Twenty years is a long time to learn anything. It is long enough to make the same mistake three different ways, to watch the same patterns play out across dozens of different teams and markets, and to develop the kind of bone-deep certainty that only comes from extended experience in a specific domain. Hospitality gave me all of that — and then some.
These are the lessons I carry. Not all of them came easily. Several were expensive. A few I am still working on. But every one of them is true — not theoretically, but in the particular, unglamorous, often hilarious reality of leading people who feed and house and welcome other people for a living.
About People
1. The guest experience almost always starts with the employee experience.
You cannot consistently deliver warmth, care, and excellence to guests from a team that feels undervalued, overloaded, and unheard. Culture flows downward and outward. The way a manager treats a dishwasher at the start of a shift shows up in the food runner's energy forty-five minutes later. This causal chain is invisible until you look for it — and then you see it everywhere.
2. The person who complains most vocally is often the most engaged.
Early in my career I found persistent complainers exhausting and assumed they were problems to be managed. I was wrong. People who complain loudly and specifically usually care deeply. They are telling you what's broken because they want it fixed. The truly disengaged don't complain — they just stop showing up, physically or emotionally.
3. Dignity is the non-negotiable.
You can tolerate a lot of operational imperfection. You cannot tolerate a culture where people are made to feel small. Not by guests, not by managers, not by colleagues. When dignity is protected consistently, everything else becomes easier to fix. When it is compromised routinely, no operational excellence can compensate.
4. People remember how you showed up during their hardest moments at work — not their best ones.
The leader who shows up with grace and humanity when a team member makes a serious mistake, or experiences a personal crisis, or faces an overwhelming shift — that leader earns a quality of loyalty that performance bonuses cannot purchase.
5. Hire for values. Train for skill.
Technical skills in hospitality are largely teachable. Warmth, integrity, and genuine care for other people are not. I have hired brilliant technicians who made the culture worse, and people with minimal experience who made it measurably better from the first week. Values are upstream of everything else.
6. The best service recovery story becomes a guest's best story about you.
A perfect experience is expected and quickly forgotten. A genuine, generous, human recovery from a genuine problem is remembered for years — and retold. Train your team not just to avoid mistakes, but to turn them into demonstrations of your values.
7. Your team will rise to meet the standard you model, not the standard you announce.
Whatever gap exists between what you say matters and how you actually behave under pressure — your team lives in that gap. They are watching when you think you are not being watched. Model the standard. Every day. Especially on the hard ones.
About Leadership
8. A calm leader in a crisis is worth ten excellent procedures.
Hospitality is, by nature, high pressure and high uncertainty. What the team needs when everything is going sideways is not a more detailed protocol — it is a leader who is present, grounded, and clear. Your emotional regulation is an operational asset. Develop it accordingly.
9. Say "I don't know" more often.
For years I felt that acknowledging ignorance undermined my authority. The opposite turned out to be true. "I don't know — let's figure it out together" built far more trust than any confident pronouncement I made when I was actually uncertain. Your team knows when you're guessing. Naming it honestly builds credibility that pretending cannot.
10. Delegate the outcome, not just the task.
Micromanagement happens when leaders delegate the work but not the authority. Real delegation means telling someone what success looks like and then getting out of the way. It requires trusting people to find their own path to the destination — which they often do better than you would have.
11. Feedback is a gift — but only if it's delivered with care.
Honest feedback delivered harshly teaches people to avoid you. Honest feedback delivered with genuine regard for the person's growth teaches people to seek you out. The message matters, but the manner is what determines whether it lands. Both are skills. Practice both.
12. The meeting after the meeting is where the real culture lives.
What people say in the hallway after the team meeting — the unfiltered version of the discussion — is your real cultural data. If it consistently diverges from what people say in the room, you have a psychological safety problem that no strategy can solve until you address it directly.
13. Great operators make great operators. The real multiplier is developing people.
You can run an excellent restaurant yourself, or you can develop twenty people who each run excellent restaurants because of what they learned from you. The second path is slower, harder, less immediately satisfying, and ten times more impactful. Legacy is in the people, not the properties.
"The best hospitality leaders I've known were not the ones who had the best answers. They were the ones who created the conditions for their teams to find answers that were even better."
About Growth
14. Comfort is the enemy of competence at scale.
Every time you stay in a role or a market because it feels manageable, you are trading growth for security. The hospitality leaders who develop the most quickly are the ones who consistently take on assignments that feel slightly too large for them. The stretch is not optional. It is the mechanism.
15. Cross-functional exposure is not a luxury — it is a prerequisite for senior leadership.
Leaders who have only ever seen their function struggle to make decisions that serve the whole organization. Deliberately seek experiences in finance, HR, sales, technology, and operations — even briefly — early in your career. The perspective compound interest is enormous.
16. Your biggest growth usually comes from the person you least expected to learn from.
The most transformative professional lessons I have received came from a front-desk agent who noticed something I had missed, a kitchen porter who had more situational intelligence than any consultant I ever hired, and a part-time server who asked a question in a team briefing that restructured my entire approach to a problem. Stay genuinely curious across levels.
17. Ego is the most expensive operational cost that never appears on any P&L.
Ego-driven decisions — the ones made to protect image, win arguments, or avoid admitting error — are extraordinarily costly. They damage relationships, slow problem-solving, and create the kinds of cultural rot that eventually surface as turnover, guest dissatisfaction, and revenue loss. Check it. Regularly and honestly.
18. Systems create freedom. Freedom without systems creates chaos.
Early in my career I thought systems were bureaucratic constraints that stifled creativity. I learned — expensively — that good systems are what make consistent excellence possible. A great system doesn't tell you how to be warm and authentic. It handles the variables that would otherwise consume your cognitive and emotional energy, so you can be fully present for the things that actually require judgment and humanity.
About Life
19. Hospitality is a philosophy, not an industry.
The practice of genuinely caring about another person's experience — of anticipating what they need before they ask, of treating them as fully human rather than transactional — is not something you leave at the restaurant door. It is a way of moving through the world. The leaders who understand this operate differently with their families, their colleagues, their communities. They see hospitality as a calling, not just a career.
20. The work that matters most is never about the work.
Twenty years of leading in hospitality has taught me that the real work is never the occupancy rates or the revenue per available room or the Michelin stars. It is the person who came to the restaurant after a terrible diagnosis and left feeling, for a few hours, genuinely cared for. It is the team member who stayed in hospitality because one leader believed in her potential when no one else did. It is the quiet understanding, built over decades, that we are all in the business of making people feel they belong somewhere. That is the work. Everything else is a vehicle for it.