Danny Meyer: Hospitality and Humanity [The Knowledge Project Ep. #115] - Farnam Street

If you don’t create room for the people who work for you to feel seen and heard in a team setting, they’ll never be fully known by the people around them.

When you work in hospitality—and I believe that whatever you do for a living, you can choose to be in the hospitality business—you have the privilege of joining people as they celebrate the most joyful moments in their lives and the chance to offer them a brief moment of consolation and relief in the midst of their most difficult ones. Most importa

In order to become a team, we needed to stop, take a deep breath, and communicate with one another. If that meant using a more basic napkin fold or simplifying the butter presentation so everyone had time to meet, then that was a trade-off I was willing to accept. How connected we were as a team was more important to me than anything.

I started by volunteering in the palliative care department at Mercy Hospital in my hometown. I was still trying cases, and I usually made time to visit the hospital on Fridays. The director of the program would give me a list of patients who’d asked for a visit, most of whom were at the end of life in some stage of dying. The patients were all ove