By Caitlin McKenna, CEO, Arch Amenities Group
We tend to describe exceptional leaders through a familiar collection of characteristics. And, admittedly, I’m not a fan of corporate or motivational speak to define such qualities:
Vision. Discipline. Resilience.
Yes, I recognize the importance of these words and capacities. But the longer I have had the privilege of participating in and leading within the industry I love, the less convinced I am that exceptional leaders share a single prescribed set of characteristics or skills. What I have learned is that exceptional leaders are consistently coherent, for the moment in time.
Leadership is not synonymous with title or status. Leadership begins, in part, by organizing uncertainty, expertise, and care as principal practice. And that means bringing people into coordination with integrity for the clarity we are seeking or the discipline we are crafting.
One of the great privileges of leading across varied disciplines for the past two-plus decades in a range of capacities is that, over time, you begin to recognize excellence in quieter places.
What We Mean by Presence
Leaders inherently recognize the value of their role.
I have seen massage therapists perform something close to genius through human touch. I have seen managers with an almost excruciating attention to detail protect the experience of thousands of people they may never meet. I have watched fitness instructors change the energy of a room of fifty people who suddenly start feeling their own potential. I have seen VPs agonize over every line item in a budget and still show up for the next round of revisions as though the work is a community responsibility.
The list of “exceptional” is long and how marvelous, really, the inability to count. Leadership has names, less title. Some command rooms. Some quietly change them. Both are incredibly valuable.
The future of wellness will not be built simply by accumulating more modalities. It will be shaped by our ability to understand what belongs where, for whom, and why. The right offering is not simply the newest innovation, and the loudest trend is not necessarily the most efficacious one.
In our industry, rather, standards become personal. Accountability becomes less about obligation and more about the fact that we genuinely care about how our role influences collective success.
That is leadership.
Presence requires relentless pursuit of integrity. Formation of repeatable practice. Critical discernment. Investment across multiple dimensions.
To lead and work in wellness is a privilege. And a standard is how you actually honor it.
It has a direct effect on lives and how people experience the art of being.
Presence in How We Design
Leading with wellness therefore requires us to ask better questions. Who are we serving? What are they actually seeking? What does the evidence tell us? How does it honestly make someone feel? I have found that those who begin with people at the core tend to create the most meaningful impact over time. That does not mean abandoning discipline, economics, or performance. Quite the opposite. It means understanding the end-user deeply enough to build with intention for the betterment of all participating.
In our consulting practice, for example, we are building world-class wellness concepts, brands, and spaces, but that doesn’t come from just understanding the aesthetic. Rather, it’s having passionately accumulated immense data and detail over time. A true subject matter expert does not arrive with that title without having investigated every corner of possibility enough that they can articulate new, inspiring, and meaningful solutions. The human capacity to deliver inspiration, experience, and vision as a product, takes grooming and integration of a lifetime of focus.
Presence in How We Operate
Steadiness is not rigidity. Actually, steadiness is largely unseen continuity while the world around continues to change, disrupt, and evolve. And in the wellness and hospitality industries, we all know the speed of change is tremendous.
I have watched aestheticians, housekeeping, bartenders, energy healers, accounting managers, recruitment coordinators, baristas, directors, partners, and clients take extraordinary ownership of the role they play, completely present for the moment in time. They see the importance of their platform. They develop ownership, and their standards become personal. Accountability becomes less about obligation and more about the fact that they genuinely care how their role influences collective success.
Our goal is to support our teams’ capacity to deliver the most qualified wellness experience for the period our industry is in.
This Shows Up on the Balance Sheet
I know how this can sound from the outside, like a nice philosophy that doesn’t move a P&L. Here’s what happens, in numbers, when a company actually leads with wellness instead of just offering it.
Gallup’s most recent State of the Global Workplace report puts global employee engagement at just 21 percent, its lowest level since 2020, and estimates the resulting drag on productivity at $10 trillion a year worldwide, about 9 percent of global GDP. That’s the cost of the absence of presence, at scale.
The upside case is just as real. The McKinsey Health Institute, working with the World Economic Forum, estimates that closing the workplace wellbeing gap could unlock up to $11.7 trillion in global economic value, and their research found that employees with strong wellbeing and tenure produce meaningfully more than newer, less supported colleagues, in some studies 12 to 30 percent more.
In hospitality specifically, this isn’t theoretical. Research on employee experience in hotels has found the same pattern at Marriott properties: hotels with higher employee satisfaction scores post higher guest satisfaction scores, and higher guest satisfaction tracks directly with stronger RevPAR. The people delivering the experience and the experience itself are not two different line items. They’re the same line item.
And capital already knows it. The Global Wellness Institute now values the global wellness real estate market at $584 billion as of 2024, forecast to more than double to $1.1 trillion by 2029. That’s not a niche amenity trend. That’s one of the fastest-growing categories in commercial real estate, full stop.
Some of the most powerful leadership is less visible, but rather embedded throughout the entire organization or industry. They are found in the people most willing to ensure the parts are cared for as much as the summation. Or conversely, to those willing to understand the whole substantially enough to care for the way its parts come together. Wellness, of all industries, cannot exclude one for the other. Instead, the whole relies on its component parts to see to the best possible outcome.
The best leaders I have known also tend to see cause and effect as part of a larger pattern. They understand that decisions rarely exist in complete isolation; every system communicates with another system. Every choice creates an effect that goes far beyond the immediate view. Leadership, then, is in large part the work of enabling alignment in people across disciplines that otherwise seem comfortably siloed or situated in isolation.
They are found in the people most willing to ensure the parts are cared for as much as the summation. Or conversely, to those willing to understand the whole substantially enough to care for the way its parts come together.
Wellness, of all industries, cannot exclude one for the other. Instead, the whole relies on the integrity of its component parts to see to the best possible outcome.
Wellness as a personal matter, an organizational matter, and an industry matter is when the respective ecology is alive enough to sustain itself.
