I’ve said it on stage: I can only teach what I’ve had direct experience of. Lately I’ve had to check whether I still live by it.
Near the end of Red Lantern, I asked Phuong why she’d stayed. She’d been with us for 20 years, running our bookings, our accounts and everything behind the scenes.
She’d had offers. Better money, easier roles. She thought about my question for a moment, then said, “You taught people how to treat us.”
It took me a while to understand what she meant. She was talking about our customers. Very early on, we’d refused to be treated the way a lot of restaurants let themselves be treated.
When we opened, it was normal for diners to book 5 restaurants for the same Saturday night and turn up at whichever one suited them, without cancelling the others. A table of 10 would sit down and order 3 starters and tap water between them. We had 40 seats. We couldn’t survive on that.
So I brought in deposits. We ran 2 seatings a night, which meant asking the early table to leave at 8pm. Groups of 6 or more had to order the tasting menu. People told us it was an insult, and the pushback was immediate.
I didn’t care. I gave the floor team the words to say and trained them to hold the line when it was uncomfortable. If you didn’t want to dine on those terms, I had a waitlist.
A few years later the big restaurants started calling to ask how we did it. I told them, “You just tell them. You just say it. They adjust. They always adjust.”
They did. Deposits and tasting menus for groups became standard practice across Sydney’s restaurant scene. Phuong was one of the people holding that line for 20 years.
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The standard people can see
I’ve written this story into Chapter Three of the book I’ve been finishing this year. The chapter’s called ‘LEADERS GO FIRST’. In it I wrote: “Leadership sets the standard. Then it holds it, publicly and consistently. Without apology.”
The chapter closes on a question:
What standard are you asking others to live that you are not yet embodying yourself?
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Where I stopped holding mine
This year I had to answer that question myself.
I tell leaders that the speed of your actions is what gains respect. Then I spent the back half of this year pouring everything into one online program. It didn’t move the way I needed it to, and I kept at it longer than I should have.
In September I stopped. Doing the same thing again would’ve given me the same result, which was nothing.
So from here, my energy goes into speaking and into the book. Both mean standing behind what I say, in public, with my name on it.
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What this looks like in a leader
Most leaders I work with hold high standards for their people. The gap shows up in the small moments where nobody would notice if they let themselves off the hook.
You ask your team to be upfront with you, and you’ve been putting off one hard conversation for months.
You ask them to own their mistakes, and you explain yours away.
You ask them to protect their time, and you answer emails at 11pm.
You ask them to make the call, and you haven’t made yours.
Your team sees every one of those moments. If you take a standard lightly, they will too. If you take it seriously, so will everyone else.
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This week
Write down one standard you hold your team to.
Score yourself out of 10 on how well you’ve kept it this month.
Then, before the end of next week, keep it once where your team can see you do it.
I’m doing this one with you.
With Love, Pauline
This first appeared in The Conscious Leader, my weekly LinkedIn newsletter. Subscribe on LinkedIn.
