The Hotel Manager's Guide to Building Human-Centric Organisational Culture

I began my career in hotel management at a prestigious presidential hotel where I rotated between departments on a management traineeship. This developed a deep appreciation for the significance of human connection and service excellence, especially in an industry where service excellence is a baseline feature in building sustainable and profitable growth, consistently.

The role of a Duty/ General Manager demands mastery of diverse skills: from complex reservation systems, and technology that reads your light and room temperature preferences from your key card, which downloads your profile history automatically, revenue optimisation models to cross-functional alignment between guest relations, front office, housekeeping, and food and beverage teams. Each department requires specific expertise - a chef's culinary mastery, a sommelier's wine knowledge, or a banqueting operator's ability to seamlessly execute multiple 300-person events in one night. This environment fosters seamless handoffs in the customer experience, contrasting sharply with the disjointed interactions often experienced with banks, insurers, or government agencies. Hotels excel at understanding and anticipating guests' idiosyncratic wishes, ensuring a smooth, integrated experience - a far cry from being fobbed off to new departments without proper data transfer, creating frustrating pinch points in the value chain.

This foundation paved the way for my transition into global leadership roles in logistics, consumer goods, and retail sectors, followed by strategic roles in tech and insurance before co-founding, amongst others, FIFTH P Strategy Consulting in London, Singular Systems a deep tech venture with the founders of Tesla, Solar City and SpaceX, to building winning capabilities for global tier 1 superbrands.

These experiences have proven very helpful, particularly for top consumer-focused superbrands in the US, UK and Europe. Throughout my career, this focus - and passion which is reflected in my work in the FlowLabs Leadership Labs since 2017, has remained unwaveringly on people and transformative leadership, driving meaningful change and cultivating high impact high functioning cultures.

A pivotal moment in my reflections on leadership came during an investors/VC event at The Hoxton, Amsterdam. The event focused on building and scaling global startups in Europe, and how this was different to the US and the UK. It was here that I encountered a fascinating insight from a former co-founder of Booking.com, who had an unusual background - the hotel industry. This struck me as not just smart, but a rare and valuable move in today's business world.

After all, isn't business fundamentally about people and building hand-to-hand relationships? In an era where grandiose promises of technological marvels often overshadow the basics of human interaction, I found myself drawn to the idea that being accountable, trusted, dependable, and consistent is far more impressive than making lofty claims without delivering tangible results.

Hotel managers possess an exceptional toolkit that allows them to create conditions for sustained excellence and success; these include a healthy dose of durable skills - those hard-earned, lasting abilities that transcend technical know-how (less durable) to build leaders who in turn build lasting superbrands, beyond the immediacy of the individual leader's impact:

1. Empathy and Anticipation: They excel at understanding and anticipating guests' needs and wants, often before the guests themselves are aware. This skill translates directly to creating psychologically safe, inclusive cultures in any organisation.

2. Versatile Communication: Hotel managers navigate seamlessly between interacting with a housekeeper who might not speak the local language, to engaging with a visiting president, and all roles in between. This adaptability is crucial in today's diverse workplaces.

3. Experience Curation: They're experts at crafting immersive, world-class experiences for guests, which requires cultivating the right culture among staff. This skill of shaping culture through training, incentives, and leading by example is invaluable in any setting.

4. Consistent Excellence: The hospitality industry demands unwavering quality. Hotel managers instil the right values, behaviours, and mindset in their teams to consistently deliver on the brand promise.

5. Cross-functional Collaboration: Hotels are microcosms with diverse functions. Coordinating these multidisciplinary yet interdependent teams fosters a collaborative, cohesive culture - a skill increasingly vital in today's complex organisations.

6. Adaptive Perfection: Hotel operations require balancing speed and various degrees of perfection with adaptability. Managers maintain core values while flexibly responding to individual situations.

7. Resilience Building: The 24/7/365 nature of hotels is similar to the non-stop supply chain operations of global food and beverage giants, and necessitates cultures of resilience, accountability, and continuous improvement for excellence. These tenets benefit any organisation striving for excellence and sustained high performance. (conditional on profitable and sustainable growth from repeat and frequent guests)

8. Comprehensive Business Acumen: Hotel managers develop strong business management skills, including smart procurement strategies that fit consumer tastes, tailored to local and international demographic profiles (at the right price-points), inventory and cost controls, profitability and revenue management, marketing, sales, financial management, capital and asset management, plus a host of other business skills. This broad expertise enables them to make informed decisions that balance guest satisfaction with business performance, while also navigating complex stakeholder relationships, from owners and investors to brand franchisors and local communities. Their ability to juggle these diverse interests while maintaining operational excellence and financial viability is a testament to their versatile business acumen.

9. Labour Relations and Cultural Sensitivity: Hotel managers operate in complex, often highly unionised environments that demand exceptional interpersonal skills, cultural awareness, and the ability to navigate challenging social dynamics. From managing diverse teams under extreme operational pressures to understanding nuanced employment rights, these leaders must balance world-class performance standards with deep human empathy and collaborative leadership.

