CHAPTER 10

CREATING A CULTURE OF COLLABORATION

The day after the strategic planning meeting, the air in the restaurant was charged with promise and excitement-and that energy showed no signs of dissipating in the weeks that followed. Our passionate and creative team had a say in where the restaurant was going and were willing to work even harder because they had a stake.

I wanted collaboration to mean everyone , every single day.

We'd gotten so much out of that single day; I couldn't wait to implement more consistent and creative ways to build collaboration more fully into our culture. We'd struck gold, and I was unabashedly greedy for more.

Choose Worthy Rivals

In The Infinite Game , Simon Sinek writes about choosing a worthy rival: another company that does one or more things better than you, whose strengths reveal your weaknesses and set you on a path of constant improvement.

Before marriage and the birth of my daughter, I ended most nights in my apartment with a glass of wine and an open notebook. Those journaling sessions-part diary, part mea culpa, part vision board, part to-do list-were where my most inspired ideas came from.

When I read that, I thought immediately of a dinner Daniel and I had at Per Se in late 2006-or, more specifically, of my nightcap afterward.

Daniel and I spent a lot of time studying other, more established and successful fine-dining restaurants. What were they doing better than what we were doing? What could we learn? What could we borrow and make our own?

I'd been to Thomas Keller's celebrated California restaurant the French Laundry with a girlfriend years before, and I counted italong with that first dinner at the Four Seasons and the meal with my dad in the Skybox in Daniel Boulud's kitchen-as one of the most memorable restaurant experiences of my life. I wasn't even interested in fine dining at the time, but our meal there was so extraordinary, it transcended all my hesitations. The whole experience was so freaking excellent , in every way, it felt entirely new.

And in New York City, Per Se was the best of the best.

The French Laundry is one of the best restaurants in the world, so nobody was surprised when Keller's New York debut instantly became a standard-bearer of fine-dining excellence. While EMP was far from being in Per Se's league, Daniel and I were paying close attention to every single thing they did.

Every course had been an inspiration. I loved the playfulness of the famous salmon tartare cornet, a nod to a child's ice-cream cone, and was swept away by the luxuriousness of the presentations, including a cascade of custom-made porcelain plates in ascending sizes. And I was struck by the effortless way Thomas Keller seemed able to elevate a humble idea, like coffee and donuts, into an opulent surprise.

So after that dinner at Per Se, I was feverishly taking notes on our experience, which had been spectacular.

The precision behind all that elegance was not lost on us. A small example: we'd been invited on a tour of the kitchen, filled with state-of-the-art equipment and so meticulous and beautifully designed I thought Daniel might burst into tears. While we were walking through, we noticed that the blue tape used to secure a tablecloth to the pass wasn't torn, but neatly cut with scissors. The attention, to every nearly invisible detail, filled us with awe.

Then, at the end of our meal, when we were already stupefied with delight, a showstopper: our server presented us with a board of twenty-four different chocolate truffles in three rows-dark, milk, and white-and conversationally ran through a detailed description of every single one of them . It was a feat of memory so audacious, so superhuman, it might as well have been a magic trick.

And it made me think about Jim Betz.

I scribbled frantically. Finally, I got to the cup of filter coffee I'd been served after dinner. It was a perfectly fine cup of coffee, but because everything else about that meal had been so unbelievably perfect perfect, that just-okay cup of coffee stood out.

Tap in to Their Passions-Then Give Them the Keys

Jim Betz was an unrepentant coffee geek who worked with me at EMP.

Jim was Ken's nephew, as passionate and knowledgeable as his uncle. He was also deeply committed to our restaurant. He'd shown up for his interview with a huge, Williamsburg-hipster, lumberjackstyle beard, which I told him he'd have to shave off if he wanted the job. He arrived the next day with a naked chin, for the first time in years; I don't know if there's a greater sign of commitment.

I'd gotten into coffee a little bit when I was running the cafés at MoMA and was lucky enough to live around the corner from Ninth Street Espresso, one of the first serious espresso bars in the city. The owner, Ken Nye, was notoriously exacting: he would adjust the coarseness of the grind throughout the day in response to the humidity outside, and toss any shot he felt wasn't up to snuff.

