When I spoke with Stephen Ansell, he was general manager of Ararat Park Hyatt Moscow. The book notes that he has since become Managing Director for Middle East and Africa at Hyatt.
Ansell speaks in the book to two things, and they turn out to be the same thing seen from different distances. The first is what happens to a leader when a crisis arrives. He had been general manager of the Hyatt Regency Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan when a political revolution gripped the country in 2010, and his account of it is remarkable for how little drama he allows into it. The hotel came through on the strength of a trusted local team and close relationships with the community, both of which had been built long before anyone needed them. The second is how a new recruit is brought into the property. After the induction, a personal coach is assigned to each new team member in their own department for the first three months, so that nobody faces their first challenge alone. Read together, the two accounts say that leadership and training are the work done in peacetime, and that a crisis simply reveals whether it was done.
“This was a very difficult time and a real-life lesson in crisis management. I learned once again the value of a trusted, passionate local team, and how important our close relationships with the community were in seeing us through this period.” Stephen Ansell, then General Manager, Ararat Park Hyatt Moscow
In the book, Stephen Ansell appears in Chapter 3, Leading by Example, Chapter 4, First the Team, and Chapter 10, The Recovery. In Leading by Example, the Bishkek revolution shows that the leader who has been walking the floor and learning the team’s names has done most of the work of leading through a crisis before it arrives. In First the Team, his three month coaching practice extends onboarding well past the first two days, a discipline almost no operation budgets for and almost every great one finds a way to deliver. In The Recovery, I return to Bishkek as the national scale version of a lesson every crisis account in the book shares: the recovery is rehearsed in peacetime, or it is not available.
“After passing the induction, a personal coach is assigned to you in your department for the first three months” Stephen Ansell, then General Manager, Ararat Park Hyatt Moscow