Leadership in Hospitality Series X: “Great Leaders are Resilient & Help Their Teammates to Be the Same”

It’s fall, and we are now in a place where we can exhale after a long, busy golf season here in the Pacific Northwest. With that, it also means we are looking at budgets, reviewing the past season’s wins and stumbles, analyzing what to move forward with, and what areas need an overhaul—or at least a tweak. The physical part of the business takes a step back, but the mental side now has the opportunity to engage and, hopefully, go from the “10-foot view to the 1,000-foot view” for anyone who is in a leadership position or an “assistant-leading” role.

During this long season, everyone in the PNW Section has had to stay engaged and be resilient—in other words, “able to withstand or recover quickly from difficult circumstances or conditions.”

With that in mind, I am inspired to continue with the theme of this series by looking at Marcus Buckingham’s thoughts on leadership and resilience. Recently, he shared this quote and video on the subject: The Most Productive People Don’t Love Everything They Do. They Find the Love in What They Do.

In this post, he added the following caption that I found thought-provoking: “ ‘Find a job you love and you’ll never work again’ is terrible advice. Here’s the truth nobody wants to tell you: Even people who are incredible at their jobs don’t love everything they do. They hate parts of it, just like you. But they’ve cracked a code most people miss… During the pandemic, Mayo Clinic researchers studied healthcare workers who didn’t burn out. The most resilient people have just 20% of their day filled with activities they love. Just 20%. But it has to be every day… You don’t need to love your entire job. You need to hunt for the moments within your job that make you come alive… What’s your 20% today?”

Let’s break down that quote a bit, as there are many nuggets in that short essay for us to grasp and apply to our golf and hospitality industry context.

“Find a job you love and you’ll never work again’ is terrible advice. Here’s the truth nobody wants to tell you: Even people who are incredible at their jobs don’t love everything they do. They hate parts of it, just like you…”

This is certainly an interesting perspective! Marcus seems to state that work is always going to be a job, and invariably, work is called work for a reason. What I’m hearing out of MB’s phrasing is:
Don’t get suckered into thinking the best jobs are the ones other people seem to have; that misconception is a dead end and, literally, it’s not accurate for anyone.

In my own job as a Career Consultant, I do love it… not all of it, though. Getting up really early or taking a red-eye flight from Seattle to Dallas–Fort Worth is really a drag. I literally hate it. But working on a Saturday—catching up on emails, articles like this one, or any other tasks—is not something I have to do; these are things I choose to do, as I can do them of my own accord.

“…But they’ve cracked a code most people miss… During the pandemic, Mayo Clinic researchers studied healthcare workers who didn’t burn out. The most resilient people have just 20% of their day filled with activities they love.”

Clearly, this is a significant group to focus on, as they are considered to have a “higher purpose” or calling, but they actually have a higher-than-average amount of burnout (and that is in normal periods of time, let alone during the pandemic). It was this detail that made me lean into the next part of the quote.

Look at it again. Who did better? Who was most resilient and “able to withstand or recover quickly from difficult circumstances or conditions?” It was the workers who had 20% or more of their workday filled with work activities they love (meaning they could have a “meh” feeling about—or maybe actually hate—up to 80% of the rest of their job).

“Just 20%. But it has to be every day… You don’t need to love your entire job. You need to hunt for the moments within your job that make you come alive… What’s your 20% today?”

Bold that one or at least highlight it! Resilience in our work can be fueled or recharged by just 20% or more.

But… we need these “20% activities that we love” every day, on repeat—not just a few days a week or month.

Finally, Buckingham states that we should all be searching for these activities that drive our love, build our resilience, and make us come alive. And, with his question, “What’s your 20% today?,” he seems to be saying we need to be intentional and think about what these 20% activities really are and why.

With that context in mind, let’s switch on the leader’s mindset (because you are one, or you want to be one very soon). Let’s consider these questions:

• What are your 20% activities (or more) that drive your love for your job and fuel your resilience?
• As a teammate, how can you help your coworkers understand this concept and then help them identify what the 20% activities are for them individually? (Some may overlap, but likely not, so keep an open mind for them.)
• Why should we, as leaders (or future leaders, or even assistants who are “managing up”), consider helping others whom we lead (or who are our leaders) discover and lean into the 20% activities that fuel their love, recharging, and success in their work with us?

Consider another quote from Buckingham, out of his book Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World: “Those of us who do this best—who find what we love about what we do, and cultivate this love with intelligence and discipline—are the ones who contribute most. The best people are not well-rounded, finding fulfillment in their uniform ability. Quite the opposite, in fact—the best people are spiky, and in their lovingly honed spikiness they find their biggest contribution, their fastest growth, and, ultimately, their greatest joy.” Here’s why:

• They will be better to work with, and they will be better contributors to the team.
• They will bring joy to the workplace and to the team… and in our business serving people, this will get noticed and it will be appreciated by the customers/members.
• In other words, this effort will be worth it for them (and for your enlightened self-interest). Win-win.

In closing, I sincerely hope you can identify the “20% or more activities” in your work that you love. I hope this article will help clarify these activities for you in such a way that you intentionally hunt them, as Buckingham suggests. Thank you for taking the time to consider these concepts from Marcus Buckingham. And, if you found value in these concepts or in any of the recent articles inspired by MB, I would greatly appreciate the chance to talk more about it with you soon. Further, I would be happy to connect with you to help you discover and hunt out your 20% activities at work so you can find more resilience, more joy, and more effectiveness in what you do every day. Check out my calendar booking link below to find a time that works for you.