Episode 3. Leading by Example

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This episode works through chapter three of The Luxury of Attention, Leading by Example, and the claim that leadership in hotels and kitchens is what the leader does in front of the team on an ordinary day. The hosts begin with the coffee cup lifted from a lobby chair and the mise en place a chef silently corrects, then follow Aaron Kaupp on how care and indifference travel through an organization at the speed of sight, Enrico Crippa on getting his own hands dirty, and Philip Barnes on walking past a problem and being watched by six hundred people. They cover the floor walk and the pass, Susanne Hatje on being present, Niki Nakayama and Peter Goossens on shared purpose and self demand, Taljinder Singh learning from Patu Keswani, Peter Hopgood rebuilding his leadership in public, George Cozonis on being abandoned on a busy floor, Matthew Orlando on presence versus performance, and Stephen Ansell in Bishkek in 2010.

In this episode

Why picking up a coffee cup and greeting a midnight VIP are the same signal.
Philip Barnes on walking past a problem and being watched by 600 people.
The floor walk and the pass as the leader’s most consequential daily decision.
Recognition produces voluntary excellence; surveillance produces compliance.
How Peter Hopgood rebuilt his leadership visibly and why visibility made it stick.
Stephen Ansell and the crisis that reveals the leadership already there.

Transcript

Automatically transcribed from the audio and lightly corrected. Speaker turns are not marked.

Read the full transcript (7502 words)

So an unnamed general manager is walking through a lobby before noon. He lifts an empty coffee cup off a chair without comment, carries it to a back of house tray and just walks on without checking to see if he was observed. Right. And then you have an unnamed chef at the pass correcting a junior cooks mise en place, just moving chiffonade containers ahead of the brunoise and sliding citrus to the right, all without saying a word. Just completely silent. Yeah, exactly.And, you know, you might look at those two extremely specific silent actions and think, oh, they're just the obsessive habits of the hospitality elite, which is what a lot of people would assume. Right. But today we're actually going to show you why those three second micro gestures are, well, they're the foundational elements of organizational culture. So welcome to this deep dive. Glad to be here. Our mission today is to completely deconstruct chapter three, which is called leading by example from Rahim B.Kanani's book, The Luxury of Attention. We are going to strip down the exact mechanics of what happens when a leader is physically in the room with their team. Which is so critical. It really is. We're going to unpack why the most profound leadership in these elite environments has very little to do with what we traditionally think of as executive management. Yeah.And that's, that is the core argument we're dealing with here, right? It's a massive departure from standard business school theory. Totally. I mean, the central thesis of this analysis is that leadership and luxury hospitality and the culinary arts, it's not about authority. It's not about drafting some compelling vision statement or having a grand strategy. Right.It's way more grounded than that. Exactly. It's entirely about what the leader does literally in front of the team on a completely ordinary day when absolutely nothing dramatic is happening. Which is fascinating. So those preposterously small gestures like picking up a forgotten coffee cup or moving a container of lemons a few inches, they aren't small at all. No, not at all.They are the entire argument. Kanani is basically saying that leadership in this context is visible or it just is simply not leadership. I love that. And you know, the idea that leadership has to be visible is something we really need to explore deeply for you guys listening. Cause it shifts the entire definition of the job. It really changes everything.So let's transition from those physical gestures in the hook, the cup, the lemons and look at how those gestures actually function within the ecosystem of a team. Yeah, let's dig into that. Cause we're talking about high speed communication here. There's this concept introduced regarding how an organization signals care and how that signaling moves through the ranks at what they call the speed of sight, speed of sight. It's a fascinating mechanism, honestly, to really understand how this works in practice. We have to look at the philosophy of Aaron Kaupp.Okay. Let's unpack Kaupp. So he approaches leadership with a framework that, well, it might seem completely counterintuitive at first glance. He treats picking up an empty coffee cup in the lobby and staying in the back office until the middle of the night to properly greet a late arriving VIP as belonging to the exact same category of action. Wait, I have to challenge that right out of the gate. Go for it.Because that sounds great as like a motivational poster, but functionally, how can they be identical? I mean, surely the staff recognizes the difference between a two second gesture of throwing away a cup and the sheer physical endurance of a four hour wait for a DIP. You'd think so, right? Yeah. I mean, if you're listening to this and you manage a team, you know that your team weighs your actions. So how can Kaupp claim they're the same thing?Well, it's a vital question. They're identical not in their duration or, you know, their physical difficulty. They're identical in their function as a signal. Okay. Right. The signal, right?Both actions transmit the exact same binary message to the