161. The Employee That Nobody Remembered

What if the belief that you genuinely care about your team is the very thing stopping you from ever changing anything? 

Today I want to talk about how a thought, a well-intentioned, completely sincere thought, can become the most expensive belief in your business. 

A few years ago I sat in a meeting with a hotel manager. She'd called me in to review my therapist manning. I'd asked for extra support staff, our team was at capacity (a good problem to have). 

What followed was a line-by-line negotiation over my spreadsheet. We were nickelling and diming over hours. A five-star property. A hotel manager who genuinely cared about the team. And me, someone who had built a career on protecting my therapists. 

But here's the irony. 

I have been that hotel manager. Not in that meeting, but in others. I have sat across from someone on my team, heard everything they said, felt the truth of it, and still made the decision that contradicted it. Because in that moment, I was running a completely different thought. A thought about cost. About optimisation. About what the business needed right now. 

And that thought won. 

It always wins. Because the mode, the P&L, the budget review, the productivity spreadsheet, generates that thought automatically.  

The thought creates the pressure, the pressure creates the decision. And genuine care about our people doesn't interrupt that loop.  

That's what this episode is about. 

In today’s episode, I’ll cover three things: 

1.- The disconnect between what we believe about our people and the decisions we actually make  

Most of us walk into a budget meeting genuinely believing we value our team. And we walk out having made a decision that contradicts that. We call it a tough call. We call it the reality of business. But what if it's neither of those things? What if it's simply the predictable output of a model that was never designed to hold both thoughts at once, and the wrong one keeps winning? 

2.- The difference between caring about your team and caring for them. 

Caring about is a feeling. You see someone struggling, you sit with them, you mean every word you say. It's real and it costs you nothing. Caring for is a decision. It's the policy you change, the cost you incur, the conversation you have with the VIP client when you tell them the treatment isn't happening tonight. One lives in your values. The other lives in your budget, and your actions. Most leaders have an abundance of the first and a shortage of the second, and their teams know the difference. 

3.- Why employee wellbeing will never work as a People & Culture initiative. 

As long as employee wellbeing sits in a separate conversation from guest experience, it will always lose. It will always be the softer priority, the initiative that gets shelved when things get tight, the value on the wall that doesn't survive contact with the P&L. The only way it works is when it becomes structurally inseparable from the guest experience strategy. 

By the end of this episode, you'll see that the problem was never that you didn't care enough. The problem is the thought you're running when the decision actually gets made.