Jim was much (much) more knowledgeable on the subject of coffee than I was, but I knew just enough to be fun for him to talk to, and the two of us would often find each other at family meal to chat about a new shop with high standards or some excellent beans we'd tried. Though Jim was only in his early twenties, I learned from him whenever we compared notes. So I couldn't help but anticipate his disappointment when I told him about that just-okay cup of coffee at Per Se.

The truth is that while that 'perfectly fine' cup of coffee was somewhat shocking in the context of our otherwise extraordinary meal, it was pretty unsurprising, given the state of coffee service at fine-dining restaurants at the time.

It had been a long time, for instance, since beer had meant the pale, flavorless industrial lager that dominated the commercial market in the 1950s. Thousands of small, independent breweries all over the world were creating beers with complex flavors that could more than stand up to excellent food. So maybe there'd been no such thing as a beer pairing at a four-star restaurant in the eighties -but by 2006, it should have been inconceivable to imagine a fourstar restaurant for the next generation without one.

You went to those restaurants expecting incredible food and amazing wine. Those were expected: table stakes, the price of admission. The ancillary programs, though-the cocktail to start your meal, the cup of tea or coffee at the end-were mediocre. And this remained true, even though there had been a complete revolution in those areas outside those hallowed walls.

The same was true for cocktails: if most people who cared about food knew that a proper Manhattan should be stirred, not shaken, why were so many places still making airport-lounge-quality drinks? And why would a thousand-dollar meal end with generic, machine-filtered coffee, when I could stop and have a glorious, high-grade, single-origin shot pulled by a professional barista at a hole-in-the-wall like Ninth Street on my way in to work?

This was true even if your wine director was one of the best in the world-and I knew that because the wine director at EMP, John Ragan, was one of the best in the world. A wine director didn't have the time to become a real expert in these other beverages, while also curating a wine list for one of the city's best restaurants.

These programs lagged because nobody was paying attention to them. Even today, in most fine-dining restaurants, the person running all the beverage programs is the wine director. That person is, by definition, fanatical about wine and has devoted their life to studying it; the majority of their travel, reading, and professional education has been in wine-not beer, or espresso, or cocktails, or tea.

My team, on the other hand, was crowded with young people who were wildly enthusiastic about various aspects of food and drink. A crew of them would take the train to Queens on their days off to visit outdoor beer gardens with sixty obscure microbrews on tap. Another routinely disappeared into a nondescript office building in Midtown to taste flights of first-flush gyokuro-green tea grown in the shade and prepared with water a full sixty degrees below boiling. And of course, there was Jim, waxing encyclopedic about ethical coffee-growing regions and precision-pour kettles.

With that, the ownership program at Eleven Madison Park was born.

Passion was one of the core values we'd committed to pursuing during our strategic planning meeting. And so the last thing I wrote in my journal after that epic dinner at Per Se was: 'Jim should be in charge of our coffee program.'

Kirk Kelewae was a Cornell grad who had joined the company all revved up about what we were doing. He was clearly going places, but, like every new hire, he started as a kitchen server, running plates of food from the kitchen to the dining room.

We introduced him to all our vendors, knowing he would soon introduce us to new ones. I came to love watching beer distributors arrive in the dining room, expecting to give the Eleven Madison Park wine director a taste of some sensational new brew, only to find themselves sitting across from a baby-faced food runner, only recently able to legally order a drink himself.

Kirk also happened to be wild about beer, and I was sure he'd be the perfect steward of our program, but when I first sat down with him, he was skittish-as most twenty-two-year-olds would beabout the responsibility until I convinced him we'd be there for him, every step of the way.

We gave Kirk a budget and showed him how to manage it. He learned how to do inventory and how to order. Then we told him: 'It's yours now. Go make it awesome.'

He didn't need to be told twice. He attacked every aspect of our beer service-from how we stored the bottles, to the glassware we used, to the technique we used to pour it. He read every trade publication and hunted down the most rare and obscure beers. All this extra work was driven by his own passion, and his youthful eagerness enchanted producers, who'd find ways to sneak him a couple of highly allocated bottles they'd made only a few dozen of.

Not only did our beer program improve exponentially, but Kirk's fervor was contagious; we all caught the beer bug because nobody wanted to let him down. He'd pour tastes and chase you down in the hallways: 'Hey-you've got to taste this gruit!' (Know what that is? Neither did I. Thanks to Kirk, I can now tell you that it's a medieval-style beer brewed using bitter botanicals instead of hops. Apparently, it's a thing.)

