Train them first, then hand over four specific kinds of authority: the right to decide, the right to spend, the right to speak in their own words, and the right to interrupt a senior person. Set clear boundaries, and decide in advance how you will respond when a decision goes wrong.
Empowerment is the word every operator uses and very few practice. In my conversations with eighty hoteliers and chefs, the people who actually delivered it described something far more specific than a slogan in the all staff meeting. They described a transfer of authority, made deliberately, after the team had been prepared to hold it.
It helps to break the word into the four things it consists of. The first is decision authority: the front desk agent who can move a complaining guest to a better room without paging a manager. The second is spending authority: a defined sum the employee can commit to resolve a problem without asking. The third is language authority: the right to speak to a guest in their own voice rather than from a script, to recommend the restaurant they love rather than the one on the preferred vendor list. The fourth is escalation authority: the right to interrupt a senior person, including you, when something is wrong. Most properties have a working version of one or two of these and an unspoken refusal to extend the rest. A leader operating across all four has given the keys. A leader operating across one or two has handed over a key chain that opens very few doors.
“Once you clearly communicate your organization’s objectives, empower your team to make decisions to achieve those results: particularly with respect to guests.” Adrian Gray, then general manager of Lotte Hotel Moscow
The order matters. Alexander Pichel, then general manager of Hotel Indonesia Kempinski Jakarta, put the argument in sequence for me: after training your team, empower them to act. The qualifier is the whole point. Empowerment without preparation is abandonment. The leaders I interviewed were unanimous that preparation has three parts. Training thorough enough that the employee knows what the right call looks like. Boundaries clear enough that they know where their authority ends and where they should pause and consult. And a recovery practice, agreed in advance, for the day an empowered decision goes wrong, which it will.
Boundaries deserve more attention than they usually get. An employee told to use their judgment with no defined ceiling will default to the most conservative reading available, which is no judgment at all. An employee told that anything up to a certain figure is theirs, and anything beyond it means coming to find you, knows exactly where they stand and acts with the confidence that comes from knowing.
There is a hiring question underneath all of this. Emmanuel Stroobant, the chef behind Saint Pierre and Shoukouwa in Singapore, named it in a sentence that applies as much to empowerment as to recruitment.
“For me, the right attitude will always trump skill.” Emmanuel Stroobant, chef, Saint Pierre and Shoukouwa, Singapore
A leader who has hired for character has earned the right to empower broadly. A leader who hired for credentials, and who now hesitates because they suspect the team will mishandle the authority, does not have an empowerment problem. They have a hiring problem one room over, and empowerment will only reveal it faster.
One last discipline is easy to overlook. Escalation authority is granted by policy and sustained by what happens after the interruption. The team learns within about three interruptions whether a senior person responds with gratitude or irritation, and they adjust accordingly. Every one of the four authorities works the same way. The policy announces it. Your reaction, the first few times it is used, decides whether it is real.
Chapter 5, Giving the Keys, sets out the four kinds of authority, the three parts of preparation, the recovery test, and the Empowerment Preparation Checklist a leader can run before handing over any new class of decision.