For this blog, I wanted to interview someone who has conducted their own experiments sharing leadership. It’s one thing to hear it from a promoter of these concepts and ideas about leadership (that would be me) and another thing to hear it from someone who has taken the concepts and ideas and implemented them in the real world in the current timeframe.
I interviewed James Taylor, General Manager of Bluefin Bay Resort on the North Shore. The conversation we had was captured on Zoom as a way for me to go back and see what had been said. At the end of this short blog, there’s a link to a 2-minute video of James talking about the level of commitment at the Resort.
The leadership team at Bluefin has expanded from no leadership team four years ago, to four layers of leadership teams. Currently, the teams are:
Leadership Support Team - these are the four leaders with the highest level of responsibility.
Leadership Team - these are department heads and leaders with department or area responsibility.
Emerging Leaders Team - these are leaders who are in charge of running day to day operations and have been identified as leaders who are in development for the next position with more responsibility.
Emerging Leaders Team 2 - These are next level leaders who currently supervise or demonstrate leadership qualities and will be the next supervisors/managers.
James is a “Meta-Leader” meaning, he sees everyone as potential leaders. For fun, I asked him how many leaders he could develop at the resort right now and his response was “At least 50, if we had the time and resources”.
Throughout the conversation, James referred to the level of commitment he felt from the leaders at Bluefin. In the 2-minute excerpt, James is responding to a question about that level of commitment.
Here’s what James pointed to as he described what makes that level of commitment:
Shared Purpose
Support for each other
General sense of “If we’re all in it together, then we can all be better”
Commitment to succeed together, and if we see someone fall down… we pick them up and we drag them along and we fix it.
Like the Navy Seals thing, you’re only as strong as your weakest link.
Because we care personally about each other, there’s a commitment to make sure we’re all ok.
One last thing, Bluefin Bay is currently experiencing the highest levels of business in the resort’s history. They do their leadership development work in concert with the requirements of constantly having to perform at a very high level.
James refers to a book during the interview, here’s a link to The Culture Code
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