Savvy business leaders know that staying ahead of the curve often means identifying and nurturing the next generation of leaders and innovators. For Kimberly Grant, an executive with over 25 years of experience in the hospitality space, this is more than just a strategic imperative — it’s a personal commitment to pay mentorship forward.
Grant began her career as a waitress in a casual dining restaurant chain and quickly rose through the management ranks. She credits much of the velocity in her career path to influential mentors who identified her early on as having potential. These mentors would actively look to provide Grant with opportunities to learn and grow or to push her outside of her comfort zone.
“Potential mentors are all around us and not just women for women and men for men,” Grant shared. “If I didn’t have both strong male and female mentors along the way, I wouldn’t be who I am today and I think it is important to talk about the value in having diversity in mentorship as well as leadership.”
Potential or Performance? Both Matter
Identifying next-generation team leaders with high potential isn’t always straightforward. Many companies rely upon standardized evaluation processes like annual performance reviews or 9-box models — a common management tool in which employees are judged on potential and performance — to sift out exceptional talent, but in Kimberly Grant’s opinion, both tools are flawed, so she came up with her own innovative methods to fill her rosters with accomplished staffers.
“Like everyone, we were struggling to find talent post pandemic,” she shares of her time as the global head of restaurants and bars for Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts. “I said, ‘Let’s test posting jobs without calling out the brand. Let’s post jobs focused on describing the type of person we want because if the person is a happy, nice, kind, hospitable person, we’re going to teach them what they have to do to do the job. We don’t want somebody to say, “Well, I’ve never worked in luxury before, or I’ve never worked in a hotel before, so I’m not going to apply for the job.”’ I think that’s really what I realized, is that I’ve crossed sectors, and I’ve gone from restaurants to hotels to I’m on the board of a food distribution company, The talent we are all looking for to fill many roles is raw talent, our robust training programs can take care of the rest.
“I’ve come to appreciate that anyone that is a hard worker, that’s curious, that really is passionate about what they do can really do anything. And if you have a broad recruitment mindset, one that is willing to invest heavily in training and development, then all of a sudden finding talent is a lot easier than if you’re just looking for people who already work in your sector.
Grant believes that while performance can be a good indicator, it’s often insufficient. A successful next-gen leader must be able to galvanize others around a common goal and coach individuals to perform at a higher level as a unit. No different than a sports team, the best players don’t always make the best coaches — and the same is true in life and business.
Kimberly Grant and the Creativity of a Next-Gen Workforce
Having led global restaurant groups, Kimberly Grant understands what it takes to inspire the next generation of leadership in a high-performing organization. She points to another opportunity she often finds when joining a new organization — and how she champions a ‘team first’ solution that pleases management, staff, and, perhaps most importantly, customers.
“I think that sometimes we don’t realize the collateral damage that is done when companies hire consultancies at agencies and third parties to do all of the fun and creative work required for innovation., If you just look at your own team for some of these challenges, you’d be really amazed at what they would come up with,” she says.
”I was recently putting together a project in Italy for a new concept in a hotel and I said to the owner, ‘Well, we could get a celebrity chef for sure, but our company has five of the world’s best chefs in our own hotels that maybe aren’t celebrities, but they’re all Michelin-starred craftsmen in their own right. Why don’t we have five of them come together and create your concept instead of relying on one celebrity? Why don’t we make them the celebrities?’”
Grant found that when she gave her millennial and Zoomer staffers permission to share their ideas, it turned out great for all involved. “Not everyone’s creative,” she concedes, “but if you have a dynamic and a team, you’re going to find the individuals that are, and are innovative and thinking differently, and then they’ll get a lot of reward out of being asked to do that. This approach is great for retention so that’s usually my preferred source to get ideas from before going outside of the company.”
Inspiring Next-Gen Leaders
The challenge to find, develop, and inspire great talent can seem insurmountable in any business, but Kimberly Grant believes it always comes down to an executive’s ability to select strong, emerging leaders who innately understand how to nurture young talent and believe that anything they set their sights on is absolutely possible to achieve.
“My fundamental belief is that virtually none wakes up in the morning wanting to be average at what they do,” she muses. “Most people wake up in the morning wanting to be the best at what they do but sometimes come across things in life and work that demotivate them. At Four Seasons, I came up with this ‘mantra’ word that we used around quality, or the guest experience, and it was ‘epic’. What being epic stands for is these four words: excellence, passion, innovation, and creativity.
“And they’re all different, but all together is what makes something epic. That could be an epic cup of coffee, you could have an epic caviar dish, you could have an epic pizza. Epic’s epic. Epic is the best you’ve ever had, quality, and innovation, and creativity. These are all a part of creating an extraordinary experience. And so that’s how I see the difference between innovation and quality or excellence.”
