Tag Archive for: Leadership

Introduction – Becoming My Own Project

Introduction – Becoming My Own Project

This series of articles was never part of a plan.
For most of my professional life, I have been asked to analyse businesses, hotels, projects, organisations, and occasionally the people leading them.
I would arrive in an unfamiliar place, ask questions, review reports, challenge assumptions, search for root causes, identify risks, and try to understand why things were performing as they were.

Over time, I developed a certain methodology:

  • Observe
  • Listen
  • Dive deep into the business
  • Challenge assumptions by asking hard questions
  • Follow the evidence
  • Look for patterns
  • Distinguish symptoms from causes

And eventually ask a simple question: What is really happening here?

For the last 15 years, I applied this approach to others. 
First as an independent adviser, then with a team of fellow specialists carefully assembled over many years, and eventually, in parallel, as a sector coordinator for a development bank.
My work brought me into contact with entrepreneurs, family businesses, investors, institutions, and banks across a wide variety of countries, cultures, and business environments.
Looking back, I believe I have helped many small and medium-sized businesses grow, adapt, or recover.
It is a heartwarming feeling to have done something meaningful.

The framework with the development bank was retired for all participating advisers, bringing my own involvement to a close after eight years of uninterrupted service.
Assignments ended. Roles changed. Professional priorities shifted.
After more than twenty-five years in hospitality and advisory work, I found myself entering a period of transition.
For the first time in a very long time, I had the opportunity to stop and reflect.
Frankly, the timing was probably good, if not overdue.

For years I had spent too much of my time away from home, moving between assignments, hotels, airport lounges, and meetings.
Suddenly, I had time for family, long walks with the dog, and, for once, plenty of time for myself.

Initially, the objective was practical. I wanted to improve my professional positioning.
Like many professionals approaching a new phase of their career, I was reviewing old projects and thinking about what I wanted to do next.
But the exercise gradually evolved into something else.
Instead of asking where I had worked, I started asking what I had learned.
Instead of reviewing achievements, I started reviewing experiences.
Instead of analysing businesses, I became the subject of my own analysis.

The process was not entirely comfortable.
For the first time, I became the subject of my own hard questions.
Looking backward rarely is. Some memories involved success.
Others involved mistakes, disappointments, failures, conflicts, poor judgement, misplaced trust, and lessons learned the hard way.

Titles changed. Projects came and went. Countries changed.
Yet something else happened.
As I reconnected with people from different periods of my life, some conversations resumed as if no time had passed at all.
Others never happened. Some doors remained open. Others had quietly closed. A few I chose to close myself.

The lessons remained.

The articles in this book are not intended as management theory written from an academic distance.
Nor are they intended as a memoir.
Rather, they are an honest reflection on experiences that shaped how I think, how I lead, and how I understand the world today.
They are also a reflection of what I have come to believe matters most.

Some lessons came from hospitality itself. Others came from remarkable people.
Some emerged from advisory work.
And some came from life outside hospitality altogether.

Together, they tell a story that took me many years to understand. 
Not the story of a career. The story of the person behind it.

Looking back, I realise that hospitality taught me much more than how to run hotels.

It taught me curiosity, and…

  • Perseverance
  • Respect
  • Calmness
  • Leadership
  • Responsibility
  • Trust

… and eventually, humility.

Whether these lessons will resonate with others, I do not know.
But they have helped me understand myself.

Before deciding where I wanted to go next, I first needed to understand how I had arrived here.
And perhaps that is reason enough to write them down.

And by doing so, perhaps I will discover what else there is to learn.

About the Author

Raoul Gransier is a Senior International Adviser and owner-focused hotelier with more than 25 years of operational and advisory experience in hospitality, tourism, governance, and performance improvement.

Website

https://gransier.com

/by

The People Who Taught Me

The People Who Taught Me

When people speak about mentors, they usually describe a senior figure who intentionally guided their development.
My experience was different. Most of my teachers never applied for the role.

Some never realised they were teaching me at all.

