The Teaspoon Formula

Early in my career as a training manager, I was summoned by the General Manager. We were both new to the property, a large city hotel. In his first weeks on the job, he had reviewed the previous two years of guest feedback — comment cards, letters, the lot.

“There are a lot of complaints about slow service in the Garden Café,” he said. “Looks like they need training. Go and help them sort it out.”

I went to see Paul, the restaurant manager, and asked him what the issue was.

“Huh!” said Paul. “Look and see.”

He asked me to stand at the side and observe the service. It was a very busy café, and it was generally working well. Servers were quick to greet new arrivals and take their orders, and food orders were served promptly. But coffee and tea took time.

It didn’t take long to see the problem. Before serving tea or coffee, servers often had to clear a used cup from another table, rinse the teaspoon at the service station, and use it for the next guest.

We didn’t have a training problem. We had a teaspoon problem.

How had that happened in a four-star hotel? The previous GM had turned losses into profits, but to do so he had cut costs to the bone. With spending frozen, the hotel had run low on many essentials, including teaspoons.

When I reported back, the GM was briefly flabbergasted. He wondered why no one had told him sooner. Had everyone accepted the way things were? Were they reluctant to bring bad news to the new boss? Who knows. In any case, when word spread that new teaspoons had been purchased that very day, the new GM won fans in F&B.

A common mistake is misjudging poor performance as a lack of competence or commitment. When a team member underperforms, it is dangerously easy to write it off as a bad attitude, a lack of skill, or poor work ethic. Sometimes that diagnosis is correct. But very often, the capability and willingness are already there. Something is getting in the way.

Many years after the teaspoon incident, I came across a formula that explained what had happened in the Garden Café.

Timothy Gallwey was a part-time tennis coach with a clear eye for what gets in the way of performance. His book The Inner Game of Tennis changed how coaches thought about the sport — and about human performance more broadly.

Gallwey summarised his insight in an elegant little formula:

Performance  =  Potential  −  Interference

Potential, as Gallwey uses the word, means capability — everything a person brings to the task. In tennis, a taller player has a natural serving advantage; a player with a longer reach covers the court differently. These physical attributes are expressions of capability — part of what they bring before a single point is played.

In leadership, capability refers to the sum of your knowledge, intelligence, skill, experience, emotional awareness, and fitness for your role. And above all, your ability to think clearly, make good decisions, and take decisive action. In an ideal world, your performance would be a perfect expression of your potential. But it rarely is. There is almost always some form of interference.

There are three forms of interference: practical, psychological, and physiological. I’ll talk about the third in a future article. For now, let’s look at practical and psychological.

The teaspoons were practical interference. The café team had the skills and the willingness to do their jobs well. What they lacked was the equipment. When the interference was resolved, the potential of the team was free to be expressed. Service improved immediately.

Practical interference is very common in hospitality: a shortage of linen, glitches in the restaurant reservation system, a service elevator under maintenance, an understaffed kitchen…

The fix for practical interference is not always simple or inexpensive, but it is at least straightforward in principle: find the source of interference and resolve it. Ask the people closest to the work some version of this question: What’s getting in your way?

Another form of interference is less visible and can be much harder to resolve. It is internal — psychological. Here’s an example…

Many moons ago, while working as a waiter in Connecticut, I enrolled in a sales and marketing programme at a local college. The professor made me an unusual offer: if I would compete in an inter-college sales competition, he would give me one-on-one coaching in sales techniques. I had no interest in the competition, but I agreed. The man was a legendary salesman named Arthur Guinness, and I wanted to learn from him.

I entered the contest in a relaxed state of mind. It was just a bit of fun. To my surprise, I won — as my professor had predicted. I suspect it was because my Irish accent made me stand out from the crowd.

Winning changed things. I then had to represent Connecticut in the national college finals. That meant I would be representing my professor, competing against people trained by his peers, and I didn’t want to let him down. Something real was at stake.

I went into the nationals tense and tight. It was the same material that had easily won me the state contest — same content, same structure, same slides. But I stumbled over my words and did a lousy job. I was knocked out in the very first round.

That was psychological interference. The tools and materials hadn’t changed, but my state of mind had. The breakdown was entirely internal.

Psychological interference comes in many forms, including fear of failure, anxiety under pressure, or the need to prove something or protect your reputation. The ego can turn a routine task into a high-stakes situation — and inhibit performance in the process.

Some psychologists describe this as emotional hijack: moments when your emotional state overrides your clarity and your capability. For leaders, the opportunities for hijack arrive constantly: a challenging conversation, a performance review that goes sideways, a presentation you’ve been dreading, a crisis call late at night… In all of these situations, your state of mind will either work with you or against you.

I’m thinking of one of my coaching clients here — someone whose potential and performance are exceptionally well matched. Like most ambitious professionals, my client is not immune to pressure. She just doesn’t let interference knock her off course.

In Gallwey’s terms, she has learned to manage her internal interference. Her self-awareness means she notices when she is not quite herself and rebalances before it becomes a problem. Her emotional awareness means she doesn’t get snagged in ego games — hers or anyone else’s. Her clarity of mind means she can enter a complex situation and see it for what it is, rather than through the distorting lens of fear, defensiveness, or the need to be right.

The leader’s job is not simply to demand better performance. It is to understand what is preventing better performance from emerging.

For any leader, Gallwey’s formula raises three questions:

●      When did you last gather a team and ask: What’s getting in your way? If you aren’t regularly asking, you are probably blind to some of the practical interference your people are dealing with.

●      What are you actively doing to reduce psychological interference for your team — and where might your own leadership style be adding to it?

●      What are you doing to identify your own blind spots and reduce your own internal interference?

•••

It’s not possible to deliver five-star service from a three-star inner state. Trying to do so on an ongoing basis just leads to burnout. A Handbook for Hoteliers (and other humans) was written to help remedy this.