The Tyranny of Urgency: Why Many Hotels Are Busy but Poorly Managed

There are days in a hotel when you arrive first thing in the morning, start dealing with issues before you have even taken off your jacket, and discover, ten hours later, that you have worked intensely without making any meaningful progress on what you had planned. An unexpected absence, a room that is not ready, a supplier who has not delivered, an escalating complaint, a reservation nobody can find, a group changing its schedule, a maintenance issue, a cash discrepancy, someone needing approval, and twenty messages marked urgent. You finish exhausted. And, paradoxically, satisfied because you have solved many things. For years, I thought those particularly intense days were a sign of efficiency. Today, I see them differently. One of the most important lessons the hospitality industry has taught me is that activity and productivity are not synonymous. Nor are speed and good management. We can have a hotel full of people rushing around, phones ringing, impromptu meetings, emails, messages and constant decisions and yet make very little progress. In fact, some of the most disorganised hotels I have known were also extraordinarily active places. Everyone was busy. That was precisely the problem: no one had time to stop and prevent the same problems from happening again tomorrow. The very nature of the business pushes us towards this dynamic. A hotel operates twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and delivers its service at the same time the guest consumes it. We cannot store tonight’s room to sell it tomorrow, delay breakfast by three hours because we have had a problem, or ask the guest to come back the following week when we are less busy. The operation demands an immediate response. This characteristic makes a certain degree of urgency unavoidable. But that is precisely why we must clearly distinguish between the urgencies inherent to the business and the urgencies created by the way we manage it. Moreover, we are working at a time when pressure on teams remains considerable. In a survey conducted among US hoteliers in early 2026, more than half reported operating with insufficient staffing levels, and 42% cited staff shortages as one of their main operational challenges. Labour costs, supplies, energy and demand volatility also feature among the sector’s main concerns. These are AHLA figures which, although they relate to the US market, describe pressure that many hoteliers will readily recognise. That is why I believe one of the greatest challenges in contemporary hotel management is getting the organisation to stop living exclusively in the immediate present. Because when everything is urgent, nothing is truly a priority. And when most of our management capacity is consumed by solving what has just happened, we stop devoting time to what should define our work: anticipating, deciding, organising, developing people, improving processes and preparing the hotel we will need tomorrow.

