Leadership by moving ashtrays
Why building a culture of trust is paramount in hospitality and elsewhere.
After many years abroad, our new General Manager’s family was used to the full five-star service they were treated to in the deluxe, five-star hotels in which they had lived in Asia.
It was 1993 and I had recently been promoted to Security Manager. A few weeks after he started, the GM was in my office. His wife had received a ticket for a traffic violation. He wondered what he should do with it.
“You should probably pay it.”, I said.
He told me that at his last post, in Malaysia, he would just give parking tickets and fines to his Security Manager and that was the end of it.
“Maybe your Security Manager paid them.”, I said.
Inside, I was thinking about the Security Manager, wondering if the poor man had to tell his family “Sorry, but we can’t afford to buy food this week, I had to pay a fine for the General Manager’s wife.”
This is the same General Manager I had to pay the taxi fare for when we were sent to a Business Planning workshop and neither he nor the Financial Controller who was with us had Swedish currency. I wrote about it here a couple of weeks ago.
I later learned that the GM had great respect for the fact that I had paid for the taxi without hesitation to save him, and the new financial controller, from an embarrassing loss of face during their first weeks on the job.
A year later, the General Manager left. Perhaps Norway couldn’t live up to his expectations or perhaps blaming him for the labour unrest that had started before his arrival was a way for ownership to resolve the strikes and disruptive disputes.
He moved to Turkey and promptly poached our Director of Sales to join him. He invited me to come and visit but he didn’t offer me a job.
On the other hand, he did give me $50 dollars to spend in the hotel Casino. He wanted me to visit and let him know if I thought security was OK there. He mentioned they’d had a shooting incident there the previous week. I’m no gambler, and I certainly didn’t want to gamble my health and safety by visiting a place you could get shot in.
The incident had happened despite the fact that the casino had metal detectors and a gun deposit desk. Theoretically, no guns should have been able to make it to the gaming floor. Apparently, a wealthy family member of a powerful politician had visited the casino. When he walked through the metal detector, it beeped and flashed. He apologized to the security guards, pulled a gun from his belt and handed it over to them.
Later in the evening, after losing lots of money and drinking lots of whiskey, he pulled out a second gun, firing a shot into the ceiling and threatening to shoot himself and others if he wasn’t given his money back. Fortunately, no one was hurt, except for the casino’s profits that evening. His money was refunded.
I was no expert on casino security, but that was the night I learned if someone sets off a metal detector and surrenders a gun to you that they “forgot” to deposit, it’s a good idea to send them back through the security screening. Just in case they “forgot” their second gun too.
Fortunately, nobody got shot during the few minutes it took me to lose the $50, the GM gave me to coax me to check out the casino.
The General Manager, the Sales Director and I three had dinner one night in the hotel’s fine dining restaurant. It was an evening where I learned a bit about how leadership and service cultures can differ from place to place around the world.
As our meal was coming to a close, I told him that I felt sorry for the disastrous year he had had in Norway with all the unrest in the hotel. It’s not fun when the people picketing your hotel, claiming to be workers treated unfairly were not employees, just people that were willing to carry picket signs for the union. It’s even worse, when the same people you don’t know, lie down in front of the beer truck at the entrance to the receiving area saying that it would have to run them over before they could make deliveries.
“No”, he said. “It wasn’t a bad year. In some ways it was like a holiday, or at least a breath of fresh air.”
His argument was, that for all the issues we’d faced, things still got done. The Scandinavian “skippertak” (no Google, it doesn’t mean Skipper roof) mentality which basically means that everyone kind of pitches in, was something he was happy his family had experienced. He could go home, spend evenings with his wife and kids and not return until the next day. The hotel would still be standing, clean and operational. Duty managers had done their duties. All was good.
In some emerging markets, he said you couldn’t do that. You could go home for dinner, but you always had to come back in the evening and make sure everything got done. “People only do what the manager does”, he said. “In Norway, they do what they’re supposed to do….. at least they do when they’re not on strike.”
The service and atmosphere at the hotel in Istanbul was impeccable. Staff were capable and competent.
I didn’t believe him.
“Watch what happens when we leave this restaurant.”, he said. “In the atrium bar there are small round tables. There should be an ashtray in the middle of each table. Everyone has been trained. Everyone knows that. But have a look. Some tables will not have an ashtray at all and if there is an ashtray, it won’t be in the middle or it won’t be clean. But watch what happens.”
We left the restaurant and his description of the tables in the bar was spot on. He walked over to one table and moved the ashtray to the middle of the table. The two bartenders, who had been quietly standing behind the bar, immediately went to all the other tables. They cleaned the ashtrays that needed cleaning. They moved the ashtrays to the middle of the tables and within a few minutes the bar looked ready to be displayed in a glossy magazine about exclusive hotel bars.
The staff were not lazy or incompetent. They may have been motivated by fear in a way that I have seen elsewhere. This behaviour manifests itself in a way that says, “it’s better to do nothing than to do something wrong”. So they wait for someone in a responsible position to do something they can copy.
In China, a painter was asked how long it would take him to paint a hotel room. When the timeframe was agreed, he asked which of the four walls he should start on. The supervisor, a friend of mine, didn’t really care since all four were to be painted, but he pointed to one of the walls. “OK”, said the painter. When the supervisor returned after he agreed amount of time, the painter was sitting on the floor smoking a cigarette. Only one wall was painted. He hadn’t known which of the remaining three should be painted second, so, rather than make a mistake, he decided to wait.
Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, I experienced similar things in Russia when staff were being taught how to run breakfast buffets. Every time the supervisor checked, the trays of sliced cheese were empty. The standard was clear, he told the staff. When there are a few slices left, replace the tray. Everyone understood. When he asked if there were any questions, a brave soul raised their hand. “How many is a few?”, they asked. The supervisor was perplexed, but he answered, “Three.” The next time he came by the buffet, the cheese tray was empty. He gathered the staff.
“Why is the tray empty? We agreed it should be replaced when there’s only a few slices left!”
“Yes, we know.”, was the response, “but there were four slices and then someone took two, so there were never “a few” slices, because you told us that “a few” equals three. There were never three slices.”
These examples can seem strange, to some, they may even seem outrageous, but to me, they do not indicate that there was anything wrong with any of these staff members. Living in a culture of fear can be paralyzing.
Many years have gone by since I experienced these examples. I’m confident and hopeful that new cultures of hospitality have replaced the cultures of fear in most places.
Still, since experiencing how paralyzing the alternative could be, building a culture of trust has always been foremost in my mind.
Stay safe, Always Care
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