This was particularly evident in South Africa during the post-apartheid era, a time of profound cultural change and heightened sensitivity. As a young hotel manager in the early 1990s, I experienced firsthand the challenges of working with militant shop stewards and highly organised unions. It was an eye-opening experience that required delicate navigation of racial tensions, labour disputes, and the complexities of a society in transition.

The hotel industry became a microcosm of the broader societal changes, where managers had to quickly adapt to new labour laws, address historical inequalities, and foster a fairer, more inclusive work environment. This often meant mediating between long-standing staff members and a new generation of employees, each with their own expectations and cultural backgrounds.

Working in Pretoria, the administrative capital, during this pivotal time added another layer of complexity. As the official Presidential hotel, we hosted high-profile events that required maintaining world-class standards while being acutely aware of the political sensitivities of the time. This experience honed my ability to balance operational excellence with cultural diplomacy, a skill that proved invaluable throughout my career.

The lessons learned during this period - of building trust across racial divides, fostering open communication in tense situations, and leading with empathy and understanding - were not just about hotel management, but about navigating a society in transformation. These experiences shaped a generation of managers who learned to lead with both strength and sensitivity, skills that remain crucial in today's globally connected and culturally diverse business world.

Importantly, effective hotel managers understand that true leadership isn't about mastering non-durable skills like checking in a guest or performing maintenance checks on the tech stack. While these "back to the shop floor" moments can offer insights, they don't exemplify good leadership and culture development. Instead, they focus on creating better leaders, not drones, emphasising durable skills often mislabelled as "soft."

This approach aligns with other career experiences building world-class retail and consumer experiences for consumer products, banks, insurers, et al, where we excelled at understanding diverse audiences and segmenting them to target the right proposition at the right time using advanced data and analytics to cultivate a closer, more trusted relationship with guests. The tech industry brought speed and nimbleness but often at the expense of quality and human connection. Combining these approaches with the human-centric skills of hotel management creates a powerful model - that includes building trust, quality, and lasting relationships - for world-class organisational cultures that can adapt and thrive in rapidly changing environments while maintaining a focus on customer satisfaction and loyalty.

The organic versus engineered culture debate is also relevant here. Organic cultures emerge naturally, breeding authenticity but risking misalignment with strategic goals if left unchecked. Engineered cultures, purposefully designed by leadership and top teams, allow for greater control but can feel forced if heavy-handed or top-down. The ideal lies in striking a balance - having leadership architect a cultural and behaviour code framework with clear guiding principles, while allowing the actual culture to evolve organically.

Hotel managers' experience in navigating this delicate balance makes them uniquely qualified as cultural catalysts across industries. Their ability to shape intentional cultures while allowing for organic growth and maintaining operational excellence is a valuable asset in today's dynamic business environment.

The legacy of hotel management, rooted in the military-style brigade system introduced by Georges Auguste Escoffier in the late 19th century, offers a powerful model for leadership. This hierarchical system, organising kitchen staff into specific roles like saucier, patissier, and chef de partie, optimises operations and improves efficiency. It demonstrates how to blend rigorous standards with adaptive empathy, and how to foster a sense of community and shared purpose even in high-pressure environments.

As French chef Paul Bocuse once said, "The art of cooking is the art of living together." This philosophy extends beyond the kitchen, encapsulating the essence of effective leadership and culture-building. It reminds us that shared experiences, like dining together, can create a sense of closeness, connectedness, and community that is crucial for any successful organisation.

As we look towards building better leadership models for the future, I'm excited to bring together the best of these worlds - from the conviviality of shared meals to the efficiency of brigade systems. By incorporating insights from diverse industries like insurance, retail, and banking, we can create breakthrough businesses, teams, and societies that have the potential to positively influence geopolitical outcomes.

The key lies in fostering human-centric cultures that balance innovation with empathy, speed with sustainability, and global vision with local understanding. It's about creating environments where every team member feels valued and empowered, where excellence is the standard, and where shared rituals reinforce a sense of belonging and purpose.

So, next time you're planning a strategy session or seeking inspiration on culture building, consider checking into a top hotel. Observe the seamless operations, the attention to detail, and the way staff interact with guests and each other. You might just find your next Co-founder or Chief of Staff working there, ready to help you build a more human-centric organisation that leverages both durable and non-durable skills to create lasting culture and success.

For more on how you can supercharge your cultural revolution in your organisation, and to learn how to apply these timeless principles to your cultural and business challenges, please reach out to:

Andrew Soteriou, founder of The Smart Growth Collective, is a seasoned expert in sustainable growth and innovation. He previously served as Managing Partner, Board Advisor and COO at FIFTH P Strategy Consulting, Europe's Top Challenger Consultancy in London and held the position of Global RGM Director at UpClear, based out of London and New York. His extensive experience positions him among the world's leading authorities on Sustainable Profitable Growth & Innovation, Customer Experience, Pricing & Strategic Revenue Monetisation, particularly for the Top 100 consumer-focused superbrands in the US, UK and Europe.

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