When solving problems becomes our way of managing

There is a scene that repeats itself far too often in hospitality. Someone walks into an office and says: “We have a problem.” The usual reaction is to ask immediately: “What happened?” Over time, I have learned that there is a more important question: Why does this problem need to reach this level? This does not mean disengaging. It means analysing the organisation’s architecture. If every minor operational conflict needs to be escalated through several management levels, we probably do not just have an operational problem. We have a problem with delegation, skills, procedures, information or authority. I remember periods when I felt particularly useful because I was constantly intervening. I would solve an issue at reception, help make a decision in F&B, answer a commercial question, review a rate, approve a purchase, attend to an unhappy guest and, five minutes later, be speaking with maintenance. I could end the day thinking: today I have been involved in everything. Until I understood that the phrase contained a contradiction. If I need to be involved in everything, the system depends too heavily on me. And an organisation that depends excessively on certain individuals may function very well while those people are available, but it is a fragile organisation. The hospitality industry has a certain fascination with the professional who puts out fires. We value those who know how to react, find solutions quickly and step in when things become difficult. And those capabilities are necessary. I too want people close to me who can react when something genuinely unexpected happens. The danger lies in turning the firefighter into our management model. Because the best operational fire is not the one we resolve brilliantly. It is the one we ensure never happens again. This is where a fundamental difference emerges between resolving an incident and managing a root cause. If a room is not ready when the guest arrives, we can solve the problem. We may change the allocation, invite the guest to wait in another area, prioritise the room or offer a goodwill gesture. Perfect. But then the interesting questions should begin: why did it happen? Was it a late departure? An inaccurate forecast? An unsuitable distribution of work? Did communication between reception and housekeeping fail? Were there too many priority rooms? Was the arrival time recorded? Are we systematically selling an operational promise that our structure cannot deliver? The first response recovers the guest relationship. The following ones improve the hotel. And they are not the same thing. Here I find an idea from Lean thinking particularly useful: identifying which activities genuinely create value and which generate waste, waiting, unnecessary movement, rework or errors. Applied correctly in hospitality, this does not mean turning a hotel into a factory. It means humbly observing how much energy we spend each day doing twice something that could have been done properly once. Every recurring incident consumes capacity. Every clarification that could be avoided consumes capacity. Every unnecessary approval consumes capacity. Every piece of data someone has to enter again consumes capacity. Every meeting without a decision consumes capacity. Every foreseeable last-minute change consumes capacity. And that capacity has a cost that rarely appears clearly identified in the profit and loss account. We call it stress. We call it lack of time. We call it “today has been a difficult day”. But economically, it is organisational inefficiency. When we are constantly reacting, we begin by sacrificing the activities whose results are not immediate. Training can wait. Reviewing the customer journey can wait. Commercial planning can wait. The one-to-one conversation with a team member can wait. Reputation analysis can wait. Preventive maintenance can wait. Forecast review can wait. Updating procedures can wait. Reflecting on positioning can wait. The problem is that everything that can wait is usually precisely what prevents future problems. This is how a rather perverse cycle begins. We do not have time to improve because we have too many problems. And we have too many problems because we cannot find time to improve. There is another, less visible consequence: the organisation quickly learns which behaviour management truly rewards. We may say we want autonomy, but if every decision ends up being reviewed from above, we teach dependence. We may ask for initiative, but if we correct those who make decisions without consulting us, we teach defensive caution. We may talk about accountability, but if every mistake triggers an immediate search for someone to blame, we teach concealment. We may insist that middle managers should lead, but if we constantly intervene in their departments, we turn them into conveyors of instructions. An organisation’s culture is built far less through speeches than through the behaviours we repeat and tolerate every day. That is why the role of middle managers is decisive. Gallup has pointed out for years that the direct manager can explain around 70% of the variation in team engagement levels. Its global data for 2025 also place the percentage of employees engaged in their work at just 20% worldwide and 12% in Europe. It is not hospitality-specific data, but it seems particularly relevant to our sector, where much of the guest experience depends precisely on the day-to-day behaviour of people working under pressure. When the middle manager spends the day putting out fires, they are not leading either. They are covering shifts. Filling absences. Answering messages. Looking for supplies. Resolving incidents. Chasing information. Managing changes. And all of that may be necessary on some days. The problem arises when it becomes their actual job description. Then we have excellent supervisors turned into emergency coordinators, department heads turned into utility employees, and managers who know exactly what happened this morning but have very little time to ask themselves what should happen in three months’ time. There is also a modern form of urgency that we do not always recognise as such: constant interruption. Messages. Emails. Chats. Calls. Notifications. Questions. “Do you have a minute?” Microsoft estimated in its 2025 Work Trend Index that, in the knowledge-intensive jobs analysed, a person receives an interruption related to meetings, emails or messages on average approximately every two minutes during their working day. The same study found that 80% of surveyed workers said they lacked the time or energy needed to do their work, while 53% of managers said they needed to increase productivity. It is not a study of hotels, and we should not extrapolate it literally to our operations, but it aptly describes a paradox we also experience: we demand greater productivity while continually fragmenting the attention required to achieve it. In a hotel, this fragmentation can be even more intense because we combine digital communication with physical operations. You walk towards reception thinking about a commercial decision. You are stopped by an incident. While you resolve it, a message comes in. Then you remember that you needed to call someone. Another matter then arises. An hour later, you are doing something completely different. We have not stopped working for a single minute. But neither have we been able to think uninterruptedly for twenty minutes. And leading requires thinking. It seems obvious, although sometimes we need to remind ourselves. The value of someone managing a hotel should not be measured by the number of matters that pass through their hands every day, but by the quality of an organisation capable of making good decisions even when they are not there. This requires abandoning another deeply rooted idea: that being informed means participating in everything. I do not need to decide everything to know what is happening. I need good information systems, indicators, accountable managers and escalation mechanisms. There is a huge difference between control and centralisation. Control makes it possible to know whether an organisation is moving in the right direction. Centralisation requires one person to constantly decide how it should move forward. The former can scale. The latter eventually becomes overloaded. That is why, when I analyse an overly reactive hotel, I normally look for a few very specific signs:

The same problems appear repeatedly. If an incident recurs, it stops being an incident and begins to become a poorly designed process. Recording recurring issues is much more useful than celebrating each individual solution.
Too many decisions are escalated unnecessarily. When capable people need authorisation for routine matters, speed declines and the organisation learns not to take risks.
Meetings are used to exchange information, not to make decisions. An operational meeting should identify deviations, owners, actions and deadlines.
Managers permanently cover operational roles. At certain times, that is part of hospitality. When it happens structurally, the issue stops being solidarity with the team and becomes one of staffing, organisation or planning.
There are no explicit priorities. If every department considers its needs equally urgent, the person in charge becomes a permanent referee.
The hero is rewarded more than the system designer. We recognise those who brilliantly solve a crisis, but rarely celebrate those who have built a process through which that crisis no longer occurs.
Exceptions become procedure. When we repeat exceptions without turning them into policy, we create arbitrariness, uncertainty and more queries.
Too much work relies on memory and conversations. “I told them”, “I thought they knew”, “I thought someone else was doing it” and “nobody told me” are phrases that usually point to a process failure.
Planning always loses out to operations. If we never find time for forecasting, preventive maintenance, training, reputation analysis, commercial strategy or people development, perhaps we do not have a diary problem. We have a priorities problem.
The hotel operates better when certain people are present. When the difference is substantial, knowledge, authority or information is excessively concentrated in specific individuals.

One of the best indicators of maturity in a hotel organisation, therefore, is not how many problems it knows how to solve. It is how many problems it stops generating.

