Hello Monday with Jessi Hempel

Danny Meyer has built some of the most beloved and enduring restaurants in the US. The “secret sauce” behind Union Square Cafe, Gramercy Tavern, The Modern, Shake Shack, and more? How diners feel when they walk in the door.

His new book, What Could Possibly Go Right, is about a common obstacle in business. How do you grow without losing the thing that made people love you in the first place? Danny joins Jessi in the studio to talk about everything he’s learned in four decades of building businesses around hospitality, including how to scale a feeling.

In this episode, Jessi and Danny discuss:

The assumption Danny held at 30 that he has since debunked

Why culture is what happens when you're not in the room, and how to build it so it endures

The 49/51 rule: why the job is only half of what Danny is actually hiring for

The six emotional skills that make up a high HQ (hospitality quotient), and why "soft skills" is one of Danny's least favorite phrases

The interview questions Danny uses to reveal character, including one that stops almost everyone cold

The jigsaw puzzle theory: why the worst hiring mistakes happen when you keep jiggling a piece that doesn't fit

Why Danny's biggest leadership mistakes came from hanging on too long: to people, to businesses, to deals

How to get to "no" faster, and why a quick, honest no is kinder than a slow one

The five-year, no-tipping experiment at Union Square Hospitality Group: what worked, what didn't, why the pandemic ended it and what Danny replaced it with

What Danny is still learning, and why he looks to younger people to teach it to him

Follow Danny Meyer and Jessi Hempel on LinkedIn.

RSVP here for a special edition of Office Hours this Wednesday at 3pm EST. We’ll be discussing how we might be able to get what we need from work if jobs disappear, inspired by this micro-documentary from the Hello Monday team.

Ten years ago, Angela Duckworth wrote the book on grit. Now she's back with the advice you need to keep moving forward. The MacArthur genius fellow, University of Pennsylvania professor and bestselling author joins Jessi in the studio to make the case that individual effort only takes you as far as your situation allows and that changing your situation is one of the most powerful tools you have. Her new book is called Situated: Find the People and Places That Bring Out Your Best.

In this episode, Jessi and Angela discuss:

Why grit isn't enough and what Angela has learned in the decade since she wrote her first book

The three-box model: how your situation shapes your thoughts, and your thoughts shape your behavior

Why changing your situation feels like giving up and why Angela calls it an act of heroism instead

Status quo bias: the psychological reason we cling to circumstances we know aren't working

The difference between quitting and job crafting and how to make smaller career moves before the big one

What Taylor Swift moving to Nashville at 14 has to do with your next career decision

Microfriction: the surprisingly small physical changes that do what willpower can't

The Pygmalion Effect: why so much of what we believe about ourselves is borrowed from the people around us

Three kinds of mentors everyone needs: mentors for a reason, a season and a lifetime

The curiosity conversation: how Oprah got Maya Angelou to be her mentor, and how you can apply the same approach

Why Y Combinator funds in batches and what that tells us about trying to go it alone

Follow Angela Duckworth and Jessi Hempel on LinkedIn.

This conversation was recorded live and broadcast to LinkedIn Premium members. Premium members can watch the extended version here.

Laura Vanderkam tracks her time in 30-minute increments and has been for over a decade. That’s 336 half-hour blocks over the course of a week. After reviewing thousands of people’s schedules, she finds, again and again, that most of us are sitting on more time than we think. We just have to shift our mindset to believe it. The time management expert and author of the new book Big Time: A Simple Path to Time Abundance returns to Hello Monday to talk about what it actually takes to move from time scarcity to abundance.

In this episode, Jessi and Laura discuss:

Why "I don't have enough time" is not just inaccurate, it's actively making things worse

The math that surprises everyone: what a full-time worker actually has left after work and sleep each week

Why we're bad narrators of our own experience and how to get better data

The biggest blind spots in a week: weekday evenings and weekends

How email and digital communication expand to fill all available space and what to do about it

The one-hour a week experiment that could change how you feel about your job

Why tiny tweaks beat lifestyle overhauls every time

How to carve out "play and possibility time"

The right way to think about learning something new at work, including AI

How to recast ambition when climbing the ladder no longer feels like enough

Laura's September time-tracking challenge and why she's been doing it every year since 2015

Follow Laura Vanderkam and Jessi Hempel on LinkedIn.

Join Laura’s time-tracking challenge here

Join us for Office Hours, Wednesday at 3pm EST

Most of us try to avoid conflict. But done right, fighting can be a path to stronger teams and healthier communities. On this episode of Hello Monday, Priya Parker makes the case for embracing “healthy heat” and learning how to navigate conflict with care.

Priya Parker is a conflict resolution facilitator and author of The Art of Fighting: The Transformative Power of Conflict. Drawing on her work with teams, organizations, communities and groups, she shares practical ways to face conflict effectively.

Jessi and Priya discuss:

Why conflict is often a sign of relevance, and why we tend to fight with the people and groups we care about most

The difference between healthy heat, unhealthy peace and destructive conflict

How healthy conflict can create connection, clarity, better decisions and stronger teams

Why our “fighting muscles” have atrophied, particularly after the pandemic

How digital communication can flatten or exacerbate conflict rather than help us hold productive tension

How to become an artful fighter by approaching conflict with curiosity instead of immediately trying to shut it down

How to identify “hairline fractures” before they grow into larger rifts within teams and communities

How to determine whether a conflict is worth facing

The role of an outside facilitator in helping teams navigate conflict and develop practical conflict-resolution skills

Why preparing your body for conflict matters, including breathing, grounding and learning to stay physically relaxed under pressure

How listening can transform conflict and why staying in the heat long enough to hear each other can create breakthroughs

A lesson from the Canlis restaurant team: how treating feedback as “an investment in you” can help people listen without becoming defensive

What the Seattle Seahawks can teach us about culture and hairline fractures

Why learning to gather and fight well is increasingly important as AI reshapes the workplace

Follow Jessi Hempel and Priya Parker on LinkedIn

Join us for Office Hours, Wednesday at 3pm EST

For a lot of people, work feels especially chaotic right now.. Projects start and don't finish. Layoffs happen, then reorgs, then new strategies, and through all of it, managers are expected to have the answers. Caroline Webb spent 25 years coaching leaders through exactly this kind of turbulence. She's a behavioral scientist, a former economist and the author of the new book Leadership Intelligence: Science-Backed Strategies for Mastering 21 Everyday Management Challenges. This week she joins Jessi to talk about what the science of the human brain tells us about leading through uncertainty.

In this episode, Jessi and Caroline discuss:

Why the current moment hits a stress trifecta — demanding, uncontrollable and unpleasant — and what that does to your team's brains

The "know-be-do" framework: how to lead people through uncertainty when facts are in short supply

Why naming how you feel is one of the most powerful things a leader can do and what affect labeling actually does in the brain

What "measured authenticity" means, and why "terrified" is not a word you want your manager to use

How to be honest with your team when you know more than you can say

Why letting projects die quietly is one of the most demoralizing things a manager can do, and what to do instead

What Astro (Google X's moonshot factory) does when it kills a project, and why it works

The "when-then" method for taking the sting out of worst-case scenarios before they happen

"Compassionate clarity": what it means in practice when layoff season arrives

Why walking people out of the building immediately is almost never necessary and what a seasoned CHRO said about it

Follow Caroline Webb and Jessi Hempel on LinkedIn

Join us for Hello Monday Office Hours, Wednesday at 3pm EST

Listen to Caroline’s previous Hello Monday episode on how to have a good day at a bad job