I was thrilled but not overly surprised when, a year into Kirk's reign, Eleven Madison Park was listed as one of the best beer programs in America in a number of different publications.

Similarly, Sambath Seng, another food runner, took over our tea program. She flew to Las Vegas to attend the World Tea Expo and introduced herself to distributors who were buying tea directly from gardens in India and China and Thailand and Taiwan and Korea and Japan. She taught us about teas that had been roasted, as well as others processed with steam. Because she cared deeply about water purity, precisely calibrated brewing times and temperature combinations, and how proper teaware should be warmed and handled, we cared, too.

One of our bartenders said, 'That's ridiculous; it's not possible.' It could take a bartender at the high-end cocktail bars ten full minutes to make a drink. That type of service would be difficult to mimic in a restaurant setting, with a hundred and forty seats to serve, not six.

Cocktails were next. I got our bar team together and said, 'I want to have a cocktail program as good as PDT.' PDT was a cocktail bar in the East Village, run by my friend Jim Meehan. The initials stood for Please Don't Tell, a reference to the tiny bar's covert location, which you accessed, speakeasy-style, through a phone booth in Crif Dogs, a hole-in-the-wall hot dog joint. It was widely recognized as one of the best bars in the world.

But as anyone who's worked for me will tell you, 'We can't' is not my favorite phrase. I come by this honestly. In a particular season of my youth, I made the mistake of telling my dad about something I couldn't do. The next morning, the house was covered in printed, fortune-cookie-size pieces of paper: 'Success comes in cans; failure comes in can'ts.' I never said it in front of him again.

Leo had always been full of great ideas, but he was also the squeakiest wheel, the person on the staff who never failed to let you know why what you were doing was fundamentally flawed and never going to work. He completely transformed once given an ownership role, as if he hadn't wanted to commit to greatness until he was in charge. At the helm, he went from being our most outspoken in-house critic to a true ambassador for the restaurantand an absolute guru in the world of quality cocktails.

I also had a lot of faith in the guy I was talking to. His name was Leo Robitschek. Maybe you've heard of him-he's one of the foremost mixologists in the world now. But at the time, he was working at EMP while putting himself through medical school.

Then, of course, there was Jim. In charge of coffee, he immediately switched our supplier to Intelligentsia, one of the best roasters at the time. He started making coffee tableside, giving our guests a choice between a classic Chemex pour-over or a vacuumpot siphon system, which combined the best attributes of the immersion and filter methods and had the added benefit of being thrilling to watch in action.

Thanks to Jim (and, indirectly, to Per Se), an after-dinner cup of coffee at EMP went from being a just-fine, bulk-ordered afterthought to a highly entertaining, exquisitely crafted, educational, and theatrical experience. Most important, you ended up with a damn fine cup of coffee.

Find the Win/Win/Win

Steve Ells, the founder of Chipotle, spoke eloquently at the Welcome Conference about the positive impact of giving his team more responsibility.

Most fast-food companies process ingredients at a plant because they don't trust the teams at the stores to do it; unsurprisingly, the food arrives tasting like it's been on a truck for a couple of days. Ells believed that, with proper training, his in-house employees could make better, fresher food.

He discovered that when he gave the teams responsibility, they became more responsible; elevated by his trust in them, they stepped up into the role. The team was empowered, the food tasted better, and customers felt better about the food they were eating because they could see living human beings chopping tomatoes and grilling chicken.

It was for us, too. Our staff loved the ownership programs. Because every single person who worked for us started as a food runner, some of them could work there for three years before they became a captain. These ownership programs gave these motivated, creative people a project to engage with while they earned their stripes.

It was a win/win/win.

And the investment of time and trust and education was almost always worth it, because when we mentored someone into full ownership, our jobs became easier over the long term. When Leo was handling cocktails and Kirk was taking care of beer, our wine director, John Ragan, didn't need to think about those beverages or about coffee or tea. Our already stellar wine program got better because John had more time and energy and capacity to devote to it, while all those other programs, so inherently mediocre at so many other fine-dining restaurants, became absolutely best in class.

