When you’re a manager, you’re no longer just responsible for the work. You’re responsible for human beings. And while that seems obvious—yes, that’s the whole point of the job—it’s a difficult thing to grapple with when all of a sudden eighty people are looking at you, expecting you to know how to lead them.

To manage people well, you must develop trusting relationships with them, understand their strengths and weaknesses (as well as your own), make good decisions about who should do what (including hiring and firing when necessary), and coach individuals to do their best.

When you create a hospitality-first culture, everything about your business improves—whether that means finding and retaining great talent, turning customers into raving fans, or increasing your profitability.

When you work in hospitality—and I believe that whatever you do for a living, you can choose to be in the hospitality business—you have the privilege of joining people as they celebrate the most joyful moments in their lives and the chance to offer them a brief moment of consolation and relief in the midst of their most difficult ones.

A leader’s responsibility is to identify the strengths of the people on their team, no matter how buried those strengths might be. I thought about that often when I was sitting down with the new team at EMP. It was tempting to weed out everyone who had a reputation as a less-than-stellar employee; eventually, some folks would need to be managed out. But first, I needed to make sure a hidden capability wasn’t lurking behind someone’s subpar performance.