  • An Executive Chef taught me humility
  • A Stewarding Manager taught me respect
  • A General Manager taught me authenticity
  • An HR Director taught me that people and performance are not enemies
  • A COO taught me pace
  • A CEO taught me to first set direction
  • A peer taught me the difference between competence and trust
  • Others taught lessons they never intended to teach

Some through generosity. Some through discipline. Some through conflict. Some through disappointment.
Many through example. A few through warning.
What connects them is not whether I agreed with them.
What connects them is that something survived the encounter.
A lesson. An idea. A perspective. A question.

The more mature I become, the less interested I am in judging people as successes or failures.
Most people are both. Most people possess strengths and weaknesses. Most people are struggling with challenges invisible to everyone else.
The same is true of organisations. And certainly, true of myself.

Looking back, I realise my career was shaped less by formal education than by observation.
Watching people. Learning from people. Admiring people. Occasionally arguing with people.
And sometimes discovering wisdom in places I did not expect to find it.

The people who taught me rarely resembled the teachers I imagined I needed.
Perhaps that is why their lessons endured.

Reflection

This article is about gratitude.

This is the sixteenth of a series of articles – “What hospitality taught me about myself” – in which I share lessons learned throughout my professional and personal journey, and how those experiences have shaped my thinking and led me to develop my own principles.

The most valuable teachers are not always the most impressive.
Often, they are simply the people who leave us unable to think exactly as we did before we met them.

I carry many such people with me. Not their titles. Not their positions.
Not their achievements. But, their lessons.
And in the end, that may be the only part of any of us that truly survives.

About the Author

Raoul Gransier is a Senior International Adviser and owner-focused hotelier with more than 25 years of operational and advisory experience in hospitality, tourism, governance, and performance improvement.

Website

https://gransier.com

/by

The Professional I Could No Longer Trust

The Professional I Could No Longer Trust

Not every lesson arrives through success and admiration.
Some arrive through disappointment, hurt, and betrayal.

One of the most capable professionals I encountered during my career taught me exactly that.
Her expertise was genuine. She opened the door to my early career in advisory work. I learned from her. Significantly. We collaborated, exchanged ideas, developed opportunities, and worked together over many years.

At least that was how I understood the relationship.

Over time, circumstances changed. A client relationship moved elsewhere.
People I had worked with were pursued under false pretenses to join her for a very promising opportunity.
Looking back, I no longer view the events as a misunderstanding or a difference in perception.
The consequences were significant, both professionally and personally.
What had taken years to build—relationships, concepts, and frameworks—disappeared remarkably quickly.

The commercial, contractual, and legal consequences were not the most important part of the story.
The real lesson was different. The experience forced me to confront a possibility I had previously preferred not to consider.
Professional competence and personal trustworthiness are not the same thing.

For a long time I struggled with that conclusion.
Not because I did not understand what had happened.
Rather because I found it difficult to reconcile the contradiction.
How could somebody demonstrate such professionalism in one area and such poor judgement in another?

Years passed.

I struggled. I adapted. I rebuilt.
I developed new capabilities and new business lines.
I strengthened structures that reduced dependency on individuals and created greater resilience.
In many ways, this experience reinforced a theme that would later become central to my professional thinking: governance.

For me, governance is not bureaucracy.
Governance is the operating system of decision-making.
It creates clarity around decision rights, accountability, expectations, information flows, and risk.
Proper governance does not eliminate human error or poor judgement.
It does, however, reduce ambiguity and make organisations less vulnerable when trust is tested.

One principle gradually emerged from this experience.
Revenue should not be chased directly.
Trust should be built. Revenue is often the consequence.

Over time, my frustration diminished.
My conclusion remained.
The professional relationship ended because trust had been broken.
Some things can be repaired. Others cannot.

Yet something interesting happened.
My respect for her professional capability survived.
I continued to recognise her expertise.
I continued to acknowledge the contribution she made to my own development.
The relationship ended. The lessons remained.

That distinction took years to understand.
It would be easy to reduce the story to heroes and villains.
Reality is rarely that simple. Neither are people, nor me.

Looking back, I learned two lessons:

  • One about commercial thinking
  • One about character

Both were valuable. Only one survived the relationship.

