How Hyatt’s CEO uncovers staff stories to drive change
Mark Hoplamazian, CEO of Hyatt Hotels, sat down with a housekeeper at one of the company’s hotels with the hopes of learning some ways that leadership might improve the experience of team members like her. As you’d expect, the housekeeper was a little nervous—after all, she was having a one-on-one conversation with the CEO of an 80,000+ person company.
This wasn’t Mr. Hoplamazian’s first time having a conversation like this, so he knew what to ask when it became clear that the housekeeper’s nerves were making it difficult for her to open up about what would make her work experience better. “Could you walk me through your typical morning and how you get to work?”
The housekeeper began describing her typical morning, which involved making sure her son could get to school before she’d take a long bus ride with multiple transfers to the hotel.
A similar question by Hoplamazian revealed that—because of the schedule assigned to her—she wasn’t able to get home in time to watch after her son when the school day was over. Learning about this difficulty she experienced every day helped move Hyatt’s leadership to develop and implement an app through which team members could create their own schedule.
“Instead of asking how it’s going, I ask about specific aspects of their lives,” Hoplamazian said at the 2016 Conscious Capitalism conference.
The substance is in the story
In asking the housekeeper to walk him through a specific aspect of her life, Hoplamazian did exactly the same thing that we do at Stories Inc. as part of our story discovery methodology. To help our client’s storytellers get into storytelling mode, we like to start with questions that elicit a description of a specific thing. For example, “could you walk me through what happened on your favorite day at the office?”
As humans, we all have a tendency to speak in generalities and platitudes. Asking questions that focus on specifics and descriptive language helps people move from the expository to the narrative. And narrative language is where the substance is.