team, which is I am dedicated to the standard and I have passion for this operation. Oh, I see. So the team isn't like calculating the caloric expenditure of the leaders actions. Exactly. Okay. They are just watching for the presence or the absence of care.Kaupp argues that if leadership lacks this visible commitment, like if they decide the coffee cup is beneath them or that midnight greeting is just too exhausting, that indifference doesn't stay isolated with the leader. It leaks out. Yeah. It immediately filters down to the staff. And then by extension, it directly impacts the guest experience. So it's basically a contagion effect.If the person at the top decides the details don't matter, that permission to ignore details just cascades downward instantly. Spot on. Indifference is highly contagious. But you know, so is rigorous care. And we see this mirrored perfectly over on the culinary side too. Right.With Enrico Crippa. Yes. Crippa, who operates Piazza Duomo, offers a perspective that aligns seamlessly with Kaupp's. Crippa actually says, I always believe that leadership is a form of teaching and being engaged. Yeah. And he follows that up with a really heavy question.He says, how can I ask my team to sacrifice if I don't get my own hands dirty? Exactly. And if you put Crippa's quote right next to Kaupp's philosophy, the parallel is impossible to miss. I mean, they are dictating the exact same rule from two entirely different stations. Yeah. Kaupp's is observing the standard from the lobby and Crippa is observing it from the kitchen pass.Right. The rule is just that you can't demand your brigade of cooks push themselves to their physical and mental limits if they look over and see you keeping your hands perfectly clean. Because the hypocrisy would just instantly destroy your authority. It would. And that destruction of authority happens instantly because of the sheer scrutiny leaders are under, which kind of brings us to the really severe standard articulated by Philip Barnes. Oh, Barnes, this part is intense.Very. He operated at the highest levels of the industry. And he lays down a rule that is almost terrifying in its absolute nature. He says, if you walk by a problem, then you are the problem. Wow. That is a remarkably heavy sentence.If you walk by a problem, you are the problem. I mean, it completely removes any gray area. There is zero gray area. Right. Like there's no excuse for being distracted or being late for a meeting or just assuming someone else is going to get it. Exactly.And it removes the gray area because it addresses the psychology of the team watching you. If you walk past a piece of trash or say a misaligned chair, you haven't just failed to clean up a lobby. You've done something much worse. Right. You have actively established a new standard. The team saw you notice the problem and they saw you choose not to act.Oh, wow. So therefore they're going to read every future small failure as something you as the leader tolerate. Yes. You actually become a constituent part of the operational failure. OK. Let's unpack the reality of this scrutiny.Because Barnes extends this point into territory that sounds honestly completely exhausting for you, the listener to even imagine living through. It sounds brutal. Yeah. He points out that staying in his own hotel is like being stocked by 600 people. Stocked by 600 people. Right.Just think about that. Right. He notes that they watch his every move. They know when he goes for breakfast. They know what he eats for breakfast. They know when he hits the gym.And they know who he's having dinner with. They know everything. So I have to push back on this on behalf of anyone listening who aspires to leadership. Doesn't this relentless like an optic level of scrutiny sound completely suffocating? Oh, absolutely. I mean, how does a leader maintain any psychological sanity when 600 people are actively tracking their breakfast habits?Well, if you approach it with a conventional mindset, it would be entirely suffocating. But Kanani's analysis points out a fundamental misunderstanding most people have about seniority. What's the misunderstanding? There's this pervasive myth in corporate culture that as you climb the ladder, as you become more senior, you eventually arrive at this plateau where you just have more autonomy, more privacy, and you're actually watched less. Oh, right. Like you think you finally get to just close the heavy mahogany door to your office and hide.Exactly. But the reality of elite hospitality and the culinary arts is the exact inverse. Seniority is the position in which you are watched most closely. So the higher you go, the more visible you become. You're essentially like a walking, breathing billboard for the organization's standard. Yes.Every sip of coffee, every single interaction with a waiter is a broadcast. That is the precise mechanism. Barnes bluntly notes that if you do not like that level of scrutiny, well, you're simply in the wrong role. You just have to accept it. Right. You can't fight the scrutiny.You actually have to use it. If you know 600 people are watching how you treat the wait staff at breakfast, you use that breakfast to give a masterclass in exactly how the wait staff should be treated. Oh, that makes total sense. So the leader who resists that reality, who tries to like hide in the back office just to escape the 600 pairs of eyes, is fundamentally abdicating their primary duty. Completely abdicating it. Okay.Because the team's observation of the leader is the primary vehicle through which the culture is transmitted. Okay. So if we accept that terrifying reality that the team is tracking your every single move, that obviously creates a massive strategic problem for