Welcome
How to bring everyone into the group
“When we gather, we often make the mistake of conflating category with purpose.” Priya Parker, The Art of Gathering
Let me be clear, I LOVE hospitality and even more so, unreasonable hospitality. I ran into Billy Peele and gasped. [read the book] I read Will Guidara’s newsletter religiously. I think about, and write about, hospitality and what education can learn.
I also adore The Bear. Season 2 Episode 7 “Forks” is the best episode of television ever made. The first time I saw it I was telling my friend all about Unreasonable Hospitality - before it showed up in the next scene. In the early 90s I worked at Ruby Tuesday at the mall. These were the days that servers had to carry the tray of plastic desserts to every table. After one table declined the ladies started talking about the Fannie Mae mint meltaways candies and how they’d love those. I slipped out the door, headed down the hall and bought mint meltaways and served those. My very own Pequod’s Pizza moment. [This was, in case you haven’t read it yet, a regionally appropriate copy of the NY dirty water hot dog Will served at Eleven Madison Park, marking the beginning of Unreasonable Hospitality.
Hopefully I have established my credentials as a hospitality groupie. I went to the Welcome Conference on Monday. Will Guidara started it 10 years ago as a gathering for dining room professionals. Apparently after a couple of years other industries decided to learn from them, like I did this year. The idea gave me Disney Institute vibes. Why not take the best of hospitality to education, or banking, or the Army [yes, the Army was there]?
I have planned an event or two in my time. From a non profit dinner for 400 at the beach in Chicago to immersions in South Africa for 100 to my supper series at home this year - September theme is “back to school” and all foods are adulted school lunches. For the gala dinner I had roughly 100 volunteers [a teaching corps] and I assigned their tasks by personality and preference. Some folks were more comfortable handing out flip flops or checking coats, but the extroverts got put on “schmooze duty” - making sure no one was alone or uninvited.
This photo is the home page for the conference. This is how they describe themselves: We founded the Welcome Conference in 2014 to create a space where dining room professionals could share ideas, inspire one another, and connect to form a community .
For a decade I’ve been in higher ed, and I’ve gathered a lot. I continue to be shocked, however, at how badly we tend to gather. Priya Parker, author of The Art of Gathering, talks a lot about finding the why before we move on to the how. I presented this summer at COLTT - in my workshop, we played the card game I created. I was actually super sad to find when I got there that since it’s in CU Boulder Law School, we’d be seated stadium style. No way to interact or make eye contact. I had folks immediately form groups, front/back and to the side. My why was for attendees to learn from each other and the game expert tips on online education. You had to be able to see each other for that!
Some of the speakers in NYC were fantastic, others less so. If you have the chance to book or see Jade Simmons, do it. Donald Miller tells a hell of a story. There were former speakers there presenting, and I am officially a giant Brian Canlis stan. Andrew Zimmern and Kevin Boehm could talk about straws and it would be great.
The conference itself was at David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center. You don’t get much nicer than that, and the food, by CxRA, was out of this world. When I was at Cardozo Law, we held graduation at Lincoln Center. [Paul McCartney and Senator Claire McCaskill both spoke in 2019]. It is beautiful. It is world renowned and glorious and imposing. The one thing it is not is welcoming.
The Welcome Conference was founded to “share ideas, inspire one another and connect to form a community.” The photo above is my seat. Now, if you only want me to listen to lectures, no problem. This is exactly where we should be. Bear with me though.
What if the Welcome Conference was held in a restaurant, since that’s who we are learning from and with? The new Din Tai Fung just opened in NYC- it seats about 450 people. Show me unreasonable hospitality. Inspire me in real time, not in a book. What if, when you got your name tag, first time attendees also got a fake flower to clip on to their badges, so old timers would know to welcome them? What if volunteers were assigned to “schmooze duty”, making sure that no one feels alone. Many attendees came with colleagues. I flew to New York and was alone. At UNC we used to announced who had come the furthest and who was the closest when we had immersions. What if they had done this, starting with farther away and ending with anyone who actually worked in the building?
Making someone feel involved takes more time. Jade Simmons, in her brilliant piano playing and keynote, brought up 2 audience members when she was making a point. Sure, it too a minute or two, but I was far more engaged when it was interactive [I was shockingly not on stage] than during a lecture.
Will Guidara quotes the brilliant Maya Angelou, and I’m quite sure that at a restaurant, he knocks it out of the park. At this conference, however, formed to inspire and build community, I will not forget that how I felt was alone.
“I've learned that people will forget what you said,
people will forget what you did,
but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
Maya Angelou