train myself to be my best, and I'm going to have the mental and emotional mental to figure out a way to win. That's athleticism. And I look for that in leaders that we have,

• 21:08Speaker 07

  because people often say to me, "Gosh, how are you in the restaurant business? It's so hard, so competitive." Maybe, but I think that's true of what you do, Ryan. How many podcasts are out there?

• 21:21Ryan Hawk?

  Millions.

• 21:21Speaker 07

  I guarantee you, you, you work really hard and you prepare like, I can tell you prepare really, really hard for what you do. That's why you're on top. And I look for that in leaders because there's 26,000 restaurants in New York City. You think we're the only ones who know how to make a good burger or a good roast chicken? Of course not. And so what are the things we need to do to make sure that we become your favorite place to dine? A lot of that has to do with, actually, most of it. When things are not going well, first person I look at is myself, because I'm the ultimate leader. But then I look at all the leaders in the restaurant and somehow they're not bringing out

• 22:04Speaker 07

  the athleticism in their own team. Because we have an expression we call day one mentality. And the first day a restaurant opens, it never looks better. There's no scratches in anything. All the doors work. You have all the wine glasses you need. You're not running out of anything. The flowers are beautiful. All the shirts on the servers are completely pressed. There's not a smudge on any of the plates that go out. And you assume that every single person in the restaurant might just be a restaurant critic. Well, what happens naturally over time is that things can go a little sideways. So I really, really encourage our team to bring that day one mentality to every

• 22:47Speaker 07

  single day. Because why should day one of year 10 or year 20 not be as special as day one was way back then? And as a matter of fact, it should be a lot better because we've got 20 years of learning. Or in the case of Union Square Cafe, 40 years of learning. It should be even better right now. But if you don't bring out that athleticism in your leaders and in the team, that today has to be better than yesterday, it only goes backwards.

• 23:15Ryan Hawk?

  I read this about some of the attributes that you look for. Optimistic warmth, curious intelligence, determined work ethic, empathy, self-awareness, integrity. Really interesting. I think hiring, again, is something that is useful for anybody, whether you're running a restaurant or any business, of how to get great people, how to get the ones that you think will help drive your culture forward. What's like your interview process like? And now you're, you're running the whole show, so you get people who are already really well screened. But I'm still curious, like, what it sounds like? Could you take me inside the room when you're interviewing somebody, having a conversation about them either coming to work for you, to run a restaurant,

• 23:57Ryan Hawk?

  to be a leader? What does it sound like? What are some of the questions you like to ask?

• 24:02Speaker 07

  Yeah, well, you're right. I don't do most of the interviewing these days, but I do teach how I want to see people interviewed. You know, I'm still involved with, we're not going to hire a chef without me being involved with that. Or we're not going to hire a senior manager without my being involved with that. So really, I'm looking for two things, Ryan. I'm looking, our recipe's pretty straightforward. Forty-nine percent of what I'm looking for is how well I think this person can do the job we will be paying them to do. Most of that is going to be technical skills. And those technical skills are completely different from every, every single job. You know, if I'm hiring an accountant or the CFO of the company, I'm not, I don't really care how good

• 24:44Speaker 07

  of a pasta cook they are. And if we're hiring a chef, do I care that they can handle the balance sheet? It's a good skill for them to have, but that's not the primary technical skill. So that, the 49% of the technical skills. The 51% that I'm looking for in any interview is, is who are you? And specifically, I'm looking for the degree to which you have what we call a high hospitality quotient, which is, we call HQ. And HQ is the outcome of all the emotional skills you just read off. When someone has each one of those things, beginning with optimistic kindness or warmth,

• 25:25Speaker 07

  right up to and including integrity, but all the ones you just listed, when someone has those at a very high level, they have what we call a high hospitality quotient. And that's someone who is actually happier themselves when they make someone else feel better. Now, I think you know as well as I do, that has absolutely nothing to do with whether you can cook a great piece of fish. And yet, cooking a great piece of fish only gets you to the 49-yard line with our company. We got to get the touchdown. We got to get all 100 yards. And the way we're going to do that is, we're not going to hire someone who's great at fish if they don't also have a high HQ. And it's not just servers in the dining room who have to have a high HQ. It's everybody.

• 26:10Ryan Hawk?

  Yeah. Is that just like a gut feel through having a regular conversation? Are there specific questions? Is there a style? Because gut feel could work for you, but maybe, again, how does it scale? So how do you teach that to somebody else?

