How to Build a Culture That Grows With Your Company

Restaurateur Danny Meyer, founder of Union Square Cafe and Shake Shack, discusses the strategies he uses to maintain a strong company culture as his businesses scale. He emphasizes the importance of defining clear cultural values, hiring for emotional intelligence alongside technical skills, and using promotions to reinforce desired behaviors within the organization. When a company is small, maintaining a strong culture can feel relatively easy. But as organizations grow, layers of management, geographic distance, and pressure for efficiency can make it much harder to preserve what made the company special in the first place. Restaurateur Danny Meyer has spent decades figuring out how to do just that. He founded Union Square Cafe and built Union Square Hospitality Group, then helped scale Shake Shack from a single location in New York City into a global restaurant chain. Along the way, he's learned that culture isn't what happens when the CEO is in the room-it's what happens when they're not. He explains how he turned his philosophy of "enlightened hospitality" into a set of specific behaviors that employees can understand and practice. He discusses why companies should hire for both technical expertise and emotional skills, how to identify people with a high "hospitality quotient," and why promotions are one of the most powerful tools leaders have for reinforcing culture. Meyer is the author of the new book Hospitality: A Manual