For years, there was a standing appointment on my calendar every week for each of my managers. Thirty minutes. One-on-one. No matter how busy the operation became, that time belonged to them.
Sometimes we talked about a project. Sometimes we worked through an operational challenge or something happening within their department. And sometimes we barely talked about work at all. We talked about their families, something they were excited about, a hobby, or something happening outside the four walls of the hotel.
On paper, those meetings probably looked like another thirty-minute block on an already crowded calendar. In reality, they became some of the most important time I spent as a leader each week.
Because I wasn’t just listening to what my managers were saying. I was paying attention to how they were doing.
When you spend consistent one-on-one time with someone, you begin to recognize the things they may never put into words. I could tell when someone was antsy. I could see when they were tired. I knew when their energy wasn’t quite right or when something was weighing on them. Sometimes they wanted to talk about it. Sometimes they didn’t.
Either way, I noticed.
Managing people can become very transactional. What needs to get done? Where are we against budget? What’s happening with labor? Is the schedule finished? Did we solve the guest issue? Where are we on that project?
Those things matter. They are part of running a successful operation. But they’re not the entirety of leading one.
The person sitting across from you doesn’t stop being a parent, spouse, daughter, son, friend, or human being because they walked through the employee entrance. Life comes to work with us.
When leaders make room to understand that, we begin to know our people differently. And when we know them differently, we can lead them differently.
That doesn’t mean removing accountability or lowering expectations. I believe deeply in both. It means understanding the person you’re holding accountable well enough to recognize when they need to be challenged, when they need support, and sometimes when they simply need thirty minutes where nobody is asking anything from them.
There were weeks when those conversations gave us breakthroughs on projects. There were weeks when we solved problems. And there were weeks when the most productive thing we accomplished was simply sitting together and talking about life.
None of that time was wasted.
A manager can assign the work, measure the results, and hold someone accountable. A leader has to do those things and still see the person doing the work.
Those thirty-minute meetings taught me that I didn’t always need to walk into the room with an answer, an agenda, or my “boss” hat on. Sometimes my responsibility was simply to be present enough to notice the human being sitting across from me.
Looking back, those thirty minutes with each of my leaders were among the most valuable meetings on my calendar. Not because of everything we accomplished during them, but because of everything I learned by making the time to know the people I was leading.
That is the difference between managing people and leading them.