The True Cost Of Leadership

Want to know the true cost of bad leadership?  Take a look at the hospitality industry.

The first job for most businesses when facing a New Year is to review and update their strategic plan.  With people costs being the major component of most budgets these always gain a fair bit of attention especially any training and development expenditure.  In the light of a fresh year and a few weeks off, the reasoning behind some of this expenditure maybe lost and the expenditure hard to justify.  If this is the position you find yourself in, I suggest that you look at this way to find tangible justification:

Over the break period we visited three very high profile vineyards in the Hawkes Bay and they had a lot in common.  Fantastic food drawn from the best local ingredients prepared by expert and innovative chefs, great local wines to match, all eaten at breath taking multi-million dollar locations.  The only clear difference between these three places?  Service.  This was made even more interesting by the fact that these vineyards were all within the same geographical location drawing on the same community for staff. We left two of these businesses vowing to return with friends as we walked out with a case of wine under our arm.  The third we will be not returning to and along with many others we have added to the complaints on their social media pages.

It came down to one simple thing… leadership.  It was extremely clear when these businesses had invested in providing everyone on the restaurant floor with the knowledge, skills and support to do the job and evident to all when it was lacking.  Imagine for a minute if your business was a restaurant, what would your clients be saying as they pay their bill and leave?

Food for thought.

^DB