Lessons from the Front Desk: Leadership, People, and Life in the Hotel Business (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798175828840)

Leadership lessons rarely arrive in a conference room.

Sometimes they come from a housekeeper standing in your doorway. A maintenance employee working the night shift. A manager who isn't ready for the promotion you want to give her. A hotel on fire five hours away. Or a dinner your wife has covered with foil and left waiting in the oven.

In Lessons from the Front Desk, longtime hospitality leader Mike Davis looks back on a career that began almost by accident. After five years as a public school teacher, he answered a newspaper ad in 1988 and entered the hotel business with no hospitality experience and very little idea what he was getting himself into.

What followed was a career spanning hotel general management, regional operations, acquisitions, turnarounds, organizational change, and decades of learning how to lead people-and how to run a business.

Through candid stories from the front desk to the executive office, Davis explores both sides of leadership: the human decisions that shape a culture and the operating decisions that determine whether a hotel succeeds. He writes about developing employees, handling mistakes, managing rates and labor, recovering dissatisfied guests, making difficult personnel decisions, leading through crisis, and learning when to step in-and when to get out of the way.

But this isn't a textbook about running hotels.

It's a book about what happens when business becomes personal.

Warm, practical, and self-reflective, Lessons from the Front Desk is for anyone who has led a team, managed through uncertainty, made a decision they later questioned, or discovered that some of the best leadership lessons come from the people they were supposed to be leading.

Because eventually, the numbers fade. The awards get boxed away. The buildings change hands. The titles disappear from the organizational chart.

What remains is the people.