Chronicle No. 43 · Lessons

The 51 Percent Rule: How Danny Meyer Decides Who to Hire

Fifty-one per cent heart, forty-nine per cent craft. The restaurateur's hiring formula explains why hospitality is not the same as service.

Danny Meyer was 27 when he opened Union Square Cafe in New York in 1985. The group that grew out of it, Union Square Hospitality Group, has produced Gramercy Tavern, The Modern and Shake Shack, and a body of management practice that other industries now borrow.

His central distinction, set out in his 2006 book Setting the Table, is deceptively simple. Service is what you deliver. Hospitality is how the delivery makes someone feel. Service is a monologue; hospitality is a dialogue.

From that follows the hiring formula. Meyer looks for what his company calls 51 percenters: people whose contribution is fifty-one per cent emotional hospitality and forty-nine per cent technical excellence. He names five core emotional skills:

• Optimistic warmth — genuine kindness and a sense that the glass is at least half full
• Intelligence — not cleverness, but an appetite to keep learning
• Work ethic — the instinct to do a thing as well as it can be done
• Empathy — awareness of how your actions land on other people
• Self-awareness and integrity — knowing what makes you tick, and being accountable

Meyer also fixed the order of who comes first: employees, then guests, then the community, then suppliers, then investors. Investors last is not sentiment; it is a claim about the sequence in which value is actually created.

Technique can be taught in a fortnight. Warmth cannot be taught at all. That is the whole argument, and it is why the interview matters more than the trial shift.

“Service is the technical delivery of a product. Hospitality is how the delivery of that product makes its recipient feel.”

Lesson: Hire for the emotional skills you cannot teach, then train the technical ones you can.