No. The hoteliers and chefs I interviewed hold very high standards without playing the villain. They do it by being visibly harder on themselves than on anyone else, by never walking past a problem, and by admitting their own mistakes in front of the team. Severity about the work and cruelty toward people are different things.
The question usually comes from someone who has just been promoted and assumes that holding a standard means becoming the person everyone fears. The leaders in this book run some of the most demanding operations in the world, and none of them described leadership that way. What they described is stricter than the bad guy model and far less theatrical.
Start with where the strictness is aimed. Peter Goossens of Hof van Cleve told me the profession demands 300 percent of yourself and that the best is never enough, and he was talking about the chef first. The leader who is visibly more demanding of their own work than of anyone else’s has earned the right to demand the same of the brigade. The leader who asks less of themselves than of the line has stopped leading, and the cooks have noticed. Severity, in these kitchens, points inward before it points at anyone else.
Then consider what happens when something is wrong. Philip Barnes, then regional vice president and managing director of The Savoy in London, told me the general manager sets the tone for everything that goes on, and then gave me the sharpest line in the chapter.
“If you walk by a problem, then you are the problem.” Philip Barnes, then regional vice president and managing director, The Savoy, London
That sentence is severe on purpose, and notice who it is severe with. It does not ask the manager to shout at the person who left the problem there. It asks the manager to stop and fix it, because the team saw the manager notice, and whatever the manager tolerates becomes the new standard. The bad guy model confuses being loud with being rigorous. A general manager who picks up the coffee cup in the lobby, every time, is more exacting than one who lectures about standards and walks past the cup on the way out.
The third piece is the one the bad guy can never do: admit error. Peter Hopgood, then general manager of Outrigger Fiji Beach Resort, began his career in an autocratic register, top down and directive, the model his generation inherited. After a Franklin Covey leadership program he concluded that the posture was limiting a team of six hundred people, and he rebuilt his approach around surveying staff, appreciating them in public and recognizing them during reviews rather than saving feedback for the corrective moment. The important part is that he changed visibly, in front of the team. A private adjustment would have reverted under stress. A public one became the standard.
Enrico Crippa of Piazza Duomo in Alba, three Michelin stars and one of the most disciplined kitchens in Europe, put the same discipline in gentler words.
“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.” Enrico Crippa, Piazza Duomo, Alba
Built into that sentence is the assumption that yesterday’s work could have been better, including the chef’s own. A leader who can say I got that wrong in front of the team builds a kind of trust that competent decision making alone cannot produce. The team is more relieved than offended. It tells them that being wrong is survivable in this operation, which is the precondition for anyone being willing to make the calls the work requires. The leader who treats wrongness as intolerable produces caution instead, and caution slows everything down.
There is one more distinction the chapter draws, between surveillance and recognition. The bad guy watches people to catch them. The leaders I most respect watch people to know them: the housekeeper on the third floor, the night auditor with twenty two years at the property. Surveillance produces compliance. Recognition produces voluntary excellence. A manager who understands that difference can hold a standard as high as anyone in the industry without playing the villain.
Chapter 3, Leading by Example, follows this from the lobby walk and the pass through admitting error, the difference between presence and performance, and what the standard looks like when a crisis arrives.