Good Evening Everyone
‘Good Evening Everyone’ is for guests of and professionals in the hospitality industry, it’s where I share observations and converse with experts (podcasts) who rejoice in delivering delightful dinners and stays in exchange for your hard-earned money. You’ll also find conversations here with guests, their truths want to be heard too.
In case you’ve not noticed, the hospitality world’s highly competitive. Every sector’s constantly in search of its equilibrium state, with their operators leading and responding to change like life depends upon keeping up with tastes, demographics, and further variables. Markets lead to progress in hospitality, as they do everywhere.
The big levers like creativity, location, processes, time, and price are how operators compete, teasing them to creating their signature products for delighting guests. Incumbents and new entrants take their shots on goal, producing and testing their product bundles, each having guest acquisition and retention fully front of mind —because switching costs.
At the end of the day, winning in hospitality hinges almost always on the operator’s talent —their caring individuals and how well they work together. From the guest-facing staffers to those evaluating and deciding locations, acquiring further talent, orchestrating training, keeping processes compliant and on track, communicating offerings with potential and present guests, and everything else, it’s hiring well that makes the difference.
Attracting further appropriate talent almost always requires already having a base of great talent on board. There’s a law of attraction in play here, as in most industries, it’s expressed in each organization’s culture. Each operator’s team quality is what draws, and sometimes repels, further constructive talent as their organizations grow; HR’s not an attractor but instead a coordinator responsible to the culture as its screen for keeping out potentially toxic elements and as needed an usher of ethical conduct.
Smart people in hospitality prefer working with kindred spirits, these treasured individuals tend to loathe shouldering free riders and political players. Operators losing their best assets as the result of culture-related issues and under-coordinated hiring often soon discover their valuable guests switching away, intuitively moving on to explore delightful moments at competitors’ venues. An operation’s culture is reflected in the quality of its guest experience, for better or worse.
Given that in hospitality a rememberance of delight is always a product’s end game, anything interfering with the process of delivering them consistently and with grace negatively impacts the P&L. While one unintentional hiccup might be excusable, erratic ongoing turbulence simply isn’t. Ever. When identifying constraints and defective logic within operational processes is a cultural responsibility everyone in the organization can be helpful, and personally safe, performing truth seeking to improve profitability.
Culture is a well from which either financial success is drawn or operational nightmares emerge. It provides everything from the talent to the technology, and if tainted sets the scene for a cascading collapse. While on one end of the spectrum there’s the treasured talent organizations want to attract, on the other there’s the polar opposite type who sneak in through cracks in the hiring process. Once in, they weigh heavily on morale in the workplace and at home as the gravity they bring never sleeps —because tricksters.
Hospitality leadership is directly responsible for cultural integrity, it benefits us and everyone in the organization, and guests too, to always be watching and listening carefully to ‘what’s really going on’. Ensuring clarity prevails isn’t optional, each talented individual who decided to join and endeavor with us likely did so based upon a belief we’d maintain a healthy environment for them —and everyone.
I’m very much looking forward to posting ideas and conversations, and inviting you to join in with questions, requests, and ideas. BTW, any time you come across something in a GEE episode where you think it’d be beneficial to present a followup, conversation, guest invitation, or whatever, please feel free to reach out with your thoughts, I greatly appreciate your caring. Thank you!
Disclosure: In the spirit of truths sharing: all of the words you read and pod-listen across all Good Evening Everyone episodes are derived from impressions and thoughts in my head, nothing presented should not be construed representing policies, cultures, processes, circumstances, operators, individuals, teams, operating or shuttered venues, contractors. events, experiences, or anything else of or related to any of my present or past employers, clients, or places where I’ve dined.