the leader. It does. It forces a choice. Right.You have to decide where to physically place yourself to use that scrutiny to your advantage, which brings us to what's called the geometry of leadership, right? Where the leader chooses to stand. The geometry of leadership, yes. Let's look at this dynamic of the floor versus the office. This is where we see a totally universal behavioral trait among the general managers who command the deepest, most resilient loyalty from their staff. What's that trait?They all share a daily practice of being out on the floor. They are not hiding in their offices answering emails all day. They are not trapped in consecutive meetings. They prioritize physical presence in the operational space. Susanne Hatje provides a really crystal clear window into this. She emphasizes how crucial it is to maintain an open dialogue with the team to inspire innovation, hunger for excellence and success.Yeah, she makes a very conscious effort with that. She does. She makes it a point to interact daily with colleagues across both the heart of house, so the back operations and the front of house. She says, whether greeting staff in the morning or discussing menus, I make a point of being present. Right. But the text makes it very clear that being present isn't just some vague feel good aspiration.It is a hard calculated daily decision. It is an extraordinarily difficult operational tradeoff. I mean the sheer volume of administrative demands in a luxury property will happily consume every single minute of a general manager's day inside an office. Oh, without a doubt. There is always a financial report to review or an investor demanding a phone call or, you know, a regional director who wants a meeting right now. Yeah, the distractions are endless.So when a general manager actively decides to walk the floor for two or three hours a day, they are making a conscious choice to forego office work. They are doing it because they hold the deep conviction that walking the floor is the highest leverage work they can possibly do. And linking this back to the speed of site we discussed earlier, the team knows the difference between a real floor walk and a fake one. Instantly. They can read the geometry perfectly. They know if the general manager is walking the floor just to check a box or if they are genuinely there to observe and actually support the operation.Let's translate this geometry to the kitchen side. Because the spatial dynamics work the exact same way for a chef, just in a much more confined area. Yeah, the kitchen equivalent of the general manager's lobby walk is standing at the pass. And for you listening who might not be super familiar with kitchen architecture, the pass is that long narrow strip of stainless steel where the finished plates pause for a final inspection before they're carried out to the dining room. Right. It's the ultimate border.It really is. It's the border between the kitchen and the guest. The chef stands at the past during service for the exact same reason that general manager is walking the lobby. They are there to see to act as the final filter to be that they stand there to catch a piece of meat that is maybe six degrees too cool. They're reading the body language of a struggling saucier, you know, the cook managing the complex sauces who might be starting to fall behind on their tickets. Or they're tasting the third spoonful of a reduction just to ensure it perfectly matches the exact taste of the first spoonful.Exactly. And the text points out that the consequence of retreating from that position at the past is immediate and dire. It falls apart fast. It really does. The chef who is not physically standing at the past is almost without exception. The chef whose kitchen is about to slip.So the physical placement of the leaders feet really is their most consequential daily decision. I want to offer an analogy here for you, the listener to kind of help visualize this. Think about a structural load bearing pillar in a massive building. OK, I like this. The leaders physical presence on the floor or at the past acts exactly like that load bearing pillar. It is physically holding up the standard of the entire operation.It's holding up the energy, the focus and the culture. That's a great way to look at it. And the moment that pillar retreats into a back office or gets distracted by administrative tasks, you can almost physically feel the ceiling on the floor begin to sag. Yeah, the weight is just too much. Exactly. The weight of maintaining that elite standard gets too heavy for the team to hold up on their own without that central, highly visible support structure.That is exactly how it functions mechanically. The structure of the culture relies entirely on that physical presence. And, you know, once we establish that the leader is standing in the right place, once they're visibly out on the floor or planted at the past, we get to examine how the culture is actually constructed. Right, the building blocks. Yes. The finding here is that culture is not built by drafting memos or rewriting corporate mission statements.It is built by the daily accumulation of hundreds of small, closely observed gestures. This is the gritty reality of leadership that one doesn't usually make it into business school textbooks. Rarely. Niki Nakayama brings this to life really well. She believes deeply in the necessity of surrounding herself with likeminded individuals. The logic is that everyone must share the same understanding of why they do the work in order to maintain motivation.Which is foundational. It is. But the crucial insight later on top of her philosophy is that this shared understanding of the why doesn't just magically manifest because you talked about it in like an orientation session. It arrives through repeated, observed physical gesture. Correct. The why arrives when the team watches the chef taste every single dish before it leaves the pass.Night after night. Right. It arrives when the team sees the chef silently fix a junior cooks mise en place, you know, their entire prep station set up of ingredients, just like we saw in the opening hook. Yeah, the specific micro gestures. Exactly. It arrives when a leader stays late to methodically debrief a failure rather than just yelling and going home. These gestures executedhundreds of times are the actual vocabulary of the operations culture. Peter Goossens adds a layer of absolute intensity to this vocabulary too. He states, this profession demands that you give 300 percent of yourself. The best is never enough. 