Tag Archives: TED

Leadership

Characteristics Of A Bad Leader

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You’ve been reading posts after posts on how to become a great leader and how to motivate the people around you.  Unfortunately bad leaders are more common than the great ones, and it can be very dangerous to work for people who don’t know what they are doing. It’s not only dangerous for your business, but for more selfish reasons, it can be very dangerous for your own career and kill the passion for what you are doing. While I strongly believe that you can learn from both, the good and the bad boss, you shouldn’t try to find excuses to continue working for the bad one.

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Office Space

Here are some of the characteristics of a bad boss: Continue reading Characteristics Of A Bad Leader →

Development, Leadership

The Greatest Challenge of Any Luxury Hotelier

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The greatest challenge of any luxury hotelier is without any doubt change. Not change itself, but the hesitation to let go of the status quo and the past, and to embrace the future… to embrace the future and with that to stay relevant.

At every single luxury hotel I worked so far, employees would always tell me about the golden past, how everything was better years ago and how things are going down nowadays. They would tell me about the sumptuous flower bouquets in every guest room, the abundance of luxury amenities, and how money didn’t matter. How our guests would all be dressed in the finest suits and dresses, and how glamorous and ostentatious everything was. With the words of Bob Dylan the times they are a changin’… you cannot stop change.

Our guests don’t define luxury in material goods like flowers and amenities anymore, they define it by experiencing and collecting enriching experiences. They define luxury with service that goes beyond.

My wife and I visited the W Koh Samui on our vacation to Thailand at the beginning of the year, and while the hotel was fantastic, it’s not the breathtaking view, nor our amazingly beautiful villa with the private pool, and the fine dining restaurant we keep talking about, it’s the service that stayed in our memories long after our departure. Unfortunately my wife got food poisoning from the food at the airport and got sick as soon as we arrived at the property. In the evening while we we’re trying to eat a little at the restaurant and hoping for her to get better, the waiter noticed that she didn’t feel well and offered assistance.

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W Retreat Koh Samui

While he wasn’t able to help himself, he right away got the director of rooms, who arranged the hotel limousine for us and asked one of his employees to escort us to the hospital to stay with us until we would return to the property later that night. Once my wife got better and we came back to the hotel, they arranged some porridge in our villa with a note for her to get better soon. We felt that the hotel truly cared about us, and that we built a connection with the people working there. Continue reading The Greatest Challenge of Any Luxury Hotelier →

Leadership

Can You Learn Leadership?

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I always used to believe that if one person can to do something, anyone should be able to learn it provided the proper training and guidance. I used to believe that anyone can evolve from being a micro-manager to becoming a great leader.

I now believe that while you can learn certain leadership techniques and skills and evolve to become average at leading other people, you’ll never be able to make a true difference and change things.

Why? Because I believe that the core values of leaders have a passion for what they are doing, a desire to grow other people and a vision that people want to fallow… and these values cannot be learned by choice, they are embedded in your character. Simon Sinek explains on TED how great leaders challenge the status quo and think different (click image below to get to his blog).

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True leaders must have:

  • A passion for your product or service. If you’re not truly passionate about what you are doing, you’ll never be able to overcome all the challenges along the way, move mountain like obstacles and remain focused, even when everyone else around has already given up.
  • A desire to help others. People want to work for people who support them and have their interested at heart… no one wants to work for a boss who has only his next promotion in mind. People always work for people, not companies, and will go above and beyond if they believe in the person they’re working for. If they don’t trust their leaders, the simplest task will be impossible to accomplish.
  • A vision. We all want to believe in something, believe that we are part of something great, bigger than us, and that our efforts can make a difference. We want to give meaning to what we do.

Check out Simon Sinek’s take on why leaders must have a vision on TED

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