A great hotel general manager is on the floor, visibly holding the standard they expect from everyone else. The team reads every gesture, from a coffee cup picked up in the lobby to a problem walked past, and copies what it sees. Consistency in those gestures, every day, is the job.
The general managers I interviewed for this book run very different properties, from a palace hotel in Istanbul to a beach resort in Fiji, and when I asked what the role demands they kept returning to the same answer. The great ones are seen doing the work. Aaron Kaupp, then general manager of Le Royal Monceau, Raffles Paris, put it in terms of a coffee cup. A general manager who picks up an empty cup on the way through the lobby, or who stays late into the night to greet an arriving VIP, is signaling dedication. A general manager who cannot be bothered is signaling something too, and that signal travels through the staff and reaches the guest.
The first thing a great general manager gets right is where their body is during the day. Susanne Hatje, then general manager of Mandarin Oriental, New York, described a daily routine of moving through both the heart of house and the front of house, greeting staff in the morning and sitting in on menu discussions. She called it making a point of being present. The phrase sounds modest. In practice it means giving up two or three hours of office work every day, work that someone else will insist is urgent, on the conviction that the floor is where the real work happens. The team can tell within days whether a general manager walks the floor for substance or for show.
The second thing is refusing to walk past a problem. Philip Barnes, then general manager of The Savoy in London, gave me the sharpest version of this idea in all of my interviews.
“If you walk by a problem, then you are the problem.” Philip Barnes, then general manager of The Savoy, London
Barnes is describing a mechanism, and the mechanism is unforgiving. When the team sees the general manager notice a fault and keep walking, they conclude that the fault is now acceptable. The standard of the property has dropped by one visible increment, and no memo will bring it back. Barnes also accepts the other side of that bargain. When he stays in his own hotel, he told me, six hundred people know when he goes to breakfast, what he eats and who he dines with. He treats that scrutiny as part of the job, and he is clear that a leader who dislikes it has chosen the wrong role.
The third thing is recognition. The team is watching whether the general manager sees them. A lobby walk that registers no faces is a gesture, and the staff read it as fluently as they read the cup lifted off a chair. The general managers who command the deepest loyalty in my interviews can name the housekeeper on the third floor and the night auditor who has been with the property for twenty years. Taljinder Singh, then general manager of The Taj Mahal Palace in Mumbai, learned this as an assistant lobby manager in New Delhi by watching his own general manager greet returning guests by name and ask after their families. He absorbed the standard by observation, and it became a behavior he expected of himself.
“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 of Mandarin Oriental, New York
None of this depends on charisma. The general managers the team follows are the ones who keep doing the small things after the novelty of the title has worn off and the press cycle has moved on. The consistency is the leadership.
Chapter 3, Leading by Example, follows this through the lobby and the kitchen pass, the discipline of admitting error in front of the team, the difference between presence and performance, and what the daily deposits of example are worth when a crisis arrives.