300 percent. That is relentless.It is. He argues you have to be critical every single day to perform even better than the day before. The analysis of Goossens' demand is that the chef must be visibly undeniably more demanding of themselves than they are of anyone else on the line. Visibly more demanding is the operative phrase there. If the team sees the leader giving that 300 percent effort, the standard is set by the leader's own physical output. Right. It's not a directive handeddown from above. No. It's a pace set from the front. And when that standard is set visibly, it actually changes the neurological wiring of the team watching. It becomes completely internalized. It becomes part of them.Yeah. We have a brilliant example of how this internalization happens in the story of Taljinder Singh. We're looking at his time as an assistant lobby manager at the Taj Mahal Hotel in New Delhi. He basically spent his time closely observing his predecessor, man named Patu Keswani. Keswani is a perfect case study for this dynamic. I mean, he was renowned for his lobby walks.Oh, absolutely. Singh would watch him execute these walks and he observed Keswani greeting returning guests by name. But it went, you know, much deeper than just a name. Right. It was hyper specific. Yes.Keswani would remember exactly which suite the guests had stayed in during their previous visit. He would ask highly specific questions like checking on the health of a guest's daughter who had been ill months ago. And the critical takeaway here is that Singh wasn't reading about these extreme hospitality standards in some printed employee handbook. No, definitely not. He was watching a master perform them in real time in the physical space of a lobby. And that mechanism of observation is exactly how elite standards reproduce themselves because Singh watched Keswani execute this level of care day after day.Singh internalized that standard. He just soaked in. Right. It ceased being something he merely admired and it actually became a baseline behavior that he realized he was now obligated to be capable of himself. The standard transferred via observation, moving from the leaders physical practice directly into the junior manager's internal operating system. OK, so we've established that the team is relentlessly watching the leader.They're decoding the geometry of where the leader stands and they're analyzing the hundreds of small gestures the leader makes. They're absorbing all of it. But here is where the psychological dynamic is really interesting for you as a listener because this observation is a two way street. If the team is hyper aware of the leaders every move, they are equally hyper aware of whether the leader is actually seeing them. This is such a vital distinction in the text. Leadership by example, when practice at its highest level is an active two way practice.The leader must accept being seen, but the leader must actively be seeing the team in return. Right. It can't just be a one way broadcast. Exactly. Imagine a general manager executing their daily lobby walk. They walk briskly through that space, totally fixated on their destination and they register no faces.If they fail to look their staff in the eye, that omission is a gesture. That's a huge gesture. It is. If a leader conducts a morning briefing absorbing all the daily revenue reports, but utterly fails to acknowledge that a housekeeping supervisor's mother is in the hospital. That failure of recognition is a massive gesture. And the team reads those omissions with the exact same high speed fluency as they read the general manager picking up the empty coffee cup.It sends a devastating signal about what the leader actually values. Exactly. This is why the analysis emphasizes that the most universally respected leaders across these craps possess a completely granular knowledge of their teams. Granular is the perfect word. Right. They don't just know the department heads.They know the housekeeper working the third floor. They know the demi-chef, you know, the line cook working the cold station. They know the night auditor who has been working the graveyard shift at the property for 22 years. They intimately know their roster. And this leads to what I think is the most brilliant psychological distinction in the entire analysis. It is the profound difference between surveillance and recognition.Such an important concept. The text points out that surveillance feels like being watched, but recognition feels like being known. The first one, surveillance, produces compliance. The second one, recognition, produces voluntary excellence. That dichotomy is everything. Let's really dig into this because this applies to every single listener, whether you are running a Michelin Star kitchen or managing a team of software developers.Surveillance produces compliance. Recognition produces voluntary excellence. It