Your people serve guests who have more than they do, all day. Where is their dignity supposed to come from?

Scottsdale runs on a service economy at the luxury end, and that creates a leadership responsibility most employers never name out loud.

Tourism is the city’s largest industry, providing work for a very large share of Scottsdale’s employees, across more than sixty hotels and resorts holding upward of twelve thousand rooms. Add golf, spring training, and the events that draw hundreds of thousands of visitors a year. On the other side of the economy, HonorHealth runs its entire system from a Scottsdale headquarters, Mayo Clinic’s Arizona campus sits just north, and Axon, Choice Hotels, Vanguard, Nationwide, and GoDaddy anchor a corporate and technology base, with the Scottsdale Airpark alone supporting tens of thousands of jobs.

Consider what a shift looks like for the people in the hospitality half. They spend every working hour serving guests who are, on average, considerably wealthier than they are, in a city where many of them cannot afford to live. The service is expected to look effortless, warm, and personal. And the quality of the experience depends entirely on whether the person delivering it feels like a person while doing it.

Here is the part leaders control. Guests are a mixed bag. Most are gracious, and some are genuinely rude, dismissive, or treat staff as furniture. That variability is not fixable. What is fixable is what happens next. If someone is treated as invisible by a guest and then treated as replaceable by their own manager, there is nothing left to draw on, and the warmth in the service goes first.

Which is why in this kind of work, leadership has to supply the respect the job will not reliably provide. That means backing an employee when a guest is wrong, which is the single most closely watched decision in any service organization. It means knowing people’s names and something about their lives. It means being visibly harder on the guest experience than on the person delivering it.

The same asymmetry runs through healthcare, which is why this material moves easily between a resort ballroom and a hospital auditorium. A nurse absorbing abuse from a patient is asking the same question a server is. Does my organization have my back, or am I on my own out here?

Chris runs national healthcare staffing organizations and has keynoted state association conferences in eleven states, including LeadingAge Illinois and health care associations in Iowa, Montana, South Dakota, and Colorado.

Scottsdale employers in the experience business.

Healthcare is where Chris operates, and it faces the same dynamic as the resort down the street.

Scottsdale events Chris speaks at.

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