Reflection

This article is about discernment: the ability to recognise that competence and trustworthiness are not the same thing.
Competence creates confidence. Trust creates relationships. The difference matters.

This is the fifteenth of a series of articles – “What hospitality taught me about myself” – in which I share lessons learned throughout my professional and personal journey, and how those experiences have shaped my thinking and led me to develop my own principles.

When I was younger, I believed competence naturally created trust. Experience taught me otherwise. Competence creates confidence.

Trust creates relationships. The two often appear together. Occasionally they do not.
The difference matters.

Some of the most successful people I have encountered were not necessarily the most trustworthy. Some of the most trustworthy were not necessarily the most successful.
The rare individuals possess both. Those are the people worth keeping close.

About the Author

Raoul Gransier is a Senior International Adviser and owner-focused hotelier with more than 25 years of operational and advisory experience in hospitality, tourism, governance, and performance improvement.

Website

https://gransier.com

/by

Trust is the Final KPI

Trust is the Final KPI

For many years, I believed that successful projects could be recognised quite easily.

Revenue increased. Profit improved. Market share grew. Guest satisfaction rose. Budgets were achieved. Property value improved. Debt service secured. Investment plan on schedule.

The numbers told the story. At least that is what I thought.

Then I started noticing something.

When I looked back on the projects that remained most meaningful in my memory, I rarely remembered the final spreadsheet.
I remembered the people.

A conversation years later. An unexpected phone call. A recommendation. A friendship.
A door that remained open long after the assignment itself had ended.
Or occasionally, a door that closed forever.

That observation forced me to reconsider what success actually meant.

One organisation in particular taught me this lesson.
The engagement lasted several years. The discussions were often challenging. The expectations were not always aligned.
At times I pushed harder than the organisation wished to move.
At other times the organisation moved more slowly than I wished to accept.

There were disagreements.
There were difficult conversations.
There were moments when it would have been easier for both sides simply to stop talking.

Yet something survived.
Trust.

Years after the project ended, the relationships remained. The conversations remained. The respect remained.
Even some of the disagreements remained.
What disappeared was the need to be right.
What remained was confidence in each other’s intentions.
That fascinated me.

The project itself had eventually stopped.
The relationship had not.

And that forced me to ask a question. What exactly had been created?
Certainly not a report. Certainly not a spreadsheet. Certainly not a KPI.
The answer, I believe, was trust.
Not blind trust. Not emotional trust. Professional trust.

The confidence that somebody will tell you the truth even when it is uncomfortable.
Also when it’s myself on the receiving end.
The confidence that disagreement does not imply disloyalty.
The confidence that criticism serves improvement rather than politics.
The confidence that intentions remain aligned even when opinions differ.

Looking back, I increasingly believe trust is one of the most misunderstood assets in business.
Everyone talks about it.
Few measure it.
Yet organisations built upon trust can survive extraordinary pressure.
Organisations without trust often struggle even under favourable conditions.

The same applies to partnerships. Teams. Families. Perhaps even countries.
Trust rarely appears on a balance sheet.
Yet its absence eventually appears everywhere else.

Reflection

This article is about trust.

Not the trust that exists when everything goes well, but the trust that survives disagreement.
The more mature I become, the more suspicious I become of success that destroys trust.
The immediate outcome may appear attractive, but the long-term cost is often invisible until it arrives.

Agreement proves little. Trust reveals itself when people remain connected despite conflict.

For many years I searched for better metrics. Today I sometimes wonder whether trust was the metric all along.

About the Author

Raoul Gransier is a Senior International Adviser and owner-focused hotelier with more than 25 years of operational and advisory experience in hospitality, tourism, governance, and performance improvement.

Website

https://gransier.com

/by

The COO Who Managed Pace

The COO Who Managed Pace

If the CEO represented ambition, the COO represented management.
That combination proved both powerful and instructive.

The COO was exceptionally intelligent. Capable. Curious.
And perhaps most importantly, humble enough to learn.
Over the years, he absorbed an extraordinary amount of knowledge.
Operations. Finance. Performance management. Governance. Strategy. Commercial thinking. Organisational design.
He learned continuously. Not because anybody forced him to. Because he wanted to understand.

