Page 128 - The New Gold Standard

PRINCIPLE 2: EMPOWER THROUGH TRUST
management level or in the front line. Business coach Charrise
McCrorey suggests, “What’s missing in business today is a com-
mitment to honesty. It seems that much of the time, the truth is
inconvenient. Business leaders buy into the notion that their
team members should be sheltered from certain business issues.
In fact, the most powerful teams are led by leaders with a pas-
sion for getting to what’s true about a person or a situation, and
then acting upon it.”
At Ritz-Carlton, honesty is a reciprocal commitment be-
tween managers and staff. William P. Perry, Jr., executive assistant
manager of rooms at The Ritz-Carlton Lodge, Reynolds Planta-
tion in Georgia, notes, “It is rare to terminate someone at our
property; however, when terminations have happened, they have
mostly involved attendance issues. In those cases, we will have
tried to work with individual employees’ schedules to accommo-
date any temporary lifestyle issues that may be affecting their
ability to come to work on time. Nonetheless, sometimes an em-
ployee will still not meet amended schedule requirements, and
we have been forced to part ways. In each case, however, the con-
duct expectations are fully laid out in the company’s handbook,
which is given and explained to each employee during new-hire
orientation. There are 26 serious breaches of conduct that can
cause immediate termination. These offenses range from willful
damage of property to use of profane or abusive language.”
While the focus of this discussion on trust thus far has cen-
tered on being a trustworthy leader, a significant piece of the
Ritz-Carlton trust formula involves “being trusting.” In essence,
the Ritz-Carlton management philosophy is to select the right
people, orient them to desired outcomes, train and certify oper-
ational skills, and support staff members as they improvise and
create the guest experiences in the moment-by-moment inter-
actions with the guest.
Kathy Smith, senior vice president of human resources, clar-
ifies, “We have empowerment as part of our Service Values be-
cause we have a lot of confidence in our Ladies and Gentlemen.

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