By Manoj Mathew V M, FIIHM | Senior Vice President – Operations, Tamara Leisure Experiences | Author, Dead Reckoning: Leadership by Accumulated Judgment
Best practices make hospitality operations consistent, scalable, and reliable. But there is a point — often the most critical point — where they begin to fail. And when they do, they can cause something more damaging than leaving a gap. They reveal that the people expected to fill that gap were never prepared to.
The Promise of Best Practices in Hospitality Operations
Best practices exist for good reason. They capture accumulated experience, reduce variability, and allow operations to scale without quality collapsing at the edges. In hospitality, they are not optional. Without them, consistency fails and service becomes unreliable. A guest in Bengaluru and a guest in the same brand’s property in Lusaka should experience something recognisably similar. Best practices are what make that possible.
But best practices carry an implicit assumption: that the future will resemble the past closely enough for repetition to work. That the next situation will be similar enough to the last one that the same response applies.
Most of the time, this assumption holds. Until it does not.
“Best practices capture what worked. They are not designed to handle what has never happened before. And in hospitality, the unexpected is not the exception. It is the condition.”
How Breakdown Happens in a Well-Run Operation
Breakdown in hospitality operations rarely announces itself dramatically. It appears in small, quiet gaps: a guest whose need does not fit the process, a situation the training never covered, a moment where the “correct” response feels inadequate to what is actually happening.
In these moments, teams hesitate. Not because they lack capability, but because they have been conditioned to rely on the system. They wait for the procedure to provide an answer. And the procedure has no answer.
Over time, in environments that prize compliance above interpretation, something subtler happens. Teams begin to follow steps rather than read situations. They escalate decisions upward rather than making them at the point of contact. They avoid deviation even when deviation is clearly required. What was designed to support performance begins to constrain it.
The Human Cost: What Over-Prescription Does to an Engaged Associate
There is a consequence of over-reliance on best practices that is less visible than operational failure, but equally corrosive: what it does to the people expected to deliver them.
For a thinking, engaged associate — someone who joined hospitality because they care about people and take genuine pride in their work — the repeated rollout of predefined best practices can become quietly demoralising. Not because the practices are wrong. But because they leave no room for contribution.
When every action is predefined, initiative has no space. Interpretation is unnecessary. Personal judgment is quietly discouraged. The role becomes one of implementation rather than participation. And over time, this erodes something fundamental: ownership.
People may continue to perform — technically, correctly, on metric. But they stop investing themselves in what they do. The energy that separates compliant service from genuinely caring service quietly drains away. And once that energy is gone, no best practice can manufacture it back.
“You can design a process for every interaction. But you cannot design the energy behind it. That belongs to the person — and only if they still feel it is theirs to give.”
A Different Approach: The Incomplete Best Practice
What if the problem is not the best practice itself, but the assumption that it must arrive complete?
Most organisations treat best practices as finished products. They are developed centrally, documented fully, rolled out uniformly, and expected to be followed precisely. The rollout is the final act. Compliance is the goal. The team’s job is implementation.
But there is another way to think about this — one that turns the rollout into a beginning rather than an ending.
The incomplete best practice is a deliberate design choice. Rather than handing a team a finished procedure, leadership hands them a frame: the intent behind the practice, the outcome it is meant to produce, the boundaries within which it should operate. The how is left, intentionally, for the team to develop.
The Incomplete Best Practice: a design principle
Give the team: the why (intent), the what (outcome), the boundary (non-negotiables).
Leave for the team: the how — the method they will develop, own, and refine.
The result: a practice built by the people who will deliver it, who therefore understand, believe in, and improve it.
This is not an abdication of leadership responsibility. It is a more demanding form of it. Because to hand someone an incomplete frame and trust them to complete it, you must be clear about what cannot move — and genuinely open about everything else.
What Teams Do With the Space: Improvisation, Ownership, Iteration
When a team is given the frame but not the finished procedure, something changes in how they approach the work. They are no longer implementers. They are designers — of their own practice, within a defined intent.
They improvise. They try approaches, observe what happens, discard what does not work, and build on what does. They bring knowledge that a central team never had: what this particular guest, in this particular property, in this particular context actually needs. They adapt the intent to the reality.
And crucially, because they built it themselves, they own it. Not in the sense of mere familiarity, but in the deeper sense of responsibility. When something goes wrong, they do not look for the procedure to blame. They look for what they can improve. Because the practice is, in part, theirs.
This shift — from a team that delivers a practice to a team that holds a practice — is one of the most significant transitions a hospitality operation can make. It does not happen by announcing it. It happens by creating the conditions for it.
The Feedback Loop: How Improvisation Builds Better Practices
Here is where the incomplete best practice generates something a complete one never can: a living feedback loop.