And everyone in the restaurant, whether they were working or eating there, benefited from the wonderful alchemy that comes when fervor has the room to run. Kirk eventually became close with Garrett Oliver, the mad genius who runs Brooklyn Brewery. So when Leo, through his friendship with Julian Van Winkle, got an empty Pappy barrel from the legendary Kentucky distillery, we shipped it to Brooklyn Brewery, and Garrett aged a custom beer for us in it. It was an extraordinary outcome-a genuinely special, playful collaboration that would never have come about if our wine director had stayed in charge of the beer program.

When we saw what a tremendous success we were having with the beverage programs, our management team came up with a list of every aspect of the restaurant that could benefit from some attention, including linens, side work, and educational training. These were less shiny, but they would make a real difference in the experience of those who worked there, and on our bottom line.

An example: the guy who took over CGS (which stands for 'china, glass, and silver'-sexy as it gets, right?) dedicated himself to reducing breakage. He discovered the racks in the dish room were half an inch too short, so the stems poked up above the top when the glasses went through the dishwasher. A couple of new glass racks later, and he'd eliminated loss by 30 percent. That's serious money, and a major morale booster, as it also meant that we no longer ran out of water glasses in the middle of service.

Then he sent the handyman out for thick rubber matting, installed it on the stainless steel table that held plates waiting to be washed, and bingo-no more chips on the raised rim at the bottom of our expensive, handmade ceramic chargers, either.

These weren't line items lost on a manager's to-do list, crowded with a thousand other things, but minor, inexpensive fixes implemented by a young person paying close attention. These small shifts saved the restaurant thousands of dollars in the first couple of months. And while some of these programs affected the guests more directly than others, you didn't have to know what the linen closet or the glass racks looked like to feel the effects.

We didn't assign these ownership programs; participation was strictly on a volunteer basis. And while many who stepped up happened to be knowledgeable about the area they'd chosen, they didn't need to start out an expert. All we asked was that they be interested and curious and have the first inklings of a passion.

'It Might Not Work' Is a Terrible Reason Not to Try

I'm not going to lie: it's much easier to not share ownership-at least to start. (This is the 'It's quicker to do it myself' problem.) But refusing to delegate because it might take too long to train someone will only get in the way of your own growth.

At the beginning, the young people running these ownership programs did require tons of oversight and encouragement and advice. Mentoring them was a lot of work. And there were bumps in the road. Yes, we'd set up guardrails so Kirk couldn't lose a million

bucks in beer, but a kid right out of hotel school is naturally going to make more mistakes than someone with ten years of experience running a beverage program.

While I'm being candid, there's another reason it's easier not to do this: it might not work. We learned the hard way, for instance, that it was best if the person running the linen program was a hardheaded organizational dynamo who could stay on top of inventory, manage expenses, and take pleasure in maintaining a tidy, operationally efficient closet-not a visionary dreamer.

And while it does take more time to fix someone else's mistake than to do it yourself in the first place, these are short-term investments of time with long-term gains. If you insist on a manager having previous managerial experience, you'll never be able to promote a promising server into the role. By definition, then, it's impossible to promote from within if you wait until an employee has all the experience they need. Often, the perfect moment to give someone more responsibility is before they're ready. Take a chance, and that person will almost always work extra hard to prove you right. Given that I eventually promoted Kirk to the position of general manager of EMP-you could say the investment paid off.

But if we were trying to encourage people to take a shot, we couldn't penalize them if they didn't succeed; we simply found another area where they could invest their time. It's always been my belief that 'It might not work' is a terrible reason not to try an idea, especially one that has the potential upside of making the people who work for you more engaged with your mission.

The Best Way to Learn Is to Teach

My dad says that the best way to learn is to teach, and he taught me to study for tests as if I were going in to deliver a presentation. I found that if I studied the material as if I was going to have to turn around and teach it, I learned it much more thoroughly than I would have otherwise.

At EMP, I made teaching part of our culture.

The spirit of collaboration that came out of the ownership program was inspiring to all of us, but asking someone to take over an entire department was an enormous commitment. So when John Ragan began a weekly meeting called Happy Hour, dedicated to the wine, beer, and cocktails on our menu, we encouraged the team to step in and give presentations of their own.

Quickly, Happy Hour topics began to transcend wine and spirits. Madison Square Park was right outside our enormous windows; one of the servers did a presentation on the storied history of the park, so we'd have interesting factoids to share with guests. (The rules of baseball were created there; the torch from the Statue of Liberty was displayed there; and it was the site of the country's first community Christmas tree lighting in 1912.) That led us to reach out to Kenneth T. Jackson, a professor at Columbia and the world's foremost authority on New York history, who gave the entire team a tour of the park and the surrounding blocks.