As the organisation matured, he became increasingly capable of connecting the dots.
He understood why certain decisions mattered. He understood why assumptions mattered. He understood why expectations mattered.
He could see the chain.

Yet he responded differently from me.
That difference would teach me an important lesson.
When the organisation began asking larger questions, my instinct was to follow the logic and accelerate.
The answers were needed. The decisions mattered. The opportunity existed. Why wait?

The COO saw the same reality. Yet he reached a different conclusion.
The organisation could only move as fast as it could absorb change.
The business could only move as fast as its culture could absorb change.
His instinct was not to accelerate. His instinct was to regulate. To create time. To allow understanding to develop. To allow acceptance to develop.
To allow people to move together. He was not opposed to change. He was protecting its sustainability.
Organisations do not change when a conclusion is reached. They change when enough people are ready to accept it.

As discussions progressed, both the CEO and the COO chose a more measured pace.
Despite the slower pace, the organisation continued learning.
The culture continued evolving. The curiosity survived. The momentum remained.
Perhaps the pace was not a weakness. Perhaps it was a bridge.

Looking back, I have come to appreciate that a mandate is not implemented in a vacuum.
It must adapt to the reality of the organisation it serves.

Reflection

This article is about how patience taught me that sustainable change happens at a pace people can absorb.

This is the thirteenth of a series of articles – “What hospitality taught me about myself” – in which I share lessons learned throughout my professional and personal journey, and how those experiences have shaped my thinking and led me to develop my own principles.

Throughout my career, I have often been drawn toward the logic of an argument.
Follow the chain. Understand the consequences. Reach the conclusion. The logic remains important.

But organisations are not spreadsheets. People require time. Cultures require time. Trust requires time.

The more mature I become, the more I appreciate that sustainable change is rarely determined by the quality of the conclusion alone. It is also determined by the organisation’s ability to absorb it.

The COO taught me that progress is not measured solely by speed. Sometimes progress is measured by what survives the journey.

About the Author

Raoul Gransier is a Senior International Adviser and owner-focused hotelier with more than 25 years of operational and advisory experience in hospitality, tourism, governance, and performance improvement.

Website

https://gransier.com

/by

The CEO Who Initiated a Dialogue Rather than an Instruction

The CEO Who Initiated a Dialogue Rather than an Instruction

The organisation had asked for performance management. At least that is what everyone believed.
The mandate sounded straightforward.
Improve performance. Increase profitability. Strengthen accountability. Introduce structure. Measure outcomes.
The objectives were sensible. The implementation began.

Managers learned. Reports improved. Discussions became more disciplined.
Departments became increasingly aligned. People started asking better questions.
At first, the questions were operational. Then commercial. Then strategic.

Then something unexpected happened. The questions started travelling upwards.
Department Heads wanted clarity. The General Managers wanted clarity. The senior leadership team wanted clarity. Eventually, the same questions began appearing repeatedly.
What are our objectives? What assumptions are they based upon? What are we trying to become? What are we optimising for?

The questions were not rebellious. They were logical. The organisation was learning.
And learning organisations tend to become curious.

When budgeting time arrived, the CEO was asking the organisation to improve profitability.
A reasonable request in any organisation.

The response from the management team was equally reasonable:

  • What is our Highest and Best Use?
  • What market positioning are we pursuing?
  • Which customer are we targeting?
  • What brand strategy supports that choice?
  • How much capital are we prepared to invest?
  • When will that investment occur?
  • What return are we expecting?
  • What organisational structure is required to deliver it?

The fascinating part was that nobody had instructed the organisation to ask these questions. The organisation had taught itself.
Performance management had created curiosity.
And curiosity has a remarkable quality. Once it takes hold, it becomes difficult to reverse.

There was no hostility in these questions. No resistance. No politics.
Simply a request for clarity in order to plan and execute effectively.

What followed was a growing realisation that important assumptions about who the organisation was, where it wanted to go, and what it ultimately wanted to become had never been fully articulated.
Eventually, the discussion returned to management itself: Tell us what you believe we can achieve. Tell us what you need to achieve it.
What had started as a project about measurement gradually became a conversation about direction.

