The Confidence Advantage: When People Perform, Guests Feel It

From my experience leading spa and wellness teams, confidence grows when team members understand what is expected, receive the right training and tools, and know their leaders will support thoughtful decisions.

In hospitality, employees must often respond in the moment. When they feel trusted and empowered, they take ownership, solve problems and create more personalized experiences. Guests immediately feel that confidence in how they are welcomed and cared for.

Strong operators provide clear expectations, communicate consistently, recognize good work and listen to the employees closest to the guest. They combine accountability with coaching and give people the authority to make decisions within established standards.

Confidence is quietly eroded when leaders change expectations without explanation, correct employees publicly, communicate inconsistently or fail to address poor performance fairly. Asking employees to take responsibility without giving them decision-making authority also damages trust.

I have learned that empowerment and standards are not opposites. Clear standards give employees the foundation to act confidently. When people feel prepared, valued and supported, they perform at a higher level—and the guest feels the difference.

A phrase I use to govern any project and life in general is: "Show me the incentive, I'll show you the incentive."

The simple fact that we have KPIs often means we try to optimize for those KPIs as a proxy for the guest experience, but it ends up being a facsimile. Performance follows the KPIs, so change the goal and the data contributing it then you change how the team performs.

I still remember working with a luxury resort in California some 17-18 years ago where we had to practically invent TRevPAR in order to align the incentive / bonus structures amongst the disparate ancillary departments of dining, spa and golf in order to produce better packages / cross-selling / offseason marketing.

For real hospitality, the experience has yet to be properly tabulated into a simple KPI, albeit I'm working on some projects to get ever better in this regard using AI to calculate vast data sets in order to help teams perform better by liberating time and giving better incentives for more emotional hospitality.

This all said, to get better performance, start with what you are measuring and what you value.

Sustainable hospitality excellence begins at the top. Leaders must align around a clear mission and values and visibly walk the talk. Culture is not what appears on a wall; it is what colleagues experience through inclusion, recognition, support, communication and accountability.

Empower people to make decisions in the interest of guests and colleagues within sensible guardrails, and recognize the small wins. Issues arise, look first at the cause rather than automatically blaming the colleague. Did we train and resource properly? Were standards and expectations clear? Remedying the cause reduces repeated mistakes. Own the issue through resolution, follow up and learn from it.

Leaders must be present throughout the operation. A “Walk in Your Shoes” day—working alongside housekeepers, stewards, front-desk agents or kitchen teams—builds humility and reinforces that excellence takes the entire village.

Embrace AI to create efficiencies and strengthen service, but never allow technology to replace genuine human interaction. Hospitality means listening, anticipating needs and ensuring every guest feels seen and heard. Small, unexpected touches create memories and long-term relationships.

Perhaps brands need a “Chief Love Officer” to keep intuitive care, joy and humanity alive. Becoming #1 is difficult; remaining there is harder. Sustainable excellence requires everyone to live the culture consistently, every day.

Leaders think their job is to motivate their employees. But actually, our employees show up to work highly motivated on day one. Unfortunately, it is often the leaders' actions that chip away at that motivation over time.

"Self Determination Theory" is a well-known body of research on human motivation that has found three basic needs that humans have to develop their own intrinsic motivation:

1. Competence: to feel like they are able to use their talents and skills and that they will be capable of achieving desired outcomes.

2. Relatedness: to feel a sense of belonging--that they relate well to and are cared for by others.

3. Autonomy: to feel that the actions they take are of their own choosing and not imposed on them by others.

When leaders don't create an environment that supports these needs, they stifle colleagues' natural motivation. When leaders build a culture that allows these needs to be met, they allow for peoples' natural intrinsic motivation to come forward, and people will do their best work.

I've been blessed to work on terrifically compatible teams where leaders led with inspiration, motivation, and respect. Confidence and joy permeated, and people were comfortable thinking outside the box because they knew someone had their back. People were valued, not used, or blamed.

I've also worked on teams where leadership style leaned controlling rather than collaborative, opaque rather than communicative, cryptic rather than transparent. That is not healthy.

