Destination Leaders: Mind Your Ps and Qs

Part 1 - Leadership

Note: Here begins an extensive multi-part series of articles on the Ps and Qs associated with leading communities-as-destinations.

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The destiny of communities-as-destinations is determined through excellence in leadership.  Leadership that’s designed to deliver meaningful value, results, and outcomes not just for their clientele and corporations, but more particularly for their communities and citizens.

·       Leaders, managers and hosts supportive of tourism, fully aware of the importance and magnitude of their role especially as eco-system managers, how it reflects, supports, and advances (doesn’t harm) a community’s familial proximity and the need for preferable and meaningful outcomes desired from tourism.  Look no further than Newfoundland and Labrador’s Zita Cobb.

·       Leaders, managers and hosts understanding the importance of making a shift in intent, carefully formulating policies, plans, strategies and ethics that set the collective direction of tourism based on purpose, principles, progress, and a community’s evolving long-term prosperity.

·       Leaders, managers and hosts ensuring that the uniqueness and legitimacy of their community is not compromised but facilitated by being and becoming a destination that’s well-managed and marketed, creatively representing and serving their communities while elevating visitor experiences and visitor relationship leadership.

·       Leaders, managers and hosts trained to manage and exert their power and influence through behaviors, incentives, and actions that create admirable organizational cultures reflective of their community’s norms and values, expectations, and preferences.

·       Leaders, managers and hosts being their most effective by engaging, coaching, nudging and bridging the divide among all stakeholders by fostering collaboration and innovation, achieved by seeing others deeply and being deeply seen…the foundational essence of hospitality or what could be called relational tourism.

·       Leaders, managers and hosts focused on developing and sharing: Concepts – the best and latest in knowledge and ideas; competence – the ability to operate at the highest of standards; connections – superiority in relationship-building which provides access to the vast resources of other people, organizations, regions and countries (e.g. Jamaica)

·       Leaders, managers and hosts encouraging everyone to engage in critical thought.  Giving everyone a seat at the table.  Listening and encouraging a projection of feelings.

·       Leaders, managers and hosts making choices, but often without getting to choose the choices they have to choose from, particularly when influenced by surrounding cultures, having to respond to irregularities, crises, megatrends, and requirements for collective action. 

·       Leaders, managers and hosts demonstrating courage, deeply principled about making momentous, meaningful and moral decisions, especially during states of emergence.

·       Leaders utilizing their acumen and attributes – values, style, behavior and character – to improve the presence of communities-as-destinations, their overall appeal and image, while providing the essential resources (on climate change, for example) and being continuously involved in their renewal, revitalization, and transformation.

Leaders and managers whether associated with the management of DMOS, ministries of tourism, recreation, culture, parks, or heritage; transportation, economic and regional development agencies; business improvement districts, convention, visitor, and better business bureaus - including a wide swath of hotels, attractions, restaurants, retail establishments, banks and scores of SMAs - have a huge impact on the degree to which travel and tourism benefit our collective well-being – personally, emotionally, socially, culturally, economically, and environmentally.

And yet, as we know all too well, specific oversight and governance of communities-as-destinations can be flawed and highly fragmented…due in part to, insufficient interconnectivity among the multitude of tourism’s sectoral layers and exacerbated by leaders setting unrealistic expectations and whose concerns and compensation are based primarily on the profitability of their individual fiefdoms.  Leaders who can be insensitive to the deeper and broader needs of their communities.

Indeed, it was in partial response to these realities that led Destinations International to call on their members to create and demonstrate Community Shared Value, and for the UNWTO to recommend strengthening the management and governance of communities-as-destinations. 

And while destination management differs from destination governance, what’s rarely considered is that it’s the combinational and cascading impact of the collective behavior and decisions made by leaders and managers (as well as a community’s citizens) throughout their individual enterprises and tourism clusters, that ultimately determines whether communities succeed as destinations…whether value is created or destroyed.

We all want our communities-as-destinations to excel.  To do so, the approach to leading and managing them differs from the ways in which we manage our individual businesses or organizations.  Because tourism affects the lives and livelihoods of most citizens, including all aspects of community life, we must manage and govern them in ways that are good for the community, as well as for our individual organizations and industry sectors.

