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The Goldstein file

Show why you are the captain

First and foremost, Goldstein doesn’t want to mince words about the No. 1 thing a leader needs to do to get other leaders behind him or her.

“If you accept the opportunity to be a senior leader of any organization, but certainly this one, you have to understand that you are being evaluated for whether you are exemplifying the principles that you are communicating out to the work force,” he says.

The bigger your organization gets, the more eyes you’re going to have on you in everything that you do. If you have one slip up or one promise that you’re going to do something that you end up just forgetting to do, it’s going to be remembered.

“A lot of it is how you conduct yourself every day,” Goldstein says. “If you do things people perceive as lack of integrity, you don’t get to erase that with your next nine days of doing the right thing. It’s irretrievable.”

Since you are the torchbearer, you are also responsible for creating a “wow” moment for your people. That moment is about making a stance on one of your core values that can resonate across your entire staff. Often Goldstein says these can take place when you have to make a change in course or when you’re a new leader.

“The first day that you’re in the new area, every person in that area knows more about that area than you do,” Goldstein says. “All of the sudden, you’re their supervisor and they’re all saying to themselves, ‘Why does this person who doesn’t know even what I know, why are they leading me now? I don’t understand this.’ Well, the way that you combat that is by showing that you are prepared to deal with issues that have been lingering, in some cases, for decades in that area without ever being addressed properly or corrected, that you’re willing to take on even the hardest challenges, and they start to think, ‘Wow, this is different. This might work better.’”

For Goldstein, one of those opportunities came about 10 years back when he took over hotel operations for Royal Caribbean. The company was getting ready to unveil its new ship, Voyager Of The Seas, and was looking to update the systems around compiling guest feedback. A few people had complained that some guests were being helped toward giving generous feedback by staff, so Goldstein decided he would tackle that by keeping employees away from the process entirely — by penalty of termination. The edict was clear and sent a sharp message. It also earned him a lunch with a director on the management team who didn’t think he’d have the daring to follow through.

“He said, ‘We don’t have the guts to do that here.’ I said, ‘Watch me,’” Goldstein says. “And he said, ‘It won’t work,’ and I said, ‘If you feel that way, probably this is not a good situation for you,’ and I didn’t fire him because he actually wanted to quit.

“And we never looked back. The ratings today are what the guests want to rate us, and we changed all kinds of protocols on the ship to hermetically seal the ratings process. And it’s doing those things where people say, ‘Whoa, this is really going to be different.’”