HOSPITALITY LEADERSHIP: What 16 Years as a Hotel GM Taught Me

After sixteen years running hotels around the world, I've learned that every great stay begins not in the lobby, but in the hiring room.

I remember the first time I fired someone I should never have hired. It was my second year as a hotel GM: my first solo posting after a decade working my way through front desk, F&B, and rooms division roles across three properties. She was polished, credentialed, and sailed through every interview. On paper, she was exactly what we needed for a department head position.

In practice, within eight weeks, I had three team members threatening to resign and a front-of-house operation quietly falling apart at the seams. I made the call. And then I sat in my office and asked myself: how did I miss this?

That question has driven every hiring, training, and retention decision I have made in the fifteen years since. The hospitality industry presents one of the most complex human management challenges in any professional sector. We operate twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year.

Our product is not a widget; it is an experience, and that experience is only ever as good as the person delivering it. When you get the people right, everything else becomes manageable. When you get the people wrong, no renovation budget, no marketing campaign, and no technology platform will save you.

The Art of Selection

Most hospitality organizations approach hiring from a competency framework: does this candidate have the qualifications, the experience, the technical knowledge? These are necessary filters, but in my experience, they are insufficient ones. What I have come to look for, particularly when filling management roles and positions with guest-facing responsibility, is what I call hospitality instinct.

Hospitality instinct is difficult to define precisely, which is why it tends to get overlooked in favor of measurable credentials.

But I know it when I see it. It is the candidate who, while waiting in reception before their interview, spontaneously holds the door for a delivery person without looking around to check whether anyone noticed. It is the front desk applicant who, when I describe a difficult hypothetical guest scenario, does not immediately reach for procedure but instead asks, first, what the guest might actually be feeling. It is the department head candidate who talks about their team before they talk about their own achievements.

Over the years, I have developed an interview process that deliberately disrupts the rehearsed performance most candidates bring into the room. I ask scenario questions with no right answer, situations where empathy and ingenuity matter more than policy recall. I invite them to tell me about a time they failed a guest. The quality of someone's failure story tells me almost everything about their professional character: whether they understand accountability, whether they reflect honestly, and whether they are the kind of person who learns from difficulty or retreats from it.

For senior management candidates specifically, I have started incorporating what I call a property walk. Midway through the interview, I suggest we take a brief tour of the hotel together. I watch everything. Where do their eyes go? Do they notice the wilting arrangement at the entrance, the trolley left in the corridor, the slight scuff on the wall panel? Do they greet staff they pass, or look through them? You learn more in fifteen minutes of walking a property with a candidate than in forty-five minutes of structured questions. The building is the test.

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