Serving Culture For Breakfast
Crafting A Hospitality-Centric Culture
The business guru Peter Drucker once famously quipped that “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” If you have a culture of pursuing excellence and providing unparalleled service, you will always prevail over the most elaborate and heralded business strategy. Culture is an integral part of who you are, whereas strategy, more often than not, is an overlay or an afterthought. You can claim anything you like, but you are who you are unless you work to become something else.
Every company has a culture, just as every company has a brand. Unfortunately, in most cases, there is no intentionality to what develops, and if you are not in the business of defining who you are, someone else is going to do it for you. A brand is the sum total of all customer experiences and resides in the mind of the customer. You don’t control your brand, only the product you are offering and the service that accompanies it. Marketing is simply an expression of what you hope or think the brand is. In the best-case scenario, you attempt to craft a narrative that engages the guest and gives them some indication of what your intentions are. In the worst cases, it’s delusional, dysfunctional, and ultimately meaningless.
The same goes for culture.
If you don’t have a strategy and a plan for developing a customer-centric culture, your brand will simply be a reflection of the personalities, gifts, flaws, and defects of your worst employees. Your culture will never be focused on the customer unless you make it so. Without institutional intentionality, your success is little more than a leaf on a stream, completely at the mercy of outside forces, indifferent to your dream and desires. When the going gets tough, the rats will abandon ship.
If you do not have a plan for creating a guest-centric culture built on radical authenticity and empathy-driven service, you are at the mercy of your lowest-paid employee’s abilities and inclinations. If you’re not thinking about the guest experience every moment of every day, and incentivizing your staff to do the same, you will perpetually be putting out fires and struggling to catch up. We must be intentional about excellence and passionate about service. We must internalize the idea that service is truly noble.
Human beings respond to motives and objectives, rather than orders and directives. We must be convinced that the path to personal happiness and fulfillment lies in the empathetic response to helping others, which it does. A well-functioning staff is encouraged to think this way of their own accord, not because they will be reprimanded or fired for failing to do so.
On the contrary, they have to see the logic of it, the opportunity for self-actualization and personal reward, and not simply the profitability of it. No one cares if the boss stands to profit, even if that profit may eventually trickle down to us. We care that we are part of something larger than ourselves. We care about excellence that rewards us intellectually and emotionally. We want to be special and be recognized as such. We want to be seen.
Find a way to get every staff member to put themselves in the shoes of the guest, so that they truly do unto others as they would have others do unto them. Start by ensuring that every employee has a chance to enjoy the hospitality you offer to your guests. How can they possibly understand the guest if they’ve never eaten in your restaurant or stayed in your hotel? Make them see the business through the eyes of the guest, and not the staff.
Ask yourself, what are the objectives you are pursuing as a team, and what is the motivation for achieving them? Answer those two questions and then build a program around celebrating the pursuit of empathy-driven hospitality. This is the path to excellence and a recipe for crafting memorable experiences.
