Expertise In Business
As a business consultant, my experience and expertise is in the Hospitality sector, built on running my hotel for over eight years. Before hospitality, my experience was with a large corporate IT company, Burroughs, which merged with Sperry to become Unisys and other small manufacturing and service businesses. These experiences have enabled me to apply my services to the Tech and Service businesses sectors.
Creating the Right Conditions
Working with and through your people to create unique and extraordinary solutions for your business
With over eight years of experience running a boutique hotel and consulting with family-owned hotels, I bring a unique perspective to creating a culture of proactive participation and contribution. that increases your bottom line
Developing People - The Main Ingredient in Hospitality
Creating the conditions for a culture of active participation and contribution to emerge.
Creating the conditions for a culture of active participation and contribution to emerge.
Drawing from my experience managing hotels, I fully understood the owner's intent. I have successfully cultivated staff engagement and alignment in my own hotel. I replicated the same level of performance across this client’s hotel and other establishments.
It begins by clearly defining the desired outcome and conditions of satisfaction.
I refer to this process as CultureWork rather than teamwork, as it involves creating an environment for a culture of active participation and contribution in line with the business vision to emerge. This approach focuses on creating conditions alongside team members rather than trying to alter the individuals themselves. Together, we cultivate the conditions necessary for the desired culture to flourish.
Where do we begin?
As a hotel owner or general manager, you have a clear vision of how you want your property to look, feel, and be perceived. However, effectively communicating this vision to your staff can be challenging. Through a discovery process, I guide owners in translating their vision into simple statements that can be easily communicated to the team.
This process involves refining the vision with a select group of staff, such as department heads or entire departments, depending on the size of the team. It's remarkable how staff contributions enhance the richness of the vision beyond what was initially conceived.
Once the staff clearly understands the desired outcome and vision, I challenge them to create the rules for achieving it collaboratively. This participatory approach fosters greater buy-in and understanding among team members.
The outcome of CultureWork is a set of standards, or a Social Contract, agreed upon by the staff. This provides a powerful management tool for continuous staff development and effective administration. Tony Byrne, General Manager of The Royal Castle, Dartmouth, attests to the effectiveness of this approach: "This is the most powerful management tool I have ever encountered."
Align your team
If aligning your team around a common vision seems daunting, book a call with me to discover simple steps to create a motivated, engaged, and aligned team of hospitality professionals committed to excellence. With CultureWork, I'll help you cultivate an aligned and passionate team dedicated to delivering outstanding service to your guests every day.
Leadership, Management & Team Development in Tech Sector
Creating the conditions for a culture of active participation and contribution to emerge.
Drawing from my ten years of experience working in IT across the UK, Europe, and Australia, combined with developing my unique approach to creating transformative and innovative cultures, I bring a unique and state-of-the-art approach to organisational design called Platform Technology.
Platform Technology touches all parts of the organisation, from the board room to the shop floor. It begins by clearly defining the challenges, desired outcomes, recurring obstacles and conditions of satisfaction.
The tech sector is highly competitive and governed by many regulatory bodies. Creating conditions where teams can operate autonomously within a clear and rigorous framework requires a deep understanding of the building blocks of organisational design and how to use them.
Where do we begin?
Creating that Platform Technology to support an innovative and transformative organisation starts with Leadership. Without the authority and buy-in of the executive, starting the transformative journey is pointless and can even be damaging.
Communicating the vision for the future to the entire organisation in a form that inspires and engages the entire workforce is required from which the creation of specific teams can emerge. Developing new management practices allows the teams to operate within clear parameters aligned with the stated vision and goals guided and influenced by the conditions that management takes responsibility for.
A set of standards or a Social Contract agreed upon by team members, management and the executive provides a powerful tool for continuous staff development and effective administration. As more and more teams are developed in line with the social contract and begin to operate within the structure of the platform technology, innovation and collaboration increase, and the organisational structure continuously adapts to the demands of technological evolution.
Creating alignment
Businesses flourish when people development, strategic intent, ethical standards, and financial goals align with technical advancement. You reduce the technology overhang, empower the implementation of new technology and increase the speed of innovation. I provide you with the tools to provide the level of freedom required without losing the sense of control.
Designing Your Platform
If designing your platform around a common vision seems daunting, book a call with me to discover simple steps to create a dynamic platform that meets your needs today and is your unique platform for the future.
Transformative Leadership and Growth in Business Services
Creating the conditions for your business to thrive, which in turn creates the conditions for your clients to succeed.
Creating the conditions for a transformative culture of proactive innovation, creativity, participation and contribution to emerge.
The service sector is one of the most challenging sectors to lead and manage because, like the hospitality sector, it is as un-mechanistic as you can get. Every service business relies on human interaction, creativity, negotiation, and relationship. While many of the production and data analysis functions might be replaceable or enhanced with AI, the sector relies so heavily on human interpretation, expression, and creativity that AI cannot replace it and probably never will.
In a mechanistic system, things are predictable, linear, and unprogrammable. Human systems are the opposite: non-linear, unpredictable, and unprogrammable. While in mechanistic systems, there may be many linear branches and logic gates; humans are independently intelligent, complex adaptive systems that react and interact with the conditions surrounding them.
Leadership and management in service-based businesses require the use of subtlety, nuance, language, and effective communication, which do not exist in the hierarchical linear command and control systems of the industrial past.
Whether digital agencies, recruitment companies, community groups, personal services businesses such as hair or beauty salons and spas, or specialist consultants, the challenge for the leadership and management of these organisations is to finely balance directional control with operational freedom and creativity.
The secret lies within CultureWork and creating your unique Platform Technology
Where do we begin?
Service businesses begin when the founder brings together a small team to fulfil their vision. As the team grows, the organisation becomes more complex. We start by capturing the founder's vision and then bring all of the team together to design the future.
The product exists only in the customers' eyes, and every customer is different. They have bought into your brand values and expect them to be translated into a solution that works for them. Trusting that the team will remain true to the brand values and use all of their creativity requires courage and understanding from everyone involved.
With ten years of experience in developing the largest beauty salon business in the UK and Spain, I have a unique perspective on trusting individuals to handle the brand values and deliver the client's expected results. Also, drawing from my hospitality experience and working with community groups, event organisers, consultants and startups, I approach the service sector in a way that ensures every person understands the contribution that is expected from them and the conditions of satisfaction required by leadership and management as well as the customer.