When teams develop the how themselves, they generate real information about what works in practice, not just what was assumed to work in theory. That information — if leadership creates the structures to receive it — feeds directly back into the next version of the practice. The practice improves not through top-down revision, but through the accumulated judgment of the people closest to the work.
Over time, this produces something that no rollout programme can manufacture: a culture of continuous improvement in hospitality operations. Not continuous improvement as a slogan or a quality framework. Continuous improvement as a lived condition — the natural behaviour of a team that has been trusted to think, has developed the judgment to act, and has experienced the satisfaction of seeing their input shape what comes next.
The best practice is never finished. It is always becoming better. And the people who deliver it are the ones making it so.
“A best practice that arrives complete is owned by the organisation. A best practice that a team helped build is owned by the people who will deliver it. Only one of those produces a culture of continuous improvement.”
What Leadership Must Provide: Frame, Intent, and Psychological Safety
For the incomplete best practice to work, leadership must provide three things clearly and consistently.
The first is a clear frame. The intent of the practice must be unambiguous. What outcome is this designed to produce? What guest experience does it serve? What values does it express? Without this, the space given to the team is not freedom — it is confusion.
The second is honest non-negotiables. Every practice has boundaries that cannot move: safety, brand standards, legal requirements, core service commitments. These must be named explicitly. Not to limit the team, but to define the space within which they are genuinely free to build.
The third is psychological safety. A team will only improvise if they believe that a well-intentioned attempt that does not fully succeed will be treated as learning, not failure. Without this, the incomplete best practice simply produces anxiety rather than ownership. People will wait to be told — because acting on incomplete information in an environment that punishes imperfection is not empowerment. It is exposure.
Creating this safety is the most demanding part of the leader’s role in this model. It is also what connects this idea directly to the exploration of trust and judgment in Journey Without Maps (Vol. I of the Dead Reckoning: Leadership by Accumulated Judgment trilogy) — where leadership is formed not in the moments of control, but in the moments of genuine release.
Frontline Judgment: The Capability That Results
The incomplete best practice, delivered well, produces something that no training module can: a team with genuine frontline judgment. Not the theoretical knowledge of what to do in a predefined situation, but the practiced ability to read an unfamiliar situation and decide how to respond in real time.
This is the capability that functions when all others have reached their limit. When the procedure does not apply. When the SOP has no answer. When the guest in front of the team member needs something that was not anticipated and cannot be escalated in time.
That moment — and what a team member does in it — is what defines the guest experience at its most critical point. And it is entirely determined by whether the culture around them has developed their judgment or suppressed it.
This movement from structure to judgment, and what it demands from both the leader and the team, is the central argument of Where the Map Ends (Vol. II of the Dead Reckoning: Leadership by Accumulated Judgment trilogy). Leadership at the edge of the known depends not on the process but on the person.
The Culture That Results: Continuous Improvement as a Lived Condition
When incomplete best practices become the norm — when teams routinely develop, own, and refine the how within a clear frame of intent — the culture of the operation shifts in ways that go well beyond any individual practice.
People stop waiting to be told and start looking for what needs improving. They bring ideas not because there is a suggestion scheme but because contributing to the practice is part of their role. Problems are surfaced early because the person who spots a problem is also part of the team that will solve it. Knowledge moves horizontally — between teams, between properties, between roles — because everyone has something to contribute and the culture has made it safe to do so.
This is what a genuine continuous improvement culture in hospitality looks like. Not a quality programme. Not a quarterly review cycle. A daily, lived condition in which the people doing the work are also the people improving it — and know that both are part of their job.
The institutional case for this — for hospitality as a profession that restores not just guests but also the people within it — is the closing argument of Landfall (Vol. III of the Dead Reckoning: Leadership by Accumulated Judgment trilogy).
“A culture of continuous improvement is not built by a programme. It is built by the daily experience of being trusted to think, free to act, and expected to contribute.”
Conclusion: Beyond the Complete Practice
Best practices will always have a role in hospitality operations. The argument here is not against them. It is against treating them as endpoints.
A practice that arrives complete is, at best, a good starting point. A practice that a team helps build is something more: an expression of their judgment, their ownership, and their commitment to the guest experience they are creating together.
The difference between a well-run operation and a genuinely excellent one is often found in that distinction. Not in the sophistication of the process, but in the depth of the team’s relationship to it. Whether they follow it — or whether they believe in it, improve it, and pass on what they have learned.
That is what the incomplete best practice makes possible. Not a gap in the system, but an invitation into it.
And it is in that invitation — to think, to build, to own — that the conditions for a genuinely excellent hospitality operation are finally created.