• 26:22Speaker 07

  No, you're absolutely right. And I'm pretty sure my IQ is way lower than yours, but my HQ is pretty high. And that can be a liability, by the way, when you're hiring. And the reason having a high HQ can be a liability when you're hiring, is that when I'm interviewing, it shouldn't be my job to make you feel better. It should be my job to assess how I think you're going to make our staff members feel, how you're going to make our guests and our customers feel. So I really have to kind of sometimes park my own HQ at the door when I'm interviewing. But just because I have a high HQ, I can actually, I can almost smell someone else with a high HQ

• 27:05Speaker 07

  around the corner. I just sense it. I feel it. But that, as you just said, is not scalable. So we've come up with a number of questions that actually start to get to some of the emotional skills that we're looking for. And, you know, I would never ask somebody, by the way, are you self-aware? Because they'll say, yes, of course I am. But I might ask someone, what's the greatest misperception other people have about you? You cannot answer that question if you're not self-aware, because you first have to know, you know, you have to say, well, I'm really this, but I'm putting out there that I'm actually that. That question is a great stepping off point to get to know

• 27:47Speaker 07

  somebody. I also think it's, it's an important part when you're interviewing somebody and you get a sense pretty quickly whether this person is a possibility, pretty quickly. And so you're already beginning the process of leading that person, even in the conversation. So you have an opportunity to let them know. So here's an example. When I'm hiring a chef, and I already know that they're a really good cook, what I really care about more than anything is this, in an interview, what's the feedback loop going to feel like? When I give this chef feedback on their cooking, are they going to be defensive about it? Are they going to be grateful for the

• 28:26Speaker 07

  feedback? Are we going to have a really thoughtful conversation? And by the way, I may not be right with my question and my feedback. But I want to know, early on, what is the experience going to be like of leading this person or working with this person? And so, right in the initial interview, once I already know that someone's good at the thing they do, I really, really want to know, what's it going to feel like on a day-to-day basis to solve problems with this person? Because ultimately, that's what business is. It's just solving problems all day long. And it's kind of like, I'm sure when you played football, or whatever sport you play now, it's hard work. You come off the field tired and perspiring, but it was fun, right? And that's what business should be

• 29:11Speaker 07

  like. It's solving problems. It's hard work. And sometimes you come back exhausted, but you look back and you go, there's no team I would have rather done that with. And that's what I'm trying to gauge in an interview. Is this someone, I hate to say going to battle, that doesn't sound like I'm in the hospitality business, but it's a battle to win the hearts and stomachs and minds of your guests.

• 29:33Ryan Hawk?

  Yep. You write about heart share versus mind share. You need both, but how heart share is so important about how you make somebody feel when they walk through that door. And one of the examples, I'd love you to, to share this full story is this letter you got from a member of your team named Caitlin, and how Caitlin literally saved somebody's life when she thought she was just answering the phone to take a reservation like any other day. What happened with Caitlin?

• 30:00Speaker 07

  Oh, my Lord. So she, she heard the person called to make a reservation at, I think it was Gramercy Tavern. And Caitlin was in the process of getting the person's phone number, which we always do when we're taking a reservation. And the person started, she got the phone number out, but she started really halting with her voice. And Caitlin sensed that something was very, very different. And she asked the woman, you know, to stay calm and said, I'm going to call 911, because it sounds like you could use some help. Is that okay with you? And the woman said, yes. And Caitlin had the wherewithal to get her address. 911 came. Turned out she was having

• 30:44Speaker 07

  a hemorrhagic stroke. And if they had not gotten there, she most likely would have died, as you just said. It turned out that she was barely able to speak after that. She got all kinds of training, it turned out. And so this woman stayed in touch with Caitlin to thank her. Caitlin was inspired by this woman's miraculous ability to learn how to speak. She had aphasia. And that inspired Caitlin to go to school to learn how to provide therapy for people who had aphasia.

• 31:22Speaker 07

  When this woman died, which was pretty recently, right before Caitlin wrote me, she left money for Caitlin to pay for that school. And Caitlin, I hadn't known the second part of the story. Caitlin had left our company during the pandemic. So this all happened during the pandemic, but it was only recently that Caitlin wrote me to tell me how the story ended up. I will tell you that the letter that Caitlin wrote me is in the book, What Could Possibly Go Right. When I read it on audio, I started crying. Just it was that moving. And that's the real stuff that can happen. That was athleticism in action.