Looking back, I believe this was the real success of the project.
Not the reports. Not the systems. Not the numbers.
The organisation had learned how to think and had begun discovering what it was and what it wanted to achieve.

Reflection

This article is about how curiosity transforms performance management into organisational learning.

This is the twelfth of a series of articles – “What hospitality taught me about myself” – in which I share lessons learned throughout my professional and personal journey, and how those experiences have shaped my thinking and led me to develop my own principles.

Many people believe performance management is about measurement.
I have gradually come to a different conclusion.
Performance management is fundamentally about setting expectations.
Measurement simply reveals whether those expectations have been achieved.

The difficult part is rarely the measurement.
The difficult part is defining the expectations first.
Governance begins with that clarity, because expectations define decision rights, accountability, information flows, and ultimately the basis upon which performance can be assessed.
And not merely the financial expectations.

Once people understand how a business works, they naturally begin asking why it works the way it does.
What started as a discussion about performance eventually became a discussion about purpose, positioning, capital, structure, and strategy.

Looking back, that was the real achievement.
The organisation had not merely learned how to measure performance.
It had learned how to think.

About the Author

Raoul Gransier is a Senior International Adviser and owner-focused hotelier with more than 25 years of operational and advisory experience in hospitality, tourism, governance, and performance improvement.

Website

https://gransier.com

/by

International Financial Institutions (IFIs)

International Financial Institutions (IFIs)

Years later, I entered institutional advisory work.
It was a very different world from hotel operations.

Instead of guests, employees, and owners, I found myself working with:

  • Banks
  • Donors
  • Development programmes
  • Procurement frameworks
  • Governance structures
  • International advisory assignments

The objective was simple: Help businesses grow. Create jobs. Strengthen local economies.
Use public and donor funding responsibly.
Much of the work was rewarding. Some of it was frustrating.

What surprised me was how similar the underlying challenges were to those I had encountered in hotels.

  • People remained people
  • Ambition remained ambition
  • Fear remained fear
  • And trust remained fragile

The larger the system, the easier it became for reality and representation to drift apart.

  • Reports could look better than facts
  • Processes could look stronger than implementation
  • Compliance could exist on paper while problems continued underneath
  • Whenever reality and representation diverged, difficulties eventually emerged

The larger the gap, the larger the consequence.

Over time, I realised that governance is often misunderstood.
Many people see governance as bureaucracy.
I came to see it differently. Governance is simply the process of managing expectations.
Who is responsible? Who decides? Who is accountable? Who knows what? What happens when things go wrong?

Without clear answers, trust slowly erodes.
That observation reinforced something I had learned many years earlier in hotel operations.
Integrity is not a slogan. It is alignment between what is said and what is done.

I achieved many positive things through international development programmes and remain grateful for the opportunity to contribute to the growth of many small and medium-sized businesses.
The work convinced me that IFI institutions remain necessary where markets, public administration, or political systems alone cannot adequately support economic development.

But it also taught me that no institution, process, or governance framework can substitute for personal integrity.
In the end, every system still depends on people choosing to do the right thing when nobody is watching.

Thank you for reading my article.

This article is about how institutional work taught me that trust is built when reality and representation remain aligned.

This is the ninth of a series of articles – “What hospitality taught me about myself” – in which I share lessons learned throughout my professional and personal journey, and how those experiences have shaped my thinking and led me to develop my own principles.

I hope it has provided some food for thought, encouraged curiosity, and inspired you to keep learning.

Curiosity, humility, and continuous learning remain among the most valuable tools we possess.

About the Author

Raoul Gransier is a Senior International Adviser and owner-focused hotelier with more than 25 years of operational and advisory experience in hospitality, tourism, governance, and performance improvement.

Website

https://gransier.com

/by

The Credit Policy

The Credit Policy

Another country. Another hotel. Another culture.
In that particular environment, petty theft and corruption at scale were part of daily life.
At the time, people would sometimes say: “If you don’t steal from your company, you steal from your family.”

I spent much of my time firefighting.
Cash disappeared. Controls were weak. Responsibilities were unclear. Departments blamed one another.
There was confusion everywhere.

