YouTube talk by Donald Burns ("Culture Isn't Built by Accident") about building leadership culture in restaurant teams. Emphasizes removing friction for staff and genuinely caring for team members to keep them emotionally engaged. Describes a practical "nickel" strategy adapted from fine dining: spend five minutes with five people each day, take brief walks outside the workplace, and ask non-work questions (e.g., "What's going on in your life?", "What are you looking forward to?", "What's your favorite thing happening right now?", "What's your least favorite thing happening right now?") to build rapport and surface needs.
Chapters
There's another great quote that I heard, and it says, when people are financially invested, they want a return. When people are emotionally invested, they want to contribute. You have to keep people emotionally engaged, right? And that just starts by caring about them. As a leader, you should want to remove the obstacles and make sure, you know, wtf, where's the friction? Remove the friction. That's our job. But beyond that, you have to just genuinely care. There's this little nickel, nickel strategy. I learned this when I was in fine dining, but kind of created it, adopted it for somebody else that I worked for as a mentor. And he's like, spend five minutes with five people a day and do that every day of the week. So I'll get there and I have the list in my pocket. When I get to the restaurant, I got a list of who's working and who I'm going to chat with, and in no order. So I'll just grab and I'll be like, hey, you got a second to chat? And they'll come with me and we'll exit the building. We'll get out of the space that they're in. We'll just take a walk around the building. And I just got a handful of questions like, what's going on in your life? What are you looking forward to? What are you excited about right now? What's. What's your, what's your favorite thing that's happening in your life right now? What's your least favorite things happening right now? There's no agenda that's work related. It's just a chance to get them to open up. And it's amazing how often they'll end up turning it into a work conversation, but it's also amazing how often they won't. Like, oh, man, I'm looking forward to this concert. You know, I requested those three days off in two weeks and we're going on that, that cool, you know, festival. And dude, I'm so looking forward to that. By the way, if you got any cleaning duties or anything I do to pick up some extra hours, I need to scrape some money together so I can afford those three days off. You know, it's. It's just little, but it's amazing how much people care when they know you care, right? They don't want to let you down.