• 32:04Speaker 07

  This is somebody whose job it was to faithfully take reservations, right? You wanted, Ryan wants four people at eight o'clock at Union Square Cafe on Friday night. A really good guest relations person is going to faithfully make that happen. A great hospitality athlete in most circumstances is going to learn enough about Ryan so that those notes go to our maître d' and our maître d' has those dots to connect. So when Ryan comes, he has a great time, but that takes having a high hospitality quotient. What she did was putting that HQ into action to actually save someone's life. That fortunately, we don't have that example all that often, but it all starts with what

• 32:49Speaker 07

  her heart told her to do. And you just talked about heart share and mind share. Mind share is the outcome of great marketing. And for whatever business you have, you need people to know it exists. Better still, you want it to be on the tip of people's tongues, you know, when they're considering which podcast should I listen to? You want Ryan's podcast to be right in the top of their, their mind share. But now we want to take it even further than that. Now that we've got your mind share, we want to put our hospitality to work to earn your heart share. And when we earn your heart share, which is that people, they don't just know about your podcast, they don't just know about my restaurants, they don't just know about

• 33:34Speaker 07

  my book. They go, I love that podcast. I love that. And they start telling everyone else they know that they have to go do that, that our work actually makes someone's life better. That's why we do it.

• 33:49Ryan Hawk?

  How cool is that story? And there's tons of them, but how does it make you feel when you hear something like that? Because my first question was like, how does she know to do that? And it feels like it's because it's embedded in the culture. This is how we do things here. We don't just say, oh, I can't really hear the person. I'm going to hang up because they can't talk. They think, wait, can I help this person? And they're not even in the doors yet, right? You think all hospitality is about once they're in the restaurant, let's wow them a little bit. It's a competitive market. We gotta do what we gotta do. It's way beyond that, that Caitlin story and others. It's, it's all about how we make people feel. It's all about taking care of people. And so it's just gotta be such a rewarding feeling that.

• 34:32Speaker 07

  It is. It is. And it's, it gets back to another thing that you brought up earlier, which is as we hire people and one of the things we're interviewing for is caring empathy. The unique ability to put yourself in the other person's shoes and ask, how would I want to be treated in this situation? And that allowed me to come up with an idea, which I put in the book, What Could Possibly Go Right, which is the difference between the golden rule that I was brought up with, which is good, which is due unto others as you would have others do unto you. That's, that's pretty good, right? But the golden rule of hospitality is due unto others as you believe they would want done unto them.

• 35:12Speaker 07

  Implicit in that subtle but powerful difference is that it treats each of us as individuals. It's one size fits one. Service is one size fits all. It's how we do things for everybody all the time. Hospitality is how we do things custom just for you.

• 35:32Ryan Hawk?

  Yeah. I feel like this type of culture is built through a series of moments and inflection points. And I think one of those moments I was reading about that maybe you could share is this Gramercy Tavern all staff meeting, I believe it was 1994, 1995, where was it a loyal guest? They described like a terrible night. It was like, this is, is all bad. And you, so you gathered everybody around to have a conversation about that as well as this isn't how we do work here. What happened that night and what happened afterwards that, that helped you get it back on track?

• 36:05Speaker 07

  Do I have to tell this story? It just makes me so upset every time I think about it.

• 36:10Ryan Hawk?

  I think it was a happy ending.

• 36:11Speaker 07

  So it did have a happy ending and then it actually led to some really important thinking that was a breakthrough for our whole company, but it was painful. And I guess that's when a lot of the good stuff comes from painful experiences. So this was very soon after I had opened Gramercy Tavern. At that point, I had had 10 years of experience operating one restaurant, my one and only Union Square Cafe. And this was the first time I had to actually lead by using my words as opposed to just embodying the behaviors I wanted to see. I never did that for the first 10 years. I was a very immature leader. You know, if you saw Danny doing it, that's how you should do it. Once there were two restaurants, this was the first experience I had scaling and therefore

• 36:56Speaker 07

  the first experience I had scaling how we do things around here, how we do business. Wherever I was, I was not at the other place. And when I went to Gramercy Tavern, the brand new restaurant, and a woman pulled me aside after her meal, and she was a Union Square Cafe regular. And she said, you know, what just happened here was inexcusable. It never would have happened at Union Square Cafe. So immediately I was crushed. I said, what did we do? And she said, well, it started when you cooked my salmon. Well done. Everyone at Union Square Cafe knows I like my salmon rare. I ordered it rare here. And the first thing I said to myself was, well, I don't feel that bad that a cook made an honest mistake, but.

