You lead a luxury hotel or restaurant team by being visible in the work every day: on the floor or at the pass, doing the small things in front of people, knowing them by name, and bringing more motivation into the room than anyone else. The team copies what it sees.
Every leader I interviewed for this book came back to the same place when I asked how they lead. They did not talk about vision statements or management frameworks. They talked about where their body is during the working day, and what they do with their hands once they get there. Leading a luxury team is a physical practice before it is anything else.
Begin with presence. The general managers who command the deepest loyalty describe a daily routine of being on the floor rather than in the office. Susanne Hatje, who had run Mandarin Oriental, New York for many years when we spoke, put it plainly.
“I interact with many of my colleagues every day, whether in the heart-of-house or front-of-house. Whether greeting staff in the morning or discussing menus, I make a point of being present.” Susanne Hatje, then general manager, Mandarin Oriental, New York
Being present is a decision, renewed each morning, and it costs something. Two or three hours on the floor are two or three hours someone else will insist should go to the budget or the investor call. The GM who walks anyway is betting that the floor walk is the most important work of the day. The team can tell whether the walk is for show or for substance. In the kitchen the equivalent is the pass. The chef who is there during service is there to see: a plate six degrees too cool, a saucier starting to fall behind, the third spoonful of a sauce that no longer tastes like the first. The chef who is not at the pass is almost always the chef whose kitchen is about to slip.
Presence is only the start. What the team watches next is the hundred small gestures the leader makes once they arrive. Aaron Kaupp, then general manager of Le Royal Monceau, Raffles Paris, described the GM who picks up an empty coffee cup on the way through the lobby, or stays until the middle of the night to greet a VIP. Both are signals, and both are read by the staff. Anything the leader signals, whether care or indifference, travels through the organization at the speed of sight. Taljinder Singh learned this as an assistant lobby manager at the Taj Mahal Hotel in New Delhi, watching his predecessor greet returning guests by name and ask after a daughter who had been ill. Nobody wrote that standard down. Singh absorbed it by watching.
The third element is recognition. The team is also watching whether the leader sees them. A lobby walk that registers no faces, a morning meeting in which the GM hears the reports without acknowledging the housekeeping supervisor whose mother is in hospital, these are gestures too, and they are read just as fluently as the coffee cup. The leaders I most respect can name the housekeeper on the third floor and the night auditor who has been at the property for twenty two years. Their presence lands as recognition rather than surveillance, and the difference separates compliance from voluntary excellence.
Finally there is the leader’s own mood. Matthew Orlando, then chef and owner of Amass in Copenhagen, was direct about it.
“Leading by example is the best form of motivation. Because I set the tone at the top, I would never ask my staff to do something that I wouldn’t do myself.” Matthew Orlando, then chef and owner, Amass, Copenhagen
Orlando told me a leader needs to be more motivated than the team, and that stress and burnout cannot be visible to the staff. He was describing presence rather than performance. The leader who walks onto the floor carrying the morning’s argument teaches the team that personal weather comes through at work. The leader who has dealt with it before arriving teaches something else. Once the brigade or the front desk has identified a performance, they will do what they are told without ever truly following.
Chapter 3, Leading by Example, sets these practices out in full, from the lobby and the pass through admitting error in front of the team and the crisis that reveals which habits were there all along.