Douchebags.*
Hey I’m Hannah! I have a couple of successful coffee shops and an MSc in business psychology. And I have a mission to bring gutsy, structured leadership to street-level businesses across the UK.
I can’t stand people that think that just because they’re ‘the boss’ it means people should automatically follow them. Gone are the days that the job title = entitlement. You have to earn that sh!t. I’ve spent my working life making mistakes left, right and centre – from following the wrong leader simply because they apparently had more ‘experience’ than me, to making decisions just so that my employees liked me. It took me over a decade to realise that the thing that earns people’s respect and ultimately what creates a happy workforce is following through with your promises, being transparent with your goals and being honest about your expectations.
My understanding of what constitutes awesome leadership has come from working with some of the best people and also some of the worst. Hospitality is full of people cutting corners and ignoring vital things like contracts and performance reviews, whilst the corporate world is overrun with box ticking, tokenism-derived processes in a bid to sound like they care.
Either way, ignoring your staff’s feedback and the importance of keeping them happy is simply a recipe for failure in any industry. I look at organisations from the outside, listen to the problems, identify the strengths and empower those in higher positions to lead with integrity, guts, compassion and humanity. F*ck ‘professionalism’ – let’s just be amazing human beings.
*Not you, Karen.