cuts right to the biological core of human motivation. I mean, if an employee feels they are merely under surveillance, if they feel like just a metric on a spreadsheet or a cog in a machine being monitored for efficiency, they will adopt a defensive posture. Naturally, they will do exactly what is required to avoid disciplinary action. They will comply with the baseline rules and they will give you not one ounce of effort beyond that. They will quiet quit.That was a bunch of clock. Precisely. But luxury hospitality and world class culinary arts cannot mathematically exist on mere compliance. The operational standard is simply too high. It takes so much more than compliance. It really does.To achieve the level of detail we're talking about, you need employees who are willing to volunteer that 300 percent effort Goossens demands. And you only unlock that voluntary excellence when the employee feels comprehensively known as a human being by their leader. So it's deeply personal. Very. When the leader's physical presence on the floor is experienced by the staff as recognition, the team feels a profound sense of value and they naturally elevate their work to match that perceived value. It's basically the difference between software that tracks an accountant's mouse movements to ensure they're working versus a boss who sits down and asks how the accountant's sick kid is doing before looking at the quarterly spreadsheet.That's a perfect parallel. All right. The first one gets you compliance. The second one gets you an employee who double checks the spreadsheet at 8 p.m. They actually care about the team. That is the exact mechanism.Recognition builds an incredible foundation of operational trust. But you know, if we establish that trust is built through recognition, we have to look at the ultimate stress test for that trust. No, this is the hardest part. It really is. What happens when the leader who is being stalked and observed by 600 people makes a visible mistake. This brings us to the absolute hardest move in the entire leadership playbook, admitting wrong in front of the team.It's the move that violently goes against the ego and instinct of almost every human being, let alone a high powered executive. I mean, the natural biological instinct, especially when you know you're under intense scrutiny, is to defend your position. Of course it is. It is to deflect the error, to obfuscate or to find a way to pin the failure on someone lower down the organizational chart. But the accumulated wisdom of the elite leaders analyzed here is that yielding to that defensive instinct is a catastrophic error. It completely destroys the trust you've built.And the text actually provides a remarkably specific model sentence for leaders to use in these moments. It's elegantly simple, but psychologically excruciating to execute. The sentence is, I got that wrong. Here's what I should have done. Here's what we are going to do now. That's it.That's the whole sentence. I want to say that again for the listener to absorb. I got that wrong. Here's what I should have done. Here's what we are going to do now. A leader who has the internal fortitude to stand in front of their brigade or their hotel staff and deliver that exact sentence builds a quality of trust that no amount of flawless, competent decision making could ever generate.It's wild how powerful that vulnerability is. It really is. By openly taking ownership of the failure, they create an umbrella of psychological safety for the entire room. Conversely, a leader who cannot bring themselves to admit fault builds a culture defined by extreme caution. Let's follow the causality of that caution, actually. If the leader's behavior signals that being wrong is an intolerable punishable offense, then nobody else in the building will want to risk being wrong either.Everyone just freezes. Yeah. Overtime that fear of making a mistake metastasizes and it slows the entire operation down to a crawl. Innovation dies because everyone's just trying to cover their own bases. We see a highly instructive example of a leader recognizing and fixing this exact dynamic in Peter Hopgood. Right, at the Outrigger.Yes, we are looking at his time as the general manager of the Outrigger Fiji Beach Resort. Hopgood openly admits that earlier in his career, he operated in a highly autocratic register. Very old school. Exactly. It was a top down, command and control directive style. Essentially, the legacy management model he had inherited from the hospitality generation before him.But then he went through a Franklin Covey leadership training program. And that training catalyzed a profound realization for him. Hopgood basically concluded that his autocratic top down posture was actively putting a ceiling on the potential of the 600 staff members he was responsible for. He was the roadblock. He realized he was the bottleneck. So he undertook the massive task of rebuilding his entire leadership approach.He started deploying regular surveys to get unvarnished feedback from the staff. Which is terrifying for a lot of leaders. Totally. And he began the practice of appreciating the team in a highly public forums. He fundamentally shifted his communication style to recognize employees during their routine reviews rather than only speaking to them when a corrective action was required. But the critical analytical insight here is not simply that Hopgood changed his management techniques.The vital factor is the visibility of that change. Right. Because he did it in front of them. Yes. Because Hopgood changed his posture openly in front of the team, the team witnessed his vulnerability in real time. If he had just made a private internal resolution to be nicer, it would have