Successful spa leadership that utilises a creative mindset can drive spa profitability, according to Daniel Friedland, MD and principal of workplace wellness consultancy SuperSmartHealth.
Friedland addressed an audience of spa professionals at the Professional Spa and Wellness conference this week in London, and spoke on the topic of ‘Neuroplasticity, neuroleadership and peak performance programmes for spas.’
He began his presentation by saying that when he enters a spa, the first thing he asks himself is ‘Does this place have a soul?’
“If the answer is yes, you can track that back to the leaders – either the manager or the owners that are breathing the life and soul into the place,” he said. “High-performance leadership drives a culture of engagement, that then yields profoundly rich experiences, the byproduct of which is a highly profitable enterprise.”
Friedland detailed the difference between reactive, low-performance leaders and creative, high-performance leaders.
Creative leaders are achievement-oriented, said Friedland, with a purpose and vision that allows them to be strategically focused and decisive, and to get results. They relate and collaborate well, are authentic, systems-aware and self-aware.
“They are leaders in service to something higher than themselves,” he explained. “Leaders with a creative mindset are more effective.”
Reactive leaders, by contrast, are overly compliant – they want to please everybody and not take a stand – or they’re highly protective or controlling, often driven to prove self-worth, and perfectionistic. Rather than being in service to something higher than themselves, low-performance leaders are in service to themselves.
These two different styles of leadership translate into the culture of an organisation, said Friedland. And while leaders who score better on the creative side are perceived to be more effective leaders – and leaders who are more reactive are perceived to be less effective – Friedland cautioned that we all have aspects of both sides in our personalities.
“We all relate to both, because these qualities map to very specific regions of our brain that we all have,” he explained.
Reactivity plays to our survival brain, creating impulses of fight and flight, and often comes into play when we feel threatened by stress and self-doubt, Friedland said.
“This is almost like a default setting when we’re under threat,” he explained.
But, he said, it’s possible to learn how to reliably cultivate strength of mind to live in the creative side more and more.
“What pulls us more towards reactivity is our experience with stress and self doubt,” he said. “Specifically when we feel threatened by stress.”
Friedland said that with the right training, we can learn how to use stress as creative fuel.
“The foundation for all of this is mindfulness,” he said. “You have to be able to pay attention to what’s happening in the current moment.”
It also requires having a different internal dialogue when the reactive mind picks up, and learning how to think differently in moments of stress – something Friedland addresses in the ‘4 in 4 Framework’ programme offered by SuperSmartHealth.