What fascinated me was not the theft itself.
It was how easily accountability disappeared once money started moving between departments.

I decided to approach the problem differently.
Not by punishing theft.
But by preventing it.

I did so by first following the flow:

  • How cash entered the business
  • Who touched it
  • How accountability was transferred
  • Where controls broke down

Slowly, patterns started to emerge.
Over many months, I developed a credit policy and control framework.
Not because I enjoyed writing procedures. But because I wanted accountability to become visible.

Years later, I visited another hotel.
The Front Office Manager, who I had trained while working in another hotel, welcomed me warmly.
Proudly, he showed me what he described as the best cash-control manual he had ever encountered.
He had discovered it in a previous hotel. Not one where I had worked.

The document had travelled.
People had copied it. Adapted it. Used it. Across multiple organisations.
My initials were still visible on the cover page.

The lesson was not about authorship. The lesson was about systems.
Good systems survive the people who create them. The best systems become part of the organisation itself.
Long after their creators have moved on.

Thank you for reading my article.

This article is about how systems taught me that sustainable improvement is measured by what remains after you leave.

This is the eighth of a series of articles – “What hospitality taught me about myself” – in which I share lessons learned throughout my professional and personal journey, and how those experiences have shaped my thinking and led me to develop my own principles.

I hope it has provided some food for thought, encouraged curiosity, and inspired you to keep learning.

Curiosity, humility, and continuous learning remain among the most valuable tools we possess.

About the Author

Raoul Gransier is a Senior International Adviser and owner-focused hotelier with more than 25 years of operational and advisory experience in hospitality, tourism, governance, and performance improvement.

Website

https://gransier.com

/by

The Flooded Hotel

The Flooded Hotel

Another country. Another hotel. Another lesson.
I was Night Manager of a high-profile hotel frequented by celebrities, heads of state, and captains of industry.

A Sales Manager had approved the use of fireworks in a ballroom.
The sprinkler system activated. The hotel began to flood. Nobody knew how to stop it.
No one on the hotel team knew how. Nor me.

Water poured from the building’s entrance onto the street and down into the basements.
The situation deteriorated rapidly, and the basement where the kitchens and stores were located was beginning to flood.
Cooks started building dikes out of towels, aprons, and bed sheets to contain the water.

The fire brigade eventually arrived.
They located the switch. The water stopped.
But the crisis was far from over. Night cleaning teams from across the city were mobilised.
The clean-up continued into the early morning, with me sweeping the floors.

The hotel survived.

Looking back, the event taught me something important.
Systems matter. Training matters. Preparation matters.
But reality has a habit of introducing situations nobody anticipated.

No manual had prepared us for that night.
No training session had covered it.
No procedure explained what to do next.

Leadership often begins where procedures end.
One thing I have learned about myself is that I do not need to know everything before acting.
Sometimes leadership is not about having answers. It is about helping people keep moving until answers appear.

When I eventually arrived home, mentally and physically exhausted, I switched on the television to watch a movie on a 24/7 cable channel.
The irony could not have been greater.
The running film was “Towering Inferno”.
A classic disaster movie involving exactly the kind of problem I had just spent the night dealing with.

For the first time after battling my way through the night and into the morning, I laughed.

Thank you for reading my article.

This article is about how uncertainty taught me leadership.

This is the sixth of a series of articles – “What hospitality taught me about myself” – in which I share lessons learned throughout my professional and personal journey, and how those experiences have shaped my thinking and led me to develop my own principles.

I hope it has provided some food for thought, encouraged curiosity, and inspired you to keep learning.

Curiosity, humility, and continuous learning remain among the most valuable tools we possess.

About the Author

Raoul Gransier is a Senior International Adviser and owner-focused hotelier with more than 25 years of operational and advisory experience in hospitality, tourism, governance, and performance improvement.

Website

https://gransier.com

/by

The Overbooked Hotel

The Overbooked Hotel

I had built an early career in hotels where discretion was valued above publicity and where guests occasionally reminded you that the world was larger than the building itself.

Being young and, arguably, naively stupid, I became increasingly fascinated by a completely different side of hospitality: scale.
Large groups, airports, convention hotels, and the logistics behind them fascinated me.
I wanted to know how it worked.