faded the moment operational stress hit.No one would have believed it. Exactly. But the public highly visible dismantling and rebuilding of his leadership style is what proved his sincerity and made the change permanent in the eyes of the staff. That visibility of humility is paramount. Entirely. And Enrico Crippa echoes this necessity perfectly from the kitchen.He says the key lies in not seeking perfection nor success. But rather trying to do better today than we did yesterday and trying to do better tomorrow than we did today. That sounds so gentle. It does. The analysis points out that while this quote sounds very gentle and philosophical, it actually builds a ruthless, rigorous assumption into the daily practice of the team. It's the humbling assumption that yesterday's work was flawed and could have been better.And crucially, that assumption of flawed work includes the chef's own work from yesterday. Right. It's not just, you know, you cooks need to do better today. It's my menu design yesterday wasn't good enough. Exactly. A leader who can hold that humble posture publicly and daily without letting it degrade into neurotic anxiety provides the team with a living model of how to hold that exact same posture toward their own individual tasks.It's so freeing for the team. It really is. It completely removes the paralyzing fear of failure and replaces it with an engine of continuous iterative improvement. To really drive home what happens when a leader lacks this humility and fails to lead by example in moments of stress, the text shares two highly memorable stories from George Cozonis. Oh, these stories are incredible. They really stick with you.The first story takes place when Cozonis was an assistant manager of a restaurant. It was a complete disaster scenario. Half his team had called out sick and the dining room was filling up with guests far faster than they could possibly be seated or served. It will operational chaos. Total chaos. It is the absolute nightmare scenario for any hospitality professional.And Cozonis recounts that precisely as he was out on the floor desperately trying to pacify this massive line of frustrated waiting guests, the food and beverage director happened to walk by. And what does he do? Well, the director casually observed the chaos and just commented on how exceptionally busy they were. Cozonis explicitly directly asked the senior director for help. And the response? The director simply walked away without uttering a response.He made absolutely no effort to step in, nor did he make an effort to call in emergency support. That is just brutal. Cozonis says that memory is burned into him. It taught him in the starkest terms what leadership by example is not. Yeah, a negative role model. Exactly. It taught him about thecore requirement of integrity and the absolute necessity of being present for your team in the trenches. I mean, the most senior person in the room observed a crisis, assessed it and completely abandoned the floor when things got tough. It is a devastating failure of the exact geometry we discussed earlier. The leader retreated from the flare when the floor needed that load bearing pillar the absolute most. Yes, exactly. But Cozonis also offers a highly vulnerable confession from his own early journey as a leader, which I think is really important.In his first real leadership role as a room service supervisor, he faced an eerily similar situation. Oh, right. The call outs. Yeah, more than half of his room service team called out unexpectedly. But instead of asking for help or calling his superiors for backup, Cozonis tried to compensate for the missing staff by just physically working harder himself. He tried to singlehandedly do the work of a dozen people.Predictably failed. You cannot outwork a math problem. His takeaway from this failure is a brilliant summary, you know, just of the limits of individual leadership. He says, I learned that no matter how good you think you and your team may be, you cannot win a war without soldiers. Good intentions only go so far. Right. And by openly naming thatuseful ego driven mistake in this text, Cozonis is actively teaching the next generation that admitting you were wrong is in itself a fundamental and necessary leadership posture. You can't be a hero. No, you have to rely on the team. You cannot do it alone. And you have to possess the humility to admit when you actually need them. Admitting fall in that way naturally requires a deep reservoir of genuine vulnerability.And this transitions us into what I find to be a really subtle but absolutely critical distinction in the text. It's the line drawn between true presence and mere performance. This is a vital diagnostic tool for anyone aspiring to lead. The text defines true presence as the leader being in the room and being themselves while they are in the room. Being authentic. Yes.Performance, on the other hand, is defined as the leader being in the room and actively acting out the version of themselves. They think the room expects to see. Now, from the outside to a casual observer just passing through the lobby, true presence and a good performance might look identical for a few hours. But the argument here is that from the inside to the team who watches you every day, they can spot the difference instantly. Within a week easily. They know if you are playing a character.Matthew Orlando, who founded Amass in Copenhagen, gives us a really fascinating, slightly paradoxical angle on this. What does he say? He says, as a leader, you need to be more motivated than your team. That means even when you're stressed or burned out, the staff can't see that because I set the tone at the top. I would never ask my staff to do something