Page 235 - The New Gold Standard

Aspire, Achieve, Teach
but also in businesses that have inherited the knowledge of for-
mer Ritz-Carlton staff.
President Simon Cooper shows evidence of the effects of
Ritz-Carlton training in the broader service world by sharing,
“My wife made a reservation for a restaurant we’d heard about
in eastern Maryland. I never tell anybody what I do, and she
doesn’t either, so she just made the reservation with the phone
number. Upon entering the restaurant, we saw busboys stand-
ing at attention and the hostess was alert, friendly, and attentive.
Everything about the restaurant’s presentation was sharp. It was
a cut above the service of most restaurants in the adjacent area.
Lo and behold, the owner of the restaurant comes along and it’s
a gentleman who worked for us at Central Park South. What
he’d done in his restaurant was what I expect every Ritz-Carlton
restaurant manager or front office manager to do with his or her
team. He’s leveraging a legacy by teaching people how to carry
themselves, what to say, how to dress. It’s well beyond the writ-
ten language about procedures and dress code; it’s how you exe-
cute against standards of excellence.”
Simon continues, “It’s the whole idea that you’re always
ready—ready to serve. We don’t train people through memos
saying they shouldn’t congregate at a cash register if the restau-
rant’s empty. There’s nothing worse than being one of only three
or four tables in a restaurant, and all the servers are off chatting
in the corner. We train people how to think about the guest’s ex-
perience. That type of training helps men and women like the
owner of that restaurant take their game up a notch.”
Cherie Y. Webb, manager of learning at The Ritz-Carlton,
Atlanta, sees the training of employees at Ritz-Carlton as a
source of pride. “My job allows me to take amazingly talented
people and offer them the tools they need to fully realize their
service potential. When our Ladies and Gentlemen grow as ser-
vice professionals, they increase the impact they have on our
guests, which in turn has an effect on the guests’ families. It may
sound a bit silly, but when you think about knowledge as being

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