How to recover time to lead the hotel

Escaping the tyranny of urgency does not mean filling the hotel with procedures or trying to anticipate absolutely everything. Hospitality needs flexibility. Guests are not industrial processes, teams are not machines, and unexpected circumstances will always arise. The aim is different: to reserve our ability to react for what is truly unforeseeable. This begins by distinguishing three types of situations. There are genuine incidents, which could hardly have been anticipated. There are recurring problems, which should already have a defined response. And there are structural failures, which will continue to generate incidents until we change the system causing them. Confusing them is costly. When a structural failure is treated every day as a new incident, the organisation spends hundreds of hours managing symptoms. That is why I recommend something surprisingly simple: for a few weeks, record whatever forces you to interrupt planned work. There is no need to build a complex system. It is enough to note what happened, which department was involved, how much time it consumed, who had to intervene and whether it had happened before. The information is usually revealing. After a few weeks, we will probably discover that a significant proportion of our urgent issues belong to just a few families of problems. And that gives us a fantastic opportunity. Because recurrence makes design possible. If the problem occurs frequently, we can create a standard. If it requires a frequent decision, we can establish a criterion. If it requires repeated authorisation, we can delegate it. If it causes repeated doubts, we can train. If it generates waiting times, we can redesign the flow. If it stems from insufficient information, we can improve how it is shared. This change may seem small, but it transforms the culture. We move from asking “Who will solve it?” to asking “What must we change so that it does not need to be solved again?”. That second question is one of the most powerful management tools I know. The next element is clarifying priorities. I have taken part in many meetings where every department presents its important issues. They all are important. Sales needs to sell. Revenue needs to protect rate. Operations needs capacity. F&B needs margin. Housekeeping needs resources. Maintenance needs investment. Human Resources needs stability. Finance needs control. The conflict does not necessarily mean that someone is wrong. It means that management consists precisely of deciding between legitimate objectives competing for the same resources. That is why we need shared priorities. Not twenty. Perhaps three or four. If, over the next ninety days, we want to improve reputation, control a particular cost and increase direct bookings, those priorities should be visible in weekly decisions. Otherwise, we have strategy in PowerPoint and urgency in the operation. Strategy truly begins to exist when it helps us decide what we will not do. I also recommend thoroughly reviewing the way we conduct meetings. I have seen one-hour daily meetings that could have been resolved in fifteen minutes, and three-hour monthly meetings from which nobody left with a specific decision. An operational meeting needs rhythm. What has changed? What is off target? Why? What are we going to do? Who will do it? When will we review the result? When these questions structure the conversation, we stop constantly talking about the hotel and start managing the hotel. The same principle should apply to metrics. We do not necessarily need more KPIs. We need KPIs that trigger useful conversations. Occupancy, ADR and RevPAR can tell us a great deal about room revenue, but very little about why reception is overloaded at certain times. A reputation score may remain stable while a specific incident begins to recur. Labour cost may be within budget while overtime, turnover or absenteeism increase. Productivity may improve while we erode part of the experience. That is why I always try to combine outcome indicators with process indicators. If we want to improve the arrival experience, in addition to reputation we can monitor rooms pending at a particular time, average waiting time, room changes, allocation incidents or the number of guests affected. If we want to improve housekeeping, in addition to cost per room we can look at rework, rejected rooms, unproductive time, incidents and workload distribution. If we want to improve F&B, in addition to average spend we can analyse waste, service times, productivity by time slot, sales mix or the recurrence of certain complaints. Every indicator should help us answer a question. If we do not know what decision would change after seeing it, perhaps we do not need to measure it. There is another essential transformation: giving authority alongside accountability. We often ask teams to “take ownership”. But accountability without decision-making authority can simply become frustration. If someone has to resolve a situation but needs authorisation for every possible alternative, they do not have real accountability. They have an obligation to escalate. To delegate properly, we must establish a framework: what you can decide, up to what limit, which criteria you must use, which situations you must escalate, what information you must record and when we will review the decisions made. This approach radically changes the relationship with managers. The manager stops constantly asking for permission and begins to exercise judgement. Naturally, they will sometimes make mistakes. We all do. The important question will then be whether the mistake occurred because information, training, judgement or clarity was lacking, or simply because a reasonable decision produced an unexpected result. We should not penalise those five situations in the same way. A culture that penalises every mistake generates an entirely predictable consequence: nobody makes any decision without authorisation. And then we end up exactly where we started. Another aspect I consider fundamental is protecting certain spaces for management work. It took me years to understand this. For a long time, I felt somewhat uncomfortable if I was working alone in an office while there was activity outside. It seemed I should always be visible, accessible and resolving something. Today, I believe precisely the opposite. There are times when one of the best things I can do for an organisation is close a door for an hour and think. Analyse the following month. Review a budget. Study a variance. Prepare a conversation. Read guest comments. Review a commercial strategy. Design a process. Think about a person with potential. Question a decision we are taking for granted. That is work too. In fact, it is probably one of the parts of our work with the greatest capacity to multiply results. We should not confuse presence with contribution. One hour dedicated to eliminating a recurring cause can save one hundred operational hours during the year. That is the true leverage of management. I have also learned to distrust one phrase: “We have always done it this way.” In hospitality, there are procedures that survive for years simply because nobody has time to question them. Reports that someone prepares and nobody uses. Unnecessary signatures. Duplicated information. Inherited authorisations. Meetings whose purpose nobody remembers. Controls created after an incident that occurred ten years ago. Manual tasks maintained out of habit. Each one seems small. Together, they create bureaucracy. And bureaucracy does not usually appear all at once. It builds up, one layer at a time. That is why it is worth periodically asking each department: What do we do today that you would stop doing tomorrow if you could? The answers can be extraordinarily interesting. It does not mean automatically eliminating whatever is inconvenient. It means discovering where the team perceives activities that consume effort without delivering sufficient value. Sometimes we will find waste. At other times, we will discover that the task is necessary, but nobody has explained why. In both cases, we will have learned something. Finally, there is a particularly delicate cultural issue. We have to stop excessively admiring well-resolved chaos. A difficult day can happen. A challenging season can happen. An extraordinary unforeseen event may require us all to do something outside our remit. That is part of this business and, in a way, part of its beauty. What we should not accept is for everyday heroism to replace organisation. When someone constantly manages to keep an impossible operation running, as well as congratulating them, we should ask why it was impossible. When a department systematically requires extraordinary efforts, perhaps the problem is not that we need even more extraordinary people. Perhaps we need a better-designed organisation. Over time, I have ended up using a very simple test to evaluate my own way of working: looking at my diary after a particularly intense week. If almost all my time has been devoted to incidents, authorisations, messages, immediate problems and matters other people could have resolved, I try not to congratulate myself too much on how hard I have worked. I prefer to ask myself what I am doing to make the following week different. Because our role is not merely to ensure that today goes well; it is also to increase the likelihood that tomorrow will require less intervention. I would also advise closely observing the interruptions each manager receives over a week. Not to stop teams from speaking with us, but to identify patterns. Behind ten similar questions, there is usually a decision we have not yet delegated. Behind five similar mistakes, there is usually a process we need to review. Behind several queries about the same issue, there is usually information we have not communicated properly. Interruptions can become one of the best maps of our management problems if we stop viewing them solely as nuisances. And there is one final discipline I try not to forget. When a particularly difficult day ends, in addition to asking what we have managed to resolve, it is worth spending a few minutes on another question: what have we learned today that will enable us to manage better tomorrow? If we make that reflection a habit, urgency gradually stops governing the organisation. We will continue to have difficult days, unpredictable guests, unexpected absences and situations that were not covered by any procedure. That will remain hospitality. The difference is that we will be able to devote our energy to those exceptions because we will have stopped unnecessarily creating our own emergencies.

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