The saying is “be careful what you wish for,” and this story somewhat demonstrates that I landed the jackpot.

I joined one of the largest hotels in town as its front desk manager.
Shortly after being hired, I found myself managing a situation in which the hotel had somehow sold every room twice, an issue that remained unresolved until the day of arrival.
The problem did not start that day. It had been created weeks earlier.
An ambitious sales team, accustomed to significant wash-down and operating in an unstable market, had taken a gamble. This time, the gamble failed.

The hotel had 400 rooms. More than 800 guests arrived. Simultaneously.
The front office team froze in horror.
Management panicked. Guests demanded answers.
Panic was not going to solve the problem. Reality would.
One thing I have learned about myself over the years is that the more panic there is around me, the calmer and quieter I get.

I am not a particularly extroverted person.
Nor would most people identify me as the loudest person in the room.
I may not have caused the problem. Yet when a crisis emerges, I have a tendency to quietly assume ownership.
Not because of a title. Because somebody has to.

Over the years, I have learned that responsibility and accountability are not always the same thing.
Sometimes the person who solves the problem is not the person who created it.
But the guests do not care whose fault it is.
They simply need somebody to take charge.

The bookings were for single occupancy. The rooms were doubles.
So we started with the facts. I spoke openly with the group leaders. I explained the situation honestly. No excuses. No attempts to hide the problem.
In exchange for compensation, many agreed to share rooms.
Additional reception teams searched the city for available accommodation.

Guests who preferred not to accept the proposed solution were relocated.
Hotel-chartered buses transported guests where necessary.

Slowly, the pressure began to ease. The problem was solved. What remained was another lesson.
Clarity becomes most valuable when everyone else loses theirs.
People often believe leadership is about having the right answers.
In my experience, leadership during a crisis is often about accepting reality quickly, staying calm, and helping others focus on solutions rather than emotions.

To understand the situation, it is important to realise the context.

This was Prague in the years following the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The city was changing at extraordinary speed. Tourism was booming, international investment was arriving, and demand often seemed limitless.
It felt at times as if an entirely new hospitality market was being invented in real time.

New hotels were opening, reservation systems were far less sophisticated than today, and market demand often exceeded available supply.
Occupancy levels that would be considered exceptional today were normal.

Our 400-key hotel operated at approximately 92% annual occupancy.
In such an environment, substantial overbookings on the day of arrival were not unusual.

It was a commercial risk many hotels accepted, based on historical cancellation patterns and expected no-shows.

Most of the time the calculations worked.
Occasionally they did not.

What struck me afterwards was how quickly established procedures became irrelevant.
The reservation system could not solve the problem. The manuals could not solve the problem. Escalating the issue could not solve the problem.
Only people could solve the problem.
The solution emerged through judgement, communication, improvisation, and a willingness to accept responsibility for difficult decisions.
It reminded me that systems and processes are valuable, but they are tools.
Their purpose is to support decision-making, not replace it.
Perhaps that is why I remain cautious whenever a process becomes more important than the judgement it was designed to support.

For me, however, the lasting lesson was different.
Crisis does not create character. Crisis reveals it.
And sometimes it reveals qualities in ourselves that we did not know were there.

Thank you for reading my article.

This article is about how crisis taught me calmness.

This is the fifth of a series of articles – “What hospitality taught me about myself” – in which I share lessons learned throughout my professional and personal journey, and how those experiences have shaped my thinking and led me to develop my own principles.

I hope it has provided some food for thought, encouraged curiosity, and inspired you to keep learning.

Curiosity, humility, and continuous learning remain among the most valuable tools we possess.

About the Author

Raoul Gransier is a Senior International Adviser and owner-focused hotelier with more than 25 years of operational and advisory experience in hospitality, tourism, governance, and performance improvement.

Website

https://gransier.com

/by

Confidential Discussion

A short, structured exchange will quickly determine relevance.

Schedule a Confidential Discussion

This website is hosted in Austria (European Union) by A1 Telekom Austria Group

©2024 Webdesign from Vienna by Ameisenhaufen.at