There is no shortage of content that analyzes the difference between management and leadership.  There are so many thoughts, opinions and allegories that you could spend months building an entire thesis on the subject.

I’m lucky. I not only have a story that shows a transformation – I can consolidate it to a single year and show it through the lens of 13 staff meetings (one for each month and one unscheduled to “realign”).

The year was 2010. I was the general manager of a country and western dance hall just north of Houston, Texas. We had been in business since the end of 2005 and were chugging along. 

Then, disruption arrived in the form of a new venue around 10 miles away. This was not just any new venue. This was an established entertainment company opening their first country style operation. They knew marketing, they knew showmanship and they knew how to throw a party.

They opened in February and not much changed at first. Looking back at the notes, the first quarter’s meetings were very procedural, just as they had always been to that point. The type you have when you are managing a business and you interpret your job as keeping things on track and not screwing it up. Typical topics were reminders of responsible alcohol service, reminders of upcoming events, do this, don’t do that, etc.  The new venue was acknowledged early on with a “make sure you’re being nice so customers want to choose us” attached to it.

By springtime, which was an already natural decline in our year, there was a very noticeable change in the tone of the meetings. Part of it was defending the slow down and attributing it to the time of year – even comparing it to the prior year as if to say, “See, it’s not just the new guys. This is normal.”  The staff had a hard time buying it when the rumors were that the new place was still busy. It was becoming clear to me that continuing to manage the same way I always had was not going to be enough.

My first step from being just a manager to acting like a leader came during a meeting in the middle of May with ownership where I challenged them. The owners were veterans of the area country bar scene. They had been around a while and knew the business as well as anyone. They also knew the company we were dealing with and hoped this would be a phase that passed. My challenge to them came in response to a promotion the new venue was doing. They were using social media to tell customers how to get in free before a certain time of night. We started charging a cover two hours before that. I argued we needed to have something similar. They expressed that they did not want to give up door charges. I asked if they would rather continue having 200 people pay a cover or have 1000 people get in free and buy drinks. They saw my point and we started a promotion.

While that was the first leadership step, the unexpected plunge came a few short weeks later. That challenge meeting had been held in the office where one of owners had been set up since the beginning. Now, I knew he was buying a ranch and shifting his focus. I also knew he had not been hands on for a couple of years. We always communicated and I executed as a manager, but I had deferred all other matters to him and his partner. So, the day I unlocked that office door while looking for something, and finding it completely cleaned out, was a bit of a shock. It was the moment I realized no one was coming. I needed to take responsibility for the success or failure of the business.

I need to be clear on something here. Part is luck and part is context. While I am claiming individual responsibility for the outcomes, by no means was I alone. We had a strong team that was made stronger by a key addition at the exact right time (the luck part). So it would be better to say that if we were to succeed, it would be a team effort and if we were to fail, that would be on me.

Our next meeting took place on June 2^nd and this is when my tone shifted. I started the year on cruise control and shifted to blaming the environment when things were going poorly. Neither of those tactics were ever going to work. The confrontation meeting and the empty office – along with an addition to the management team that had all of us asking “why not?” when it came to doing things in a different way – had all led to this.

This was the “Line in the Sand” meeting, and the first time I addressed the staff with something other than just policies and procedures. What made this meeting different was a clear communication that  we were not just going to sit around and wait and see what happened. Instead we were going to raise standards and focus on the customer experience from beginning to end. We talked about accountability and how it was our job as a management team to provide the staff with what they needed to succeed, but in return we needed them do their part in delivering exceptional service that would keep customers coming back.

I would like to say that was my Knute Rockne “Win one for the Gipper” motivational speech. Or that this was our defined pivotal moment where everything changed.  But I can’t. Because it wasn’t.  We called another meeting one week later.

Apparently the staff did not get the memo as we had to correct some behaviors and make some adjustments. The details of the meeting are not nearly as important as the leadership move that was made.  The first meeting communicated to the staff that if we were going to win this thing, we all had to be on the same page and we were going to hold them accountable for that.  The reset a week later reinforced the first one by doing exactly that. They were not on the same page, so we called an unscheduled meeting to correct that.  On the surface, it was 15 minutes added on to the end of a night. In reality, it was the 15 minutes that finally got the ball rolling.

The buy in slowly started after that. Once again, my soapbox moments were not the only thing happening. I could have been the most convincing salesman in history, but if they – specifically the employees that worked for tips – weren’t making more money, it would not have mattered. But we used that. In the meetings we reminded them that buying into what we were doing would lead to customer retention as well as customer creation.  More customers meant more tips, more shifts – more money for everyone. By helping us win, they were winning as well.

The meeting notes from the final six months of the year not only reinforced that concept but also introduced another one that true leaders understand. A single person in management cannot touch every customer experience in a night. But a manager can interact with every staff member — or at least all of those they are responsible for, especially in a sizable operation.

For us, as a dance hall, that mattered. Each customer was greeted by a door host, interacted with a cashier at the door (often checking to see if they had the “right way” to get in free), then likely ordered from at least one bartender or server.  If they did nothing else, they were told goodnight by another door host. One customer — four employees, almost guaranteed.

The point was (and is) managers cannot control every customer experience. That responsibility belongs to the front-line service staff. It’s said that the way managers treat staff is the way staff will treat customers. While we were far from perfect, we did what we could to embody that.

As for me, this was my arc. But there was never an ah-ha moment where I realized that this was a manager to leader transformation. It would also be wrong to say I had no leadership qualities before 2010 and suddenly embodied them afterward. I was the same person I had always been. I just made the decision to stop waiting for someone else to give me permission to lead.