that I wouldn't do myself. The operative phrase in Orlando's methodology is that the leader must be more motivated than your team. He is accepting the responsibility of setting the energetic mood for the entire operation.OK, I have to aggressively challenge this on behalf of the listener because this feels like a glaring contradiction in the text. Let's hear it. If Orlando is explicitly stating that the staff cannot be allowed to see his stress or his burnout, I mean, isn't he by definition putting on a performance? It sounds like it. Yeah. Right. Isn't he hiding his trueinternal state to present an expected idealized version of a motivated leader? How can we possibly classify that as genuine presence? That is exactly the tension the text wants us to explore. And it actually clarifies this paradox beautifully. OK, how so? The analysis points out that Orlando is not instructing leaders to psychotically perform an energy that they absolutely do not possess.He is describing a very specific rigorous emotional discipline. Emotional discipline. Right. It is the discipline of actively leaving your physical fatigue, your domestic worries or your unrelated administrative frustrations at the back of House Door. When you step onto the floor or up to the past, you're actively accessing and bringing forth the actual genuine motivation you hold for the craft itself. Oh, I see.You were making a conscious choice to let that genuine motivation lead your behavior rather than letting your temporary stress dictate your behavior. So it's about amplifying a real existing part of yourself, your core passion for the work and turning down the volume on the temporary static of your stress. It's not fabricating a fake persona from scratch. Precisely. It is emotional regulation, not theatrical acting. That makes so much more sense.And the text gives us very clear examples of what true performance in the negative toxic sense actually looks like. Like what? Performance is the chef who is screaming and throwing saute pans around the kitchen because they think that is what a genius chef is culturally supposed to look like based on reality television tropes. Oh, totally. We've all seen that. Performance is the general manager speed walking through the lobby holding a buzzing device, looking intensely annoyed and busy because they believe that projects executive importance to the staff.They're just acting out a trope. Yep. That literally is a costume of leadership. And the crucial point is that the team reads both of those fraudulent gestures correctly within about a week of working there. They know instantly if the chef's anchor is just a theatrical temper tantrum. Or if the GM is just faking it.Exactly. They know if the general manager's phone calls in the lobby are just performative busyness and the text notes that after the team realizes it is a performance, they will still do what they are told because they need their paychecks and fear being fired, but they will not in any meaningful sense actually follow that leader. They revert to the minimum compliance we discussed earlier. Exactly. So to bring this all together, true presence, vulnerability and daily consistency act like a massive bank account of operational trust. You are making micro deposits into this account every single day.Micro deposits. I love that. Right. You make a deposit by showing up genuinely by silently fixing the mise en place by picking up the empty coffee cups and by delivering that model sentence admitting that when you were wrong. And the reason you desperately need to build that bank account of trust is because eventually a crisis will hit. And then what?A crisis is the moment the leader is forced to make a massive withdrawal from that account. The crisis test is the ultimate proving ground for the entire philosophy of leading by example. We see this illustrated vividly and with incredibly high stakes in the story of Stephen Ansell. Oh, this story is intense. Yes, we are looking at his time managing the Hyatt Regency Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan during a literal political revolution in 2010. This isn't a crisis like a broken walk-in freezer or a delayed food delivery.This is a violent political revolution unfolding directly outside the glass doors of a luxury hotel. Exactly. The stakes could not be higher. Ansell describes it as an intensely difficult period and a real life high pressure lesson in crisis management. But what got him through it wasn't a corporate crisis manual. No, it was much more human.It was. He says he learned the incredible foundational value of having a highly trusted, passionate local team. He emphasizes how absolutely crucial close relationships with the community were in seeing the property safely through that violent period. And the analysis extracts a profound truth about human behavior under extreme pressure from Ansell's experience. The argument is that a crisis does not introduce new leadership behaviors. A crisis simply reveals the leadership behaviors that were present all along.This is a structural truth of organizational dynamics. The standard of leadership in a crisis is heavily defined by what the leader does in the first ten minutes of the unexpected event. The first ten minutes. Right. But how the team responds to the leader in those ten minutes is determined by the previous two years. If a leader has not been making those daily deposits of trust, if they have been performing a fake persona or hiding in their office or blaming juniors for mistakes, they will turn to their team in the middle of the crisis and find the trust account completely empty.The checks they try to write will just bounce. Exactly. The team will not voluntarily follow them