I get asked about the phrase a lot. Lead With Soul It’s a phrase that sits at the intersection of hospitality leadership — and the idea I keep coming back to no matter what room I’m standing in.
But what does it actually mean?
I spent thirty years in crisis rooms — disaster recovery, business continuity, organizations under the kind of pressure that reveals exactly who people are when the stakes are highest and the cameras are off. I was there for 9/11. I was there for Katrina. I was there at 3am when the phones wouldn’t stop and nobody had a good answer and the person at the front of the room had to hold it together anyway.
What I learned in those rooms didn’t come from a leadership book. It came from watching what happened when leaders ran out of the thing underneath the performance.
Call it soul. Call it purpose. Call it the reason you showed up in the first place. Whatever you call it — when it’s gone, everyone in the room knows it before the leader does.
When the Soul Runs Out
Then I stopped chasing points.
No more corporate hotels with loyalty programs and room service menus that taste like every other city. No more conference center restaurants where the lighting is fluorescent and the server has said the same three specials so many times they’ve stopped hearing themselves say it.
I started seeking out the boutique hotels, the family wineries, the owner-operated restaurants — and yes, even the occasional dive bar where someone behind the stick actually wants to know your name. I grew up outside Boston. I have spent my whole life looking for my next Cheers bar — the next Sam Malone, the next Carla, the next Coach. I want to be Norm. I want to walk through a door and hear my name before I say a word.
What I Found in Hospitality Leadership Instead
What I found in those places changed how I think about leadership entirely.
That longing is what I built Vianarra around — finding the places that still do this, and helping the ones that don’t find their way back to it.
The commercial settings — the big boxes, the chains, the properties optimized for efficiency and scale — are almost uniformly soulless. Not because the people in them are bad. But because soul can’t be franchised. It can’t be standardized. It can’t survive a brand standards audit.
It lives in the places that chose depth over scale. Story over script. The host who stays twenty minutes past closing because the conversation was worth it.
A cellar in Tuscany where someone put an arm around my shoulder and said we have been through this before without being asked.
Lead With Soul: The Hospitality Leadership Standard
What I found surprised me — though in hindsight it shouldn’t have.
The best leaders I’ve ever seen in a crisis and the best hosts I’ve ever encountered in a tasting room are doing exactly the same thing.
They’re present. Not performing presence — actually present. There’s a difference and every guest, every direct report, every person who has ever sat across from someone who was truly paying attention knows what that difference feels like.
They know their story and they’re not afraid to share it with a stranger. They make you feel like the most important person in the room without announcing it. And they’re running on something deeper than obligation and caffeine. That’s what Lead With Soul hospitality leadership looks like under pressure.
I once watched a tasting room manager at a small family winery in Healdsburg spend forty minutes with a couple who hadn’t planned to buy anything. She knew the story of every block in the vineyard. She knew why her grandfather planted Zinfandel when everyone around him was pulling it out. She talked about the hard years the way you talk about something you’ve made peace with. Lead With Soul hospitality leadership isn’t a concept I invented at a desk. I found it at a bar.
They joined the wine club before they reached the parking lot.
That’s not sales technique. That’s Lead With Soul applied to a tasting room on a Tuesday afternoon.
In Stop Leading on Empty I wrote about what happens when leaders lose that — when the soul drains out and the performance continues on fumes. The research is consistent across industries. The cost shows up first in the quality of presence. Then in decision-making. Then in the people around them who start quietly looking for the exit.
I’ve seen it in hospital corridors. I’ve seen it in corporate boardrooms. I’ve seen it behind a tasting room bar when the owner has poured the same story so many times it stopped being a story and became a script.
The cost is the same in every room.
Lead With Soul isn’t a wellness program. It’s not about balance or boundaries or any of the words that get attached to leadership conversations when someone runs out of something more useful to say.
It’s about the four things that keep leaders — and the best hosts — operating at the level their people and their guests deserve.
Lead With Soul — The Standard That Doesn’t Change
Presence. Purpose. Renewal. Service.
Not as a checklist. As a standard.
One that applies whether you’re leading a crisis team through a Category 5 hurricane or a tasting room team through a Saturday afternoon in July.
The room changes. The people change. The pressure changes.
The standard doesn’t.
If you’re in the hospitality world and this resonates — Vianarra was built for you. You’ll find it at vianarra.kit.com
Stop Leading on Empty — Book 1 in the Lead With Soul series — is available on Amazon. If it sounds like something worth reading or giving to someone who needs it, you’ll find it at the link below.