Hospitality in Every Business?

Danny Meyer was provocative in a recent leadership summit. He said that every business needs to include hospitality in their offering. He also stated that excellent or perfect technical execution, including service elements, only gets you 49% of customer loyalty whereas the other 51% is hospitality--that ability to communicate "we're on your side". In his book, Setting the Table, hospitality is the art of making one feel important and wanted.

"...nothing else is as important as how one is made to feel in the business transaction. Hospitality exists when you believe the other person is on your side...Hospitality is present when something happens for you. It is absent when something happens to you. Those two prepositions--for and to--express it all...Service is the technical delivery of the product. Hospitality is how the delivery of the product makes its recipient feel. Service is a monologue...Hospitality, on the other hand, is a dialogue. To be on the guest's side requires listening to that person with every sense [editor's emphasis here], and following up with a thoughtful, gracious, appropriate response. It takes both great service and great hospitality to rise to the top."

Service only gives you an advantage for two minutes, and it can be copied by others. What can't be taught but can be modeled and celebrated is empathy, the listening with all senses. "Customers aren't always right, but they always want to be heard," Meyer says. And when mistakes happen, he runs the A's:

• Awareness of the mistake
• Acknowledgement
• Apology
• Action
• Application of additional generosity

Meyer is in a high turnover business--restaurants. His principles can be/should be applied to our employees. They always want to be heard. In fact, Meyer says, the organizational leader is like a skipper in the stern of the boat; he/she has to listen to the people on the bow, on the front lines regarding the conditions of the business. If you apply hospitality within your organization, you will have high engagement. People join organizations but they leave bad managers. A leader who can make the employees feel  heard, valuable because of their contribution, help them to be better contributors and as people of intelligence and talent will have employees who want to be at work.