A onetime presentation was much less of an obligation than taking over an ownership program-and it was fun, because the people who worked for us loved food and wine. Whether they'd had a lightbulb moment with a glass of Burgundy at a wine bar and wanted to know more about the history of the region or had finally tasted a sherry that wasn't like sneaking a sip at their grandmother's bridge game, presenting at Happy Hour was an excuse to do research, then share what they'd learned with the team.

Jeff Taylor was our resident restaurant-history buff. Once a month, he'd do a deep dive on an iconic, old-school restaurant like Le Pavillon, which debuted at the 1939 World's Fair, launched chefs like Jacques Pépin, and defined both French food and fine dining for New Yorkers in the second half of the twentieth century.

Billy Peelle, a food runner, immersed himself in the New York Public Library's vast historic menu archive, ending up with a knockout presentation on menu design and its evolution over the second part of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Menu design was entirely outside the scope of Billy's role; it was a project I handled myself, in collaboration with our graphic designer. But he knew his presentation would connect us to our heritage-the legacy we had charged ourselves with defending and extending. Perhaps it's not a surprise that, years later, Billy also went on to be the general manager.

Let Them Lead

Those Happy Hours had an important side benefit. Normally, classes in a restaurant are led by the managers, not the staff, but as more and more members of the hourly team led classes, they acted more like leaders.

I've already said I believe the most important moment of leadership each day in a restaurant is the pre-meal meeting, when the manager steps out to teach and inspire and get the team aligned before service. Once a week on Saturdays, we took the responsibility of leading that meeting away from the managers and gave it to a member of the team.

I wanted to push this one step further.

Leading pre-meal meant acting as emcee, following the template I'd established: basic internal housekeeping about stuff like paychecks and health insurance, then a short speech about a service experience you'd had that you'd found exciting or inspirational. At the end, you'd hand the meeting over to a sommelier or to a souschef to talk about wine list and menu changes.

Of course, that middle bit was the challenge, especially if you were nervous about speaking to a group. Many people told stories about tables they'd served at EMP or service experiences they'd had elsewhere, both good and bad. You could also talk about an adventure you'd had outside the realm of food and restaurants, like the shot after my haircut. As long as the experience had taught you a lesson about making people feel seen and welcomed and appreciated, it was fair game.

Leading Saturday pre-meal gave our hourly employees the chance to step into a role ordinarily filled by managers. They were contributing not only to the education of the team, but to their inspiration. And asking the team to run these meetings and present at Happy Hour had yet another unexpected benefit: everyone became more comfortable with public speaking.

I've always been comfortable talking to a group; in high school, I did theater and student government. But, in keeping with my dad's advice to build my strengths as well as my weaknesses, I took a public speaking class at Cornell. It had a lasting impact on me and was where I learned one of the most important tenets of public speaking, which I follow to this day: Tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you've told them.

The other important takeaway from that class was that public speaking is a leadership skill . Being able to communicate your own excitement is a powerful way to engage the people who work for and with you, and to infect them with energy and a sense of purpose.

We saw an enormous difference in the team in the months after they started leading Happy Hours and Saturday pre-meals. I loved the way they talked to guests: after all, taking an order, helping a guest make a decision about wine, or spieling a course are all forms of public speaking. They had more authority when giving instructions to their colleagues during service, too.

But the real shift was intangible; they began carrying themselves differently.

Make It Mandatory

'Mandatory' is a dirty word in the workplace these days.

This doesn't mean being exploitative-pay people for their time. But don't be afraid to make participation in a program mandatory.

Leaders tend to make enriching programs voluntary because we assume that everyone's going to be as excited about them as we are. But getting people to change their behavior is hard; sometimes you need to give them a taste of what it feels like to get them hooked.

There were lots of structured opportunities available for those who wanted to collaborate at EMP. But some people need to contribute to know how good it feels when they do, so I developed some tricks to prime the pump. One of them was to make collaboration mandatory for some of our new hires.