The strongest teams are the ones where people feel safe enough to speak up and know it won't cost them their seat at the table... where they're encouraged to think differently and take risks, because that's where real confidence comes from. And frankly, where other team members inspire and coach, motivate and support, so camaraderie is integrated, not just top-down. Guests feel it.

I experienced this firsthand recently at the Hotel Agnes in Prague. The joy between associates was so evident, I assumed it was family-run. It wasn't, but they called themselves family, and it showed. That energy transferred straight to guests, myself included. I left feeling fantastic, and I've been recommending the hotel ever since. This team performed, and I felt it.

Having spent many years working across a variety of environments, cultures and teams, I've learned that confidence nearly always starts with leadership.

There's a lot of truth in the saying that people work for people, not organisations. The best leaders I've worked with were visible, authentic and led from the front. Teams tend to follow what leaders do rather than what they say, and trust is built through consistent actions, not job titles.

Empowerment is another word we hear a lot, but it's not always easy to get right. In my experience, people build confidence when they're trusted to make decisions and given the space to learn when things don't go perfectly. Most mistakes become valuable lessons, and I've found people rarely make the same mistake twice.

One of the biggest challenges to confidence is inconsistency. I've worked in environments where priorities changed frequently, sometimes contradicting the previous direction. It creates uncertainty, affects morale and can leave teams reluctant to make decisions.

For me, the strongest teams are built on trust, consistency and the belief that someone has your back. When people feel confident and supported, guests and customers can sense it. It comes through in every interaction and every experience they deliver.

I think this is an important topic to discuss. Early in my career, I was fortunate to be part of a team that felt like a family. Our leader trusted us, gave us freedom, and had our backs. We worked hard, but there was also laughter, friendship, and a genuine sense of connection. Twenty years later, we’re still friends, and he has become an advisor and mentor in the work I do today.

I think a big part of creating that environment was knowing the team. We all worked differently. Some needed more structure, while others thrived with autonomy. Some were best in the morning, while others came alive later in the day. Our leader made a genuine effort to understand those differences and support us accordingly.

I’ve also experienced a workplace where we received complimentary weekly massages, meditation, and yoga after working hours and during breaks, and where natural light, greenery, and comfortable spaces were part of everyday life. I felt the positive impact of being in an environment that supported our wellbeing.

For me, the most meaningful and supportive environments were built on community rather than hierarchy, mutual respect, appreciation, and genuine care for the team’s wellbeing.

Performance can be identified, mapped and measured in many ways. Many are quantitative, e.g. upsell, others are quantitative, e.g. improvement of guest's wellbeing. Organizations set KPIs to measure the quantitative indicators. Others argue that the KPI-based approach itself is outdated and suggest e.g. the system of OKRs (Objectives & Key Results). Either way, performance depends on the understanding, attitude and drive of the person. Many of these attributes that can be improved or changed (e.g. understading), and others (e.g. drive) that may not so much. In hospitality, wellness and spa the personal touch is still key. So is the intrinsic drive of the employee. Standardised incientivisation approaches may not be effective all across. Personal characteristics play critical role here. So are the communication, target setting and result monitoring approaches applied. Should the organization miss hierarchical congruence either in setting targets or in monitoring performances all parties will loose. Colleagues must have a clear understanding of how performance and results are measured and how much they may have direct impact on that. Every C-suite member (and their departments) has their own role in ensuring the above.

The research I've read shows that the most important metric for employee happiness and retention is their relationship with their immediate supervisor. As job satisfaction and loyalty are directly tied to performance, this relationship is key. Often, though the top leaders get management training but the middle level execs don't, often just learning on the job. Focusing on training middle managers to be better bosses is key.

Feeling seen, understood and respected is obviously important in terms of emotional satisfaction at work but clear responsibilities, tasks, and feedback are also important to create psychological safety. When you're not sure what's expected of you or how your work is being judged, the uncertainty can be anxiety-making.

One of my favorite bosses was great because she believed in me, gave me clear, new responsibilities on a regular basis, and then let me go, not micro-managing me. For me, this was the sweet spot. Some people need more support, especially early career so it's important to understand who you are managing and their psychology and what they need. Leadership, like parenting, is not only what I do but who I'm leading and their needs.