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The ‘Leadership Delta’: How challenging the norm is helping the hospitality industry to train exceptional leaders

The shift from team mate to manager can be a big change. Those who are recently promoted are used to being the 'doer' and jumping in to get the job done — it's second nature. All too often, newly appointed leaders stay in their comfort zone and solve problems themselves rather than spotting moments of coaching for their team, which isn't a scalable solution.

To coach someone for success, leaders need to:

• Spot the opportunity for coaching and learning
• Create an approach that offers meaningful discussion, learning and improvement
• Give the team member the chance to tackle the problem themselves next time, in an environment where it's okay to fail

Partnering with a global FMCG brand, Attensi helped develop a hybrid approach to coaching 750 managers and general managers across the US and Europe — deploying digital simulated learning to create a safe environment for managers to practice integrating coaching conversations with their teams.

Having difficult conversations is one of the most common deltas we encounter, especially in hospitality, where teams are filled with friends, weekend workers and part-time staff who don't see the job as a career for life. This can pose three problems for leaders: setting boundaries between social life and work life, finding the confidence to have difficult conversations with former peers, and dealing with team members who may not take feedback seriously.

Partnering with a global coffee chain that had introduced the 'GROW' (Goal, Reality, Options, Will) coaching framework, Attensi created a 3D digital replica of a coffee store and deployed a game-based simulation across phone, tablet and PC to 6,000+ store leaders, letting staff hone communication and interpersonal skills by interacting with lifelike avatars in scenario-based coaching dialogues.

Culture should be the most powerful tool in a business toolkit, but is often the weakest link. The real power of great culture comes from creating consistent shared attitudes, values and behaviors — a framework for leaders to make value-led decisions and communicate effectively to all team members. This is amplified for businesses with multiple sites, venues and global locations, where culture, principles and values are too often something pinned to a wall or handed out as a PDF during onboarding, rather than applied to everyday scenarios.

Driving a consistent culture was key to the success of a global convenience store retailer. Partnering together, Attensi delivered game-based leadership training via an app to 10,000 employees across Europe, the US and Canada, ensuring the coaching style and culture remained consistent from Portland to Paris.

The retailer also saw a considerable reduction in staff turnover, and a significant increase in basket size from staff upselling — a key training objective.

For organizations to address the leadership delta, they should first consider how successful their current learning methods are. Traditional methods aren't easy to track for ROI or impact — and 'workshop bias' can creep in via group sessions, giving some people more opportunity than others to shine. If there are 10 team leaders in a session and two have dominant personalities, how do you know how the others would have responded?

Take a look at these global stats from the Hospitality Report 2022 to see how inconsistent learning can look for employees in the sector: