Process vs.

Personality: Achieving Balance in Your Guest

Experience
Aug 04, 2008 | 1:59 am
By Rick Reilly
Early in my career, while working as a young manager for a luxury hotel chain, there was one subject
that I recall inspiring universal dread for staff and managers alike. Standards.
From standards training, to standards meetings, to standards testing, to standards coaching, the perpetual
emphasis on standards seemed all-consuming and perhaps raised as many questions as it answered. Was
this rudimentary list of checkboxes the key to the sophisticated art of genuine hospitality? Exactly how
many times could we inquire if a guest needed further assistance before sounding scripted and robotic?
Where was the allowance for personalization and authenticity that might actually inspire a guest to
return?
I was sure that this was not what our illustrious founder had in mind.
"We're in the business of perfection," my hotel manager would quip, repeating the mantra of needing to
execute flawlessly every time to be successful both individually and as a hotel. In essence, if we
constantly trained, tested, and reinforced the 30 or so "steps" that needed to occur in every guest
interaction, they would become second-nature in our daily routine and we wouldn't have to consciously
think about them anymore. Guess what? He was right: our hotel performed well on anonymous quality
assurance inspections and we continuously received five-star/five-diamond recognition due to our ability
to consistently execute on pre-defined standards.
"So what?" a certain fledgling manager would think to himself. "Now we have a small army of people
that answers the phone within three rings, uses the guest's name, offers further assistance, and thanks the
guest upon departure. That's not exactly hospitality. In fact, that could be interpreted as the opposite of
hospitality-we're turning a dynamic, two-way experience into a rigid, one-way process." And, to a
certain extent, I can still empathize with my perspective. In hindsight, however, I think I was missing the
bigger picture.
The crux of my internal conflict seemed to come down to one question: How can a guest experience
maintain the consistency that is defined by strict internal processes without sacrificing the "in the
moment" panache that makes it unexpected and memorable? The service industry is already ridiculously
hard; it's the only industry where the end-product (an experience) is co-produced by both the employee
and the customer in real-time. Both stakeholders have a hand in its success and both can change its
course on a dime, so anything can happen. With that in mind, how can one possibly get personality and
process to symbiotically co-exist when it's difficult enough to excel in just one of those areas?
As a young hotelier, I was able to recognize how my hotel was able to attain success in the process part
through its continuous communication, accountability, and overall rigor around the flawless execution of
standards: we were never given the opportunity to drift into a lull of complacency. What I didn't realize

was how that practice of constant process reinforcement may have actually been the catalyst for
allowing the personality part of the equation to flourish, as well.
We're all familiar with the phrase, practice makes perfect (or more recently, Vince Lombardi's perfect
practice makes perfect). In essence, it comes down to forming habits to the point where they become
instinctive. And from the example above, that seemed to hold true in the hotel world. We practiced a predefined list of behaviors and procedures over and over again to the point where we could instinctively
meet a guest's basic needs/expectations during each type of service encounter. Offering a towel and
water after a guest returned from a jog, proactively providing a map when a guest asked for directions,
escorting a guest to a desired location, pouring the first cup of coffee during a room service delivery, etc.
etc. All were things that guests had come to expect in a luxury setting, and all, in my opinion, served as
the cost of entry for service excellence. In essence, if we weren't getting the basics right, the personal
and emotional part of an interaction never even had the chance to make an impact.
So how does the repetition of procedural fundamentals actually promote the injection of personality and
customization into a service experience? Well, the interesting thing about the practice makes perfect
idiom may not be what it declares but more so what it enables. Perhaps once individuals are able to
execute on a set of requirements essentially without thinking, they are able to shift their focus to the
bigger picture.
Consider Michael Jordan shooting a basketball. I'm sure he was not consciously thinking about the
torque of his wrist while releasing a game-winning 15-footer with a defender in his face. Instead, he was
relying on the instincts that he gained through incessant practice to rise above the mechanics of the jump
shot, allowing his creative side to take over on a much grander scale.
The same logic can be applied to our industry. If the fundamentals are so well ingrained that your
employees are able to shift their focus from putting one step in front of the other, they become free to
expend that energy on creating truly captivating experiences. This shift yields the heightened awareness
necessary to pick up on non-verbal cues, understand the intricacies of a situation, and eventually
anticipate needs. The real kicker to this model, however, is the fact that the personality side of the
interaction takes practice, too-you have to know what to look for and where to look for it. Unfortunately,
this stage is inherently less structured in the sense that you can't provide a straightforward list of step-bystep instructions (i.e., standards) to walk someone through the process ... because personality is not a
process. It's more about providing the tools, exposure, and reinforcement so that the employees can
create something memorable on their own, letting their natural gifts shine. (Assuming they have themfinding folks with personality is important, too.)
Process and personality need not be mutually exclusive; in fact, they need to coexist seamlessly. Human
beings, however, can only concentrate on a finite number of things at once, so the challenge remains to
establish an environment where process is instinctive, freeing up the "bandwidth" for personality take
over. And that, as we all know, is where the true art of hospitality ultimately resides.
Feedback? Email Rick Reilly at richard.reilly@lraworldwide.com
Reprinted with permission from http://www.lodgingmagazine.com/ and LRA Worldwide's The Loyaluty
Leader.