At every restaurant I've ever worked at, the reservations office has been a dump. The dining room looks perfect, and the kitchen must be pristine. The manager's office is usually pretty organized, or else you won't be able to find what you need when you need it, and it's good to keep the locker rooms tidy and clean, because those spaces are important for the morale of the team. So anything without a home that needs to be moved out of the dining room gets stuffed into the reservationist's office. Promotional glasses from a liquor distributor? An extra box of Christmas decorations? A cookbook the team is passing around? It's all piled up in the reservationist's office, the restaurant equivalent of a junk drawer. And every one of them has a neglected, disorganized bulletin board, weighed down by outdated announcements and reminders.

The best way to introduce a new employee to your culture is to have them work side by side with someone who believes in it. But reservationists tend to work alone or with one other person, and they had to watch the phones instead of attending pre-meal, so they were always a little out of the cultural loop. And yet, because they were the first person guests interacted with, we wanted them to be good ambassadors.

So we used an act of mandatory collaboration to bring them into the fold. When a new reservationist was hired at Eleven Madison Park, we asked them right away to do one thing to make the reservationist's office better. This was a mandate, not an invite, though they could decide what to do and how big or small.

The program was helpful, to them and for us. New people had the gift of fresh eyes and could see all the warts the rest of us had long stopped seeing.

We had to show them, right off the bat, that we meant it when we said collaboration was welcome. Otherwise, even a real selfstarter might hesitate before jumping in: I wonder whose toes I'd be stepping on if I were to fix that nightmare of a bulletin board .

It also helped them to break the ice with their new colleagues; we wanted people to be comfortable asking for help or clarification, and assigning a collaboration kick-started that: 'Would an additional bulletin board be helpful in here? If so, who do I talk to about petty cash?' Not to mention that the inevitable thanks -'How did we live like that for so long?'-would be coming from the person's new colleagues, as well as from their boss.

Assigning a collaboration runs counter to the 'Don't cannonball' advice I usually gave young managers, I know, but there's an important difference: a reservationist is an entry-level position. A lot of good comes from empowering the most junior staff.

Once people had gotten a feel for how good it felt to make a contribution, they would start actively looking for a way to do it again. And it was a way for us to communicate, on a person's very first day: We hired you for a reason. We know you have something to contribute, and we don't want to wait to see what it is.

Listen to Every Idea

When you spend this much time encouraging your team to contribute, you'd better make sure your team knows that your doors are always open to ideas. There's a better way to do everything, and I made it clear: if you had an idea for how we could improve, I wanted to hear it.

Someone may approach you with an idea you've heard before, or one you've already tried; don't automatically reject these. Maybe they've thought it through in a way you didn't previously, or circumstances have changed and you're no longer too far in front of the curve for it to work.

The first time someone comes to you with an idea, listen closely, because how you handle it will dictate how they choose to contribute in the future. Dismiss them that first time, and you'll extinguish a flame that's difficult to rekindle.

Someone may even come to you with an idea that's just plain dumb. That's an opportunity to teach-to listen, and then to explain in a respectful way why the idea is unlikely to work, so that the person leaves both encouraged and educated. Remember: there's often a brilliant idea right behind a bad one.

Great Leaders Create Leaders

Managers weren't always thrilled by this emphasis on collaboration, especially if they'd worked their way up through the ranks. This can be a problem in 'promote from within' cultures; with power comes increased responsibility, and relinquishing those responsibilitiesespecially if they're new and hard-won-can feel like a demotion.

I can't overstate how much credit I give this more collaborative approach for our ultimate success: in my eyes, collaboration is the foundation upon which Unreasonable Hospitality was built. Every single program improved by leaps and bounds, in ways that surprised us. The ideas we were fielding were newer and fresher; in fact, many of the ideas we would be most celebrated for were born in those programs. And there were more of them because it wasn't only me and Daniel and a few managers coming up with a plan.

So we reminded them: great leaders make leaders. You don't want to have a hundred keys; you win when you end up with only one-the key to the front door. Once they'd turned over some of these responsibilities, they'd have more time to make their own contributions.

Giving the team more responsibility than they expected had an amazing impact-the more responsibility we trusted them with, the more responsible they became. The more they taught, the more they understood the importance of everything we were asking them to learn. The more they led meetings like pre-meal and Happy Hour, the more they started acting like leaders. The more practice they had with public speaking, the more confidently they carried themselves.

And because every single person on the team knew that the vision was created collectively, we were all willing to work even harder to achieve our goals.