When stated this way, leading and managing tourism as a cluster (or non-cluster) begins by acknowledging that a destination’s success is dependent on its relational interdependencies …recognition that what the other does, or does not do, affects everyone.  Hence the urgency to learn and develop a more realistic culture of growth (not solely performance obsessed) that necessitates a harmonious co-existence and seeks to build and enhance a community’s capabilities. 

In this sense, the management of communities-as-destinations requires a convivial approach that fosters and achieves a ‘co-becoming’ of communities-as-destinations.  A form of cluster leadership that values engagement, collaboration, innovation, and adaptation (for example, through catalytic specialization and  civic entrepreneurialism)…all processes requiring the involvement of key stakeholders and leaders focused on building and strengthening everyone’s potential. Everyone desiring and preferring to learn from their peers and mentors.

While these and related topics are subjects for far-reaching, future discussions within Destinations-in-Action and its Networks, they do alter and broaden our appreciation for what’s known as ‘executive presence’ - the characteristics of exemplary leaders (as revealed in the book Inner Mastery, Outer Impact) that can make a difference and undo indifference. 

A presence that reminded me of my mother’s plea: Michael, “Mind your Ps and Qs”.  A quaint notion that seems like a throwback to earlier generations, but more appropriate today than ever.  Why? It’s not that leaders neglect the importance of manners, etiquette, and their obligations, responsibilities to the common good, but that greater emphasis has to be put on how leaders and organizations should behave and ‘present’ themselves as hosts and guardians.

The movers-and-shakers of our communities-as-destinations who need and want to eradicate their depiction as “chaos-makers”, seeking preference for being and becoming purveyors of hope and excellence.  Trying not only to rebuild their companies as communities, but to help re-invigorate and re-vitalize the very communities in which they operate and serve.  Leaders and managers making the effort to strengthen their community’s social infrastructures, taking their civic duties seriously.

A view that is attentive to tourism’s transgressions and the repercussions of any second and third-order ripple effects, especially their scope and scale on communities and a vast range of tourism-dependent enterprises.  Leaders and decision-makers anxious to figure out how to work more collaboratively with critics whose perspective about problems may differ, yet who need to be involved in their rectification and implementation.

If communities-as-destinations are to tune-in not tune-out, evolve not succumb, it’s essential that everyone learn to more effectively communicate their concerns with each other, especially those who have agency to undertake or influence improvements or change.  

Indeed, this was the rationale for launching Destinations-in-Action.  Communities-as-destinations require a platform for the exchange of views and experiences associated with the leadership and management of communities-as-destinations and the necessity to encourage civic engagement and civility around tourism.

Effective leadership begins when everyone works diligently to put their ‘inner mastery’ to use.  Though the goal may be to optimize the benefits offered through tourism, it would be definitively smarter if priority were given to clarifying and focusing on the outcomes and results deemed important for all stakeholders in communities-as-destinations.   An approach that might change attitudes toward tourism development as a means of embellishing, not harming or imposing on a community-way-of-life.  Outcomes and results which few communities-as-destinations need to define in transformative or transcendent terms, not solely transactional ones. 

Which led me to wonder:  What then are the Ps and Qs that leaders should be more attentive to, if they are to:

·       Determine and clarify the ‘why’ of tourism?

·       Deliver what communities-as-destinations want tourism to be, to do?

·       Develop the concepts, capabilities and connections that will allow everyone to succeed?   

·       Demonstrate outcome-oriented, result-based leadership appropriate for communities?

·       Build pathways to resilience as the foundation to achieving sustainable prosperity?

·       Create community shared value that delivers meaningful returns-for-community?

·       Design communities that create beautiful experiences and places for hosts and guests?

·       Abolish deleterious policies and practices, and revitalize the degradation of place?

·       Ensure transparency and accountability?

·       Succeed in undertaking ground-breaking transformation?

Questions that elevate inquiry as an essential skill in probing for answers, unleashing creativity and making happen that otherwise would not. Strategic questions that are investigative (what’s known?), speculative (what if?), productive (now what?), interpretative (so what?), and subjective (what`s unsaid?).

In response to the questions posed, and based on my research, observations and experiences, I have noted that it’s always the Qs – quantity and quality – that tend to be front-and-center when leadership is put to the test. So, let’s begin there.

Do note, my intention here is simply to highlight, to provide a sampling of ideas…hoping                                         that each P and Q will become a thematic construct, or subject of interest for more research            detailed thought, articles or opinions.