There’s a fancy restaurant in my village where one issue keeps cropping up in virtually every review, year after year. The picture is consistently the same: the food is excellent. The service is consistently substandard.
That combination intrigues me. How can a restaurant that is so highly regarded for its cuisine consistently fall short in the way it treats its guests? Apparently, the problem isn’t yet serious enough for the restaurant itself, as it’s been going on for a long time.
And apparently, there are also plenty of people who are willing to put up with this behaviour, as long as the quality of the food is high enough.
I recently heard of an experience that made the reviews painfully concrete.
A friend rang to make a booking there. The conversation was curt, impatient. When she asked, in surprise, whether this was the normal way of communicating with customers, the snappy reply followed:
“Do you still want to come or not?”. My friend said she did.
Shortly afterwards, the restaurant unilaterally cancelled the booking.
There you have it.
What concerns me so much about this as a coach is not the incident itself.
But the question underlying it:
Why does behaviour remain unchanged, despite repeated feedback and external cues?
In coaching, one thing is always key: change only begins when someone themselves experiences some form of distress or discomfort caused by their current behaviour. Without that internal tipping point, external comments often have no effect.
And so the question becomes relevant:
Does things really have to go wrong before anything changes?
Does a restaurant have to lose a significant number of customers before anything changes in the way they are treated? As long as those consequences fail to materialise, behaviour remains surprisingly stable.
It may be that there is no lack of intention, but rather an accumulation of blind spots: stress, overload, a strong focus on the food, or a pattern in which feedback is not perceived as information but as a threat. It is often a system that can no longer view itself from the outside.
In my work as a coach, I therefore never start by correcting, but by reflecting on and making things visible. What happens in contact with the other person? What does feedback evoke in someone?
And what keeps the same pattern so stubbornly in place?
Only when awareness arises there is there room for something new.
The broader lesson is recognisable in many organisations:
Ultimately, it is not the quality of your product that determines your success, but the quality of your relationship with others. Those who realise this too late will pay the price sooner or later.
