Peter Hopgood was general manager of Outrigger Fiji Beach Resort in Fiji when I interviewed him for The Luxury of Attention. The book’s roll call records that he retired in 2018 after eight years at the resort, where he was responsible for a team of six hundred staff.
In our conversation, Hopgood described a change in the way he led. Earlier in his career he operated in an autocratic register, directive from the top, the standard model that many of his generation inherited from the senior leaders who had trained them. The turning point was a Franklin Covey leadership program based on Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits work. He concluded that the autocratic posture was limiting the six hundred people he was responsible for, and he rebuilt his approach around surveying staff regularly, appreciating the team in public, and recognizing employees during reviews rather than saving feedback for the corrective moment.
What I took from his account was the visibility of the change. Hopgood did not change quietly. The team watched him construct a new way of leading in front of them, and that is what made the change hold. A private adjustment made inside a general manager’s office tends to last a few months and then revert under pressure. An adjustment the whole team has witnessed becomes the new standard, because everyone now knows what the leader expects of himself, and the leader knows that everyone knows.
I have kept his story in the book because it answers a question I hear often from people moving into senior roles: whether it is possible to change a leadership style that has already been seen by hundreds of people. Hopgood’s answer is that the seeing is the point. The change has to be public to be believed.
In the book, Peter Hopgood appears in Chapter 3, Leading by Example, where his account sits alongside those of Aaron Kaupp and Philip Barnes. The three make the same argument from different directions: the standard of a property is what the leader does every day, and someone on the team is always watching. Hopgood’s contribution is the clearest example in the chapter of a senior leader revising his own habits in full view of the people he led, and of the revision becoming permanent because it was seen. The passages that mention him describe his thinking in my words rather than his, so this page carries no direct quotation.