The Source of Service - Part 3: Climate

At one hotel I worked at, we would all arrive fifteen or twenty minutes ahead of morning prayers — the daily 8:30 am management meeting. Seating was first-come, first-served, and everyone wanted to sit as far away as possible from the GM.

When in a foul mood, he would zero in on someone and attack their competence, their commitment, or their character. If we spoke up in defence of a colleague, the fire was turned on us. So we sat in silence, avoiding eye contact, hoping there would be only one sacrificial victim that day.

That property had the worst climate I’ve experienced. But even in healthier places, before meeting the boss we’d ask “How’s the weather?” Calm? Agitated? Grumpy? If the weather report was bad, we played safe — held back difficult news, avoided seeking approvals, saved ambitious ideas for another day. If the forecast was good, we opened up, challenged more freely, and offered our ideas. We told the truth.

We called it weather, but we were talking about climate.

Climate plays out in a multitude of daily exchanges: how briefings are run, how mistakes are handled, what gets said and what goes unspoken. In the most practical sense, it defines how it feels to be at work. And this cannot be prescribed from above.

Brand standards can define the physical experience, but they cannot reach the state of mind of anyone serving a guest. Corporate edicts cannot determine whether the person servicing the room brings their best self to work, or just goes through the motions. Standards cannot ensure that a guest who lingers at the front desk receives genuine human attention rather than an efficiently completed transaction.

The guest’s felt experience — the one that determines whether they return, recommend, or resolve to stay away — is shaped by the state of the people serving them.

And that state is highly contagious.

Authentic hospitality can’t survive a leader who contaminates the air, or fails to remedy an unhealthy climate in their building.

In any human group, people constantly read and mirror the emotions of the most powerful person in the room. The leader. Psychologists call it emotional contagion.

If the leader is anxious, defensive, or volatile, anxiety ripples across the property. Tensions are transmitted from GM to department heads, from supervisors to line staff, and ultimately, to the guest.

In a healthy climate, people are caring, collaborative, and creative. But the same people can become distracted, distressed, or demoralised. The difference often begins with the state of their leaders.

Effective leaders don’t create great service by demanding higher performance. They create the conditions in which a healthy culture can come to life.

The leader who acts calm while feeling anxious or agitated transmits their feeling, not their performance. People feel what is underneath the surface. A leader who is composed and genuinely interested in their people makes composure contagious.

As Nancy Kline observed, “Leadership is the conscious creation of culture.” Genuine hospitality relies on authentic, self-aware leadership.

If the climate is poor, attrition rises, recruitment costs increase, and enforcing standards becomes a time-consuming substitute for inspiring engagement. Prioritising metrics over the environment that drives them is poor leadership logic. In hospitality, it is a false economy.

Exceptional service environments enable team members to meet their fundamental human needs: safety, acceptance, and meaning. If those needs go unmet, people focus on self-protection — and genuine hospitality becomes impossible to sustain. When their needs are met, people bring more to their work than any standard could ever specify.

The true source of service is leadership. Not leadership as control, pressure, or standards enforcement — but leadership as the creation of conditions in which people feel safe enough, valued enough, and purposeful enough to care deeply about being of service.

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It's not possible to deliver five-star service from a three-star inner state. Trying to do so on an ongoing basis just leads to burnout. A Handbook for Hoteliers was written to help remedy this issue.