When I spoke with Pedro Dias, he was General Manager of The Surrey in New York. The book notes that he has since become General Manager of Amanzoe in Greece.
Dias speaks to one subject in the book, and it is the subject on which hospitality leaders most often get the sequence wrong: empowerment. The chapter he appears in is built on the observation that the authority to make decisions is only useful once the team has been trained to use it. Dias made the point for me in a single paragraph. Through continuous learning, training, coaching and mentoring, he told me, an empowered workforce can be critical to success. Empowering staff to make decisions removes the need to escalate issues to higher management in a time consuming and unnecessary way, and the result is a more streamlined and effective operation.
“Through continuous learning, training, coaching and mentoring, an empowered workforce can be critical to success.” Pedro Dias, then General Manager, The Surrey
What I value in that account is its order of operations. The four words at the front of the sentence, learning, training, coaching and mentoring, come before the word empowered, and in our conversation that order was deliberate. Many operators announce empowerment to a team that has not been prepared for it and then wonder why the decisions coming back are poor. Dias describes the opposite sequence. The investment in the team’s judgment comes first, and the authority follows as the natural consequence of that investment.
The second half of his paragraph is about what the leader gets back. Every issue that no longer has to climb the ladder to higher management is time returned to the guest and to the operation. The team that can act on its own is faster, and the leader who has trained that team has fewer problems arriving on the desk. In a property such as The Surrey, where the guest expects a decision in the moment, that speed is the service.
“This will create a much more streamlined and effective operation.” Pedro Dias, then General Manager, The Surrey
In the book, Pedro Dias appears in Chapter 5, Giving the Keys, where his account of training as the precondition for empowerment extends the chapter’s argument that a leader hands over authority only after preparing the team to hold it.