A few months ago, my wife and I arrived at a hotel early for a special occasion. We’d been looking forward to it for weeks. Check-in wasn’t quite ready, so we waited in the lobby, and waited, and waited, met with little more than a formal but frosty acknowledgement that we existed.
No offer of a drink, or even bag storage. No warmth. Just a cold transactional experience that has put us off returning to that hotel.
A year earlier, we checked into another hotel in Portugal, also early, also for a special occasion. This time we were welcomed with genuine warmth, shown to the terrace, and handed a cocktail on the house while our room was prepared.
Nobody had to do that. Nothing about it was in a script. But it changed the entire tone of the stay before we’d even seen our room.
That contrast gets to the heart of service excellence. Customers remember how people make them feel in the moments that matter.
Jan Carlzon, former CEO of Scandinavian Airlines, called these moments of truth: the handful of seconds where a customer forms an impression of an entire organization, based on nothing more than how one frontline service person chose to show up.
Neither hotel was short-staffed. Neither was short on process. What separated them was something process can’t manufacture: people who were engaged, well-led, and playing to their strengths.
That gap between organizations that consistently deliver those moments and those that don’t is rarely about skill, resource, or even customer-service training. It’s about genuine engagement, retention, and standards.
Disengaged teams don’t reliably produce moments of truth; they produce moments of adequacy, at best. High turnover means constant relearning and inconsistent delivery. And without a clear, shared standard for what “great” looks like, mediocrity quietly becomes the norm, not because anyone chose it, but because nobody defined and created the alternative.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot since reading Will Guidara’s Unreasonable Hospitality, the account of how Eleven Madison Park rose from No. 50 to No. 1 on The World’s 50 Best Restaurants list through a deliberate approach to people, culture, and hospitality.
It maps closely onto what I’ve spent my career building around strengths with service-oriented businesses like Hilton, Salesforce, Tesco, John Lewis, and LVMH.
Here’s what I think it takes to close that gap.
6 Strategies for Promoting a Positive Service Culture
1. Start With Clear Meaning, Not Just Standards
People don’t rally around a rulebook; they rally around a compelling reason for being highly engaged at work.
Guidara’s team didn’t chase five-star reviews. They chased the feeling they wanted every guest to leave with.
Service excellence starts with a compelling, shared answer to “why does this matter?”, together with frontline staff feeling empowered to use their strengths, skills, and resourcefulness to make good judgement calls in real time, the way that second hotel’s receptionist clearly could.
2. Set Stretch Standards, Deliberately Above “Fine”
“Average” is the enemy of excellence.
Unreasonable Hospitality is unreasonable on purpose. It asks “what would genuinely delight this person?” rather than “what’s the standard procedure?”
Teams need permission, psychological safety, and expectation to go beyond competent service into something truly memorable. Those standards have to be set deliberately and explicitly, not left to chance.
3. Know Your People’s Strengths and Put Them to Work
Not everyone is naturally wired for the same kind of service moment.
Some people are exceptional at warmth, relationships, and connection; others excel at precision, anticipation, or problem-solving under pressure.
A proper strengths assessment doesn’t just tell people what they’re good at. It helps leaders understand how to deploy a team so the right strength meets the right moment.
Strengths optimization and deployment, not just awareness, is where the real value sits.
Gallup’s research on strengths-based cultures similarly links strengths-based practices with stronger customer engagement, employee engagement, and business outcomes.
4. Managers Have to Model It, Then Coach It
Standards don’t hold because they’re written down. They hold because someone senior visibly lives them every day and helps others get there.
The best service cultures I’ve seen have managers who still show up on the floor, demonstrate the standard themselves, and coach in the moment, not through annual reviews, but through the small, frequent corrections and encouragements that shape behaviour day to day.
This is where strengths-based people management becomes practical: helping managers notice what people do well, deploy those strengths deliberately, and reinforce effective behaviour as it happens.
5. Build Engagement and Retention by Giving People a Stage
Disengagement and turnover are rarely just about pay.
People stay where they feel capable, valued, and able to use their best strengths and learn new skills.
When someone is empowered to work in the way they’re naturally strong at, and gets recognized for it, service stops being a job they’re enduring and becomes something they take pride in delivering time after time.
6. Catch People Doing It Well, and Tell the Story
The best-performing teams create rituals around sharing their successes, as well as learning, with each other.
Not as performance reviews, but as learning and inspiration.
Sharing successes does two things at once: it reinforces the standard for everyone else, and it gives your best people the recognition that keeps them engaged.
Excellence that isn’t noticed rarely gets repeated.
Build Service Excellence Into the Culture, Not Just the Manual
None of this is complicated. But it does need to be deliberate, and that’s exactly where most service organizations fall short.
The gap isn’t from lack of care. It’s from lack of a deeply embedded system and culture that turns individual strengths, skills, and learning into consistent service excellence.
That is also why embedding strengths into organizational culture matters more than running another standalone training session.
TalentPredix™ helps service-oriented organizations strengthen frontline performance, engagement, manager capability, and culture through strengths-based assessment, development, and coaching.
If you’re serious about building service excellence into your culture, not just your training manual, we’d love to talk through what that could look like for your team.
Talk to Us About Service Excellence
Author: James Brook
James Brook FCIPD is the Founder and Managing Director of TalentPredix™, a business psychologist, executive coach and talent and strengths assessment expert with more than 30 years’ international experience. He previously founded Strengthscope® and held senior HR and talent leadership roles at Yahoo!, NatWest and Novo Nordisk.
