I was delivering a workshop for a Municipality’s Planning Department recently.
The workshop was focused on staff safety, but the dialogue and conversation in the room covered a range of associated areas, including the importance of that very first impression you make (and how quickly you make it) on someone when you meet them for the very first time.
That impression is not only about how you represent yourself but also how that impression represents your entire organization – and in many cases, your entire industry.
And the first impression is very hard to shake – so the focus is always on making it as good as it possibly can be.
I shared some of the lessons that I have learned from my recent reading list.
Two of the books I referenced were Exceptional Experiences by Neen James and Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara.
One of the participants had not only just finished reading Unreasonable Hospitality but had also eaten at Eleven Madison Park, the World’s Number 1 restaurant, co-owned by Guidara at the time of the book’s publication.
When I asked her to share her experience with her colleagues, her story stopped the rest of the room in their tracks.
I will paraphrase her experience here by sharing the philosophies from these two amazing books.
The lessons and takeaways are the same, and they will leave you thinking about your own workplace experience just as the workshop participants were left thinking about how they show up for their coworkers and clients.
James spent years studying the luxury industry — five-star hotels, exclusive brands, world-class client relationships — and what she found wasn’t opulence.
It was intentionality.
Those smallest moments, delivered with care, are what people actually remember. Not the transaction but the feeling. Guidara arrives at almost the same place, but from a completely different direction. As the former co-owner of Eleven Madison Park —a restaurant that went from a middling brasserie to the best restaurant in the world during his tenure – he draws a sharp line between service and hospitality. Service is competent and efficient, while hospitality is what makes people feel genuinely connected.
One is the job.
The other is what people tell their friends about.
Now that is a workplace lesson disguised as two business books.
The Five Levers:
James builds her framework around five moves any leader, team, or organization can make:
Entice — give people a reason to lean in before you’ve even started. This is the first impression: the email that makes someone want to open the next one, the meeting invite that signals something worth showing up for.
Invite — make people feel chosen, not processed. There’s a world of difference between “next in line” and “we’ve been expecting you.” One is a queue. The other is a relationship.
Excite — build anticipation into the everyday. The best leaders create a sense that something worthwhile is coming, even in routine work — a standing meeting people actually want to attend, a project update people look forward to reading.
Delight — surprise people in small, specific ways. Not a gift card. A detail. Something that says “I was paying attention to you specifically,” not “I have a program for people like you.”
Ignite — turn a good moment into a lasting one. This is the follow-through: the moment that gets talked about later, that becomes part of how someone describes your team or your organization to others.
None of these require a bigger budget.
What they do require is a bigger dose of attention and, to be honest, a decision that this is worth prioritizing in the middle of a busy week.
What Guidara Adds: Culture First, Then Customers.
Where James provides the framework for the moment of interaction itself, Guidara goes one layer deeper: he insists that none of it works unless the culture behind it is already in place.
His main argument is that hospitality aimed at customers has to come from an organizational culture first — you cannot ask a team to make guests (clients) feel exceptional if the team itself doesn’t feel that way internally.
A few of his practices are worth borrowing directly:
The “wow” file. At Eleven Madison Park, the team kept a running list of small, specific ideas for surprising guests — a favourite snack overheard in conversation and quietly arranged, a detail from someone’s day remembered and referenced later. The point was not to make it about grand gestures (and ones that likely hit the budget hard), but to build on a discipline of simply noticing, and capturing it somewhere so it didn’t get lost and could be shared with other staff.
Daily alignment. Guidara ran a short pre-shift meeting every day, not to review logistics, but to reconnect the team to purpose before the doors opened. This is what I did in my policing career every shift for thirty-five years. It is all about having everyone on the same informational page. It is fifteen minutes of “here’s why this matters today” – and believe me, it changes how a team shows up for the next eight/ten/twelve hours.
Ownership over instruction. Rather than handing down a script, he built a culture where team members volunteered to “own” parts of the experience — which turns compliance into investment. People protect what they helped build.
Everyone gets the good version. Guidara made a point of extending the same high-touch treatment to every guest, not just the VIPs — because word travels, and because it’s simply the right way to treat people.
None of this requires a restaurant, or a budget increase.
It requires deciding, on purpose, that this is how your team treats each other before you ever ask them to treat clients that way.
Where This Shows Up at Work:
Think about the last time someone at your organization made you feel genuinely seen — not served, not processed, but seen.
The chances are that it wasn’t a grand gesture.
It was a manager who remembered something small.
A colleague who checked in without being asked.
A leader who paused instead of rushing to the next thing.
Now take a moment to think about the opposite. An interaction that felt transactional, rushed, and almost certainly forgettable.
It could be the same organization with the same policies and procedures, but it is a completely different experience — because the difference was never the system. It was the attention.
This is where we can easily draw the comparison between the “customer experience” and “employee experience.”
It is the same conversation, and that is why I wanted to stress it here for you.
The frontline employee who feels unseen by their leader will, almost without exception, make the next customer feel unseen too.
Culture doesn’t stop at the organizational chart. It flows straight through to whoever’s standing in front of the public.
Here is a simple test you can do. Today.
Try this with your team at your next team meeting.
Ask them to think about the last three interactions your team had with a client.
- Were they encouraged to engage in the first place?
- Did they feel invited in, or just processed through?
- Was there anything about the experience worth mentioning to someone else afterwards?
If the honest answer is “not really,” that’s not a training problem or a policy problem — it’s an attention problem, and attention problems are fixable starting tomorrow morning.
The same test works internally.
Picture the last time a new hire joined your team, or an employee hit a milestone, or someone on staff had a rough week.
Was there a moment built in to notice it? Or did the calendar simply move on to the next thing?
Teams that consistently retain good people rarely do it through bigger perks.
They do it through leaders who make people feel specifically, individually seen — which is exactly the muscle James is asking her readers to build.
And this is exactly where Guidara’s insight closes the loop on James’s.
You cannot sustainably deliver those five levers to clients if the culture behind your team doesn’t already run on the same principles.
A “wow” file for your clients works.
A “wow” file for your own people — noticing birthdays, callouts, hard weeks, quiet wins — works just as well, and it’s usually the piece organizations skip.
Attention given outward has to be backed by attention given inward, or it burns out fast.
I have just wrapped up a cultural review on a team – in which the team members themselves were very much engaged and connected – but where the manager was completely detached.
And it showed in every single interview I conducted.
A Question for This Week
Where in your workplace — for your team, your clients, or both — could one small, intentional moment replace ten forgettable ones?
Start a “wow” file of your own this week. Not a program, not a policy — just a running list, however small, of specific things worth noticing about the people around you. Then act on one of them before Friday.
You don’t need a bigger budget for that.
You just need to decide it matters.
If this message resonated with you, consider sharing it with a colleague or leader in your network who might benefit from a different way of thinking about leadership.
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This work is about helping people show up better—one conversation, one leader, and one workplace at a time.
Thank you for being here each time – I never take for granted the time you take to read me here.
I am passionate about Creating Incredibly Better Workplaces by focusing on the people, relationships, supervision and leadership in today’s workplaces…wherever they may be.
And perhaps I can be of service to you?