into the fire. But if those micro deposits have been made consistently over time, the team, even if they are exhausted, bruised or frightened by the external circumstances, will execute almost anything the leader asks of them to protect the operation and each other. Because the trust is there. Exactly. The text points out that boththe hospitality and culinary crafts live through immense industry shattering stress recently with the pandemic. The pandemic didn't miraculously separate the good operators from the bad ones. It simply revealed, very starkly, and publicly, who had been operating well with genuine presence and a full bank account of trust all along. Which brings us to the ultimate philosophical question of what the true standard actually is in these elite industries. In both luxury hotels and fine dining, there are massive external authorities that exist entirely to hand out grades and stars. We're talking about Michelin stars, Forbes 5 star ratings, La Liste, the leading hotels of the world.These are the metrics that people build their entire decades-long careers chasing. They are the absolute obsession of the industry. They are. But the text makes a fascinating subversive argument about these accolades. It argues that those external standards are merely floors, not ceilings. Wait, floors?Yes, they are downstream from the actual work. The true machine of quality, the actual source of the standard, is upstream. It lives in the leader's physical body. It lives in the geometry of the floor. It lives at the pass. Let's make that concrete.If a general manager walks past an empty coffee cup in the lobby twice a week without picking it up, the standard of the entire hotel lowers in real time, regardless of what the heavy leather-bound Forbes manual says in the back office. Exactly. The manual doesn't matter in that moment. Right. Conversely, if a chef silently and methodically fixes a cooks mise en place every single shift for six months, the standard of that kitchen raises, regardless of what the Michelin guide expects her demands. Exactly.The text notes that the leaders who command the most respect actively resists the temptation to turn their standard into a static printed document. Why is that a temptation? Because the moment you turn a living physical practice into a documented policy, you hand ownership of it over to auditors, corporate brand compliance teams, and external graders. The true standard must belong to the people actually executing the work in the physical space. The culinary brigade, the front desk agents, the housekeeping team. Enrico Crippa frames this reality beautifully, bringing it down to the micro level of the dining room.He operates an 11-table restaurant. But he says that each individual table is a single judge. A single judge. Right. Therefore, he calculates that his restaurant is theoretically judged 22 times each and every day between lunch and dinner service. The standard isn't an award on the wall.The standard is something that is renewed or broken 22 times a day, plate by plate interaction by interaction. And Susanne Hatje expands this exact single philosophy to the macro level of operating a massive luxury property. She asserts that a general manager must be deeply, visibly part of every single facet of the business. Every facet. Yes, they have to understand finance, marketing, rooms, food and beverage, engineering, everything. Because as the analysis points out, if a general manager is famously rigorous and demanding about the cleanliness of the guest rooms, but shows visible indifference toward the food and beverage department, they have explicitly communicated to the entire staff which parts of the property are allowed to slip. This standard isholistic across the entire building or the standard is just broken. It's all or nothing. So if we pull all the way back and look at everything we've unpacked from chapter three today, the high-speed signals of care, the geometry of standing on the floor versus hiding in the office, the final message to the aspiring leader is a vital distillation of everything we've covered. Leading by example at its absolute highest level is not about possessing overwhelming charisma. It's not about being the loudest in the room. No, it's not about having a booming voice or a natural magnetic authority.It is entirely about consistency. The leaders that teams genuinely voluntarily follow into the fire are the ones who do the small, unglamorous, repetitive things in front of the team every single day. Just doing the work. Yes. They keep picking up the coffee cups and fixing the lemons long after the novelty of the promotion has worn off and long after the press cycle has ended. The consistency is the leadership.The visible example we've been dissecting is simply that internal consistency made manifest in the physical world. As we wrap up this deep dive, I want to leave you with a question to ponder in your own life and whatever workplace you walk into today. Look around your environment. What are the empty coffee cups or the misplaced brunoise containers that you are currently walking past? What are you ignoring? Right. What standard is your silence actively establishing for the people who report to you?Because, as we've learned today, someone is always watching. The true standard of your operation is what you do when you think no one is watching. Because the reality is, the team always is. We've spent our time today exploring exactly how the leader shapes the standard through their own physical actions and visible presence. Next time, we turn our attention to how the leader shapes the people around them. Join us for episode 4, First, the team.

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