Groot Hospitality

Julie Howe

Hospitality Culture Shaper

Julie Howe is Senior Vice President of People & Business Strategy at Groot Hospitality. She began her career in operations before transitioning into finance and later people strategy, giving her a unique perspective on the connection between business strategy and people strategy. Julie believes hospitality has taught her more than any classroom could, demonstrating that anyone can become anything, from a dishwasher to a CEO, a back waiter to a general manager or a hostess to a head of sales. She believes that with vision, there is no role in hospitality that is out of reach and that this creates enormous strategic value for leaders who recognize and develop talent. Seeing every side of the business and learning to think outside the box has enabled her to move fluently between the people and strategy functions, shaping a leadership approach grounded in operational understanding and business performance.

Building Business Leaders Through Operational Understanding

That belief shapes how I train my teams. Every HR employee of mine has to have experience in the front and back of house, because you can’t build effective policy for jobs you don’t understand. Operators often experience HR as a set of rules that defy operational logic and honestly, sometimes they’re right to feel that way. If we haven’t done the work to explain the why, they won’t buy what we are selling. Empathy has to run both directions, which is also why I expect every department leader, not just finance, to be able to read a P&L and scrub a balance sheet. You can’t contribute to strategic thinking if you don’t understand the numbers behind the strategy.

Having a Voice at the Leadership Table

A large part of my role as SVP of People and Business Strategy is being a direct line to ownership and the CEO, telling them plainly what I’m seeing in the business day to day and giving my honest read on it. But directness only works if it’s paired with humility, this is their company, built on their passion and their instincts and I can’t offer that feedback with an ego attached to whether they follow it. When my boss tells me, “I hear you, but I’m doing it my way,” I don’t get to sulk about it. I get behind the decision and support it fully. I think people misunderstand what “having a seat at the table” actually means. It isn’t about your recommendation winning. It’s about having the voice and the safety, to say what you’re seeing. I’m fortunate to have a boss who trusts and respects that voice enough that I’m always comfortable raising it and he’s just as fortunate to have someone who gets behind his decisions regardless of whether they match my own idea. That’s exactly how it should work. The value isn’t in being right, it’s in being heard and in being able to fully support the direction once it’s set.

“The value isn’t in being right; it’s in being heard, and in being able to fully support the direction once it’s set.”

The Cost of Losing Organizational Confidence

That same discipline, knowing when to speak up and when to fall in line, is what I try to teach ownership and executives about pacing decisions themselves. I’ve watched leadership give direction without thinking through the strategy behind it and it plays out one of three ways, no decision gets made, decisions take too long or the direction changes so many times that trust erodes across the organization. That erosion is costly. It cripples growth long before it shows up on a P&L. Confidence is the thread underneath all of it. Employees thrive when they’re confident in their leaders, their paycheck, the health of the company and themselves. Protecting that confidence is a strategic responsibility, not just a cultural one.

Training Before Titles

Nowhere does patience matter more than in promotions. The instinct is to elevate whoever works the longest hours and says yes to everything, but that employee is often trying to outwork insecurities or compensating for a skill gap. They are not necessarily your strongest future leader. The answer isn’t to overlook them, it’s to recognize that they care, then invest in the training and experience that sets them up to actually succeed before handing them the title. Think about a server, skip the training and it doesn’t matter how good the menu is