• 37:41Speaker 07

  She kept talking, fortunately, and she said, the problem wasn't the cook's mistake. At Union Square Cafe, the server who knows I like my salmon rare, who took my order rare, would have seen that it had come well done, would have discreetly come over to me without the rest of my guests seeing and would have discreetly taken it away, brought a cup of soup in its place so that I could have something to eat and my guests wouldn't wonder why I was eating nothing and therefore they could keep eating. They would have cooked the salmon the right way without saying anything. And then at Union Square Cafe, they probably would have even taken the salmon off the bill. You know what your guys did here?

• 38:25Speaker 07

  Not only did they not come over while I picked at my salmon, but at a certain point, your manager came over, took it away and gave me a coat check in exchange, telling me that the rest of my salmon would be waiting for me at the door. And then they left it on the check. And she said, I'm just appalled. This never would have happened. So I got sick just hearing this story because I had not used my words. I hadn't taught my staff that we always lead with generosity. I had always been doing that, but now I had a second restaurant. And this gets to the core of your earlier question about scaling culture. If you don't have language, you cannot teach. And I did not have language and I was not teaching.

• 39:10Speaker 07

  So I did call an all staff meeting. I think it was maybe even the next day. It was a Saturday before our lunch service and I brought everyone in and I told them from this moment on, this is how we're going to be doing business. And that was the day that I named for the first time, what I would call enlightened hospitality. And I said, we are in the business of serving hospitality and we lead with generosity. We are in business for tomorrow dollars, not today dollars. You actually, by charging that woman for a piece of salmon that she clearly did not like, because you were afraid that she was trying to rip us off and that if you had

• 39:53Speaker 07

  taken it off the bill, she would come back again and try to, I mean, that's insane. It's just like, where's the charitable assumption? Where's the sense that maybe she wasn't trying to rip us off? Maybe we, we made a mistake and overcooked it. So I named enlightened hospitality. I said, the name of our game is hospitality. And from now on, the first customer we have here is you. The way you treat each other with a generous spirit and with a charitable assumption and doing thoughtful things for each other, that's first. And then you're going to do extraordinary things for our guests. And then we're going to do extraordinary things for our community and our suppliers. And I believe if we do all those things, we're going to have more money left over for our investors. And guess what happens?

• 40:38Speaker 07

  When we have happy investors, you guys are going to get raises and you're going to get promotions. If you break this anywhere, starting with how you care for each other, it's not going to work. That was the day that I came up with that idea and it came from the pain of doing it so wrong the day before with how we treated this guest. I'd like to beat her sometime. I wish I could remember who she was, but she gave us a gift by complaining. She really did.

• 41:03Ryan Hawk?

  If you don't have language, you cannot teach. That's so good and so useful because yeah, like it's like a lot of people, you're a great player and you go out and you just keep playing, even though now you're in a leadership role. Well, it's time to be a player coach and/or a coach slash general manager slash leader. I think a lot of people who are excellent at their craft can identify with that, Danny, and realize, oh, it's, it's now, I gotta do more. It, it's about finding my voice. It's about having language so that I can teach. Another example of a conflict I thought was good to read about was in chapter 15, which is titled, How Could You Not Know? How could you not know?

• 41:45Ryan Hawk?

  And there's a story there, but I like focusing on what it is to be nice versus what it is to be kind. There's a difference. Can you tell me more about this difference between nice and kind and how you also learned that one the hard way?

• 42:01Speaker 07

  Yeah, I, I continued to learn that one the hard way. You know, I'm a proud native St. Louisan and, and I think that there's a, there's a sense that people from the Midwest are nice. And I think nice is not a bad thing in the world of hospitality, but sometimes the word nice, I think, is a way to avoid addressing problems, which I'm just going to keep things nice. And I think there is a big difference between nice and kind. I think kind actually means I'm on your side and I'm going to, I'm going to be kind to you. But one of the ways I'm going to sometimes be kind to you is to hold up the mirror and give you the opportunity to improve. It's not being.

• 42:46Speaker 07

  Kind, and it's not even being nice if you're not measuring up and I just let that go on. That's not being kind. So I do think that kind involves the courage to give people honest feedback in a way that is on their side. It's not honest feedback that demoralizes people. And by the way, sometimes it's really, really hard. One of the stories in What Could Possibly Go Right is something that went very wrong for so many of us, which was the pandemic. It was really, really hard to be told by the government, for good reason, you cannot be

• 43:25Speaker 07

  in business because this COVID-19 is not only incredibly highly transmissible and we're losing thousands and thousands and thousands of people in New York City. I think our city got it worsened first. And so we could not be in business. We couldn't, we couldn't offer hospitality. It almost, it took away all of our tools. And it was so hard that we were still paying rent. Granted, we got some, a little bit of rent relief in most of our places, not all of them. But the insurance company was still charging, the landlords were still charging. And so we had to lay people off. That is not a nice thing to do. But the kind

• 44:07Speaker 07

  thing to do was to do it one by one with actually several hundred people. No one got laid off by tweet. No one got laid off by, you know, a big mass email. Everyone got spoken to by their boss. And it was a very hard thing to reconcile. How can you be a people first company and then lay all these people off? I had to come to grips with the fact that ultimately, if we went out of business, that wouldn't serve anyone. On the other hand, if we could get back into business, once this thing was over, and we all assumed someday it would be over, then we would be able to be in a position to hire most of these people back.

• 44:55Ryan Hawk?

  Shake Shack, man. It's incredible. I feel like anytime I see one, it's

• 45:00Speaker 07

  I like the way that this question started.

• 45:03Ryan Hawk?

  I just want to hear you tell the origin story of it and how this whole thing got going, why it got going, how it helped other parts of your business.

• 45:11Speaker 07

  Well, I've got to really credit, I've got to really credit what we just spoke about enlightened hospitality because, so this goes back to 2001, we had a hot dog cart in Madison Square Park that was part of a piece of art that we had helped to bring to Madison Square Park for the purpose of bringing people to the park. Why? Why do we do that? Well, we wanted to have art to take care of our community. That was part of enlightened hospitality. Madison Square Park was the front yard of two of my restaurants, Eleven Madison Park and Tabla. Take care of your front yard. A rising tide lifts all boats. That's what I was thinking about. Take care of your community. And when the artist that we brought in said, hey, listen, I've got this crazy idea for a piece of art.

• 45:54Speaker 07

  We've got four taxi cabs on stilts and I'm going to decorate a hot dog cart that I want underneath it. And I need somebody to operate the hot dog cart. And, you know, I went to my teammates and I said, you guys, we have to do this. They said, you're crazy. We're too busy running Eleven Madison Park, Tabla, Gramercy Tavern, Union Square Cafe. They don't have time to operate a hot dog cart. We don't even know what we're doing. And I said, no, no, no, you don't understand. Let's imagine what could possibly go right. That's kind of the first big time I put that to, actually, I put it to use even before that. But what could possibly go right was this. I said, let's put enlightened hospitality in action. Someone's got to work that hot dog cart. Let's take our coat checkers who

• 46:37Speaker 07

  otherwise aren't going to get to come to work till the weather gets cold in late October. Let's give them a job all summer. That's taking care of our people. Number two, let's serve not only great hot dogs, but let's serve Chicago-style hot dogs. Why? Because they've got eight classic toppings. And let's see if our four coat checkers can remember everybody's special way they like it. Ryan's the guy that likes everything except pickle relish. Danny likes double sport peppers. Jill can't stand mustard. Let's see if we can actually show that hospitality is not just for fancy restaurants, but it's for everything. And low and behold, that hot dog cart would attract, you know, hundreds

• 47:20Speaker 07

  of people, literally, the line would go through Madison Square Park. And we did that in 2001. We lost a fair amount of money because there's a reason hot dog carts don't have four people working it. We did it again in 2002. The community said, even though the art's down, please bring back our hot dog cart. Now, I love that. When I said our hot dog cart, I said, we're there. We got that heart share, right? They felt shared ownership. Brought it back again in 2003. Now, having lost money in the first two years, I came up with a great idea. In year three, 2003, I said, this year, because we only did it during the summer, I said, we're going to donate all of our profits to the Madison Square Park Conservancy. And that felt like a good bet because we kept losing money. Wouldn't

• 48:03Speaker 07

  you know, in year three, just by saying that, we made $7,500. And that's when I got the idea, let's turn this hot dog cart into a permanent kiosk. And that became Shake Shack. And I had read this great book called The Cathedral Within by Billy Shore, which was all about creating community wealth. And I wanted to, I wanted to put his theory to work that if you want to take care of a community, historically, the ways that this happened were either philanthropy, on one hand, or money from politicians, you know, the, the government earmarks, some money for this. His thesis was, you can actually use capitalism

• 48:44Speaker 07

  to create community wealth. And so I took a page out of that book, donated this kiosk, which costs $750,000 to Madison Square Park. So Madison Square Park would be the landlord, whereby we would own the business, but they would own the building. And therefore, if this worked, it would not only attract people to using the park, which would keep us safe, but a percentage of every sale would go right back into the park to keep it beautiful, safe, programmed, et cetera. Called it Shake Shack. Never had any dream of having a second one. Never mind. Today, we have 700 of them in 22 countries. It's public company. We

• 49:29Speaker 07

  didn't even open a second one for five years. But to this day, Ryan, that first Shake Shack in Madison Square Park pays just shy of a million dollars a year in rent to that park. So you want to talk about what could possibly go right. A great piece of business for a not-for-profit public-private partnership, Madison Square Park, which is as beautiful as it could be. We got a nice business out of it. Thousands and thousands of jobs have been created and launched. And I think it's made a whole lot of people happy who happen to like burgers and shakes.

• 50:06Ryan Hawk?

  Yeah, incredible. What a story. Dan, I know we got to run, man, but I'm curious. This is called the Champagne Question for my friend Jason Gainart. He's a huge fan of your work as well. We're fast forwarding one year, exactly one year from today. You're surrounded by all the people you love and you're popping bottles, you're celebrating like crazy. I'm curious, what are you celebrating?

• 50:30Speaker 07

  We're celebrating the fact that my new book, What Could Possibly Go Right, actually meant something to a lot of people. And that, that they understand that while I wrote it selfishly to teach myself, because that's, I learned by writing, that some of these lessons I've learned while scraping my knee along the way, were actually useful for them. And if I learned that, that will make me feel like it was all worth it.

• 50:55Ryan Hawk?

  So good, man. The book is called What Could Possibly Go Right: The Essential Journey to Scale an Enduring Culture. The reason I love it is because it's, it's very, very portable to business leaders, to sports teams, certainly to people in the restaurant and hospitality industry, hotels. But your storytelling ability is, is as good as it gets. And it's also very practical and entertaining. So thank you for doing it, man. And thank you for being here. This was so much fun. I would love to continue our dialogue as we both progress, man.

• 51:28Speaker 07

  I'm really grateful and thank you for all the fantastic questions. I'm just going to throw in one thing, which is that 100% of your listeners have either eaten in a restaurant or worked in a restaurant. I happen to have been working in the restaurant business for many years. That's the laboratory for these stories. But as you just said, these stories, it could have been a ball bearing factory. It's just that most of us haven't eaten in one before.

• 51:56Ryan Hawk?

  So good. I appreciate it, man. I look forward to, hopefully it would be fun to do this again next time in person, man. It would be great.

• 52:03Speaker 07

  That'd be great. Thank you so much, Ryan.

• 52:08Ryan Hawk?

  It is the end of the Podcast Club. Thank you for being a member of the End of the Podcast Club. If you are, send me a note, [email protected]. Let me know what you learned from this great conversation with Danny Meyer. A few takeaways from my notes. Think about your entrepreneurial athleticism filter. Danny hires leaders for optimistic warmth, curious intelligence, work ethic, empathy, self-awareness, integrity, and the ability to connect dots. Before your next hire or promotion, write down a few of the non-resume traits that actually predict success on your team and build an interview question for each. An example of this, if you value self-awareness like Danny does,

• 52:51Ryan Hawk?

  what's the greatest misperception other people have about you? Good one. And then do the nice versus kind audit in your own life. Danny talks about the difference between being nice, where you kind of avoid conflict, and kind, where you care enough to tell somebody the truth. Identify a conversation or two where you've been putting off because you'd rather be nice, which is the feedback, maybe you're softening, or the expectation you have in set. And go have that kind conversation now. Now, one of my favorite quotes of all time, business like life is all about how you make people feel. It's that simple and that hard. As a leader, it's all about how we make people feel. It sounds simple, but

• 53:36Ryan Hawk?

  it's very hard in practice. It's worth it to think about every single day. How are we making the people we're serving feel? Once again, I want to say thank you so much for continuing to spread the message and telling a friend or two, hey, you should listen to this episode of the Learning Leader Show with Danny Meyer. I think he'll help you become a more effective leader because you continue to do that. And you also go to Spotify, Apple Podcasts, subscribe to the show, rate it, hopefully five stars, write a thoughtful review. By doing all of that, you are giving me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis. And for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so, so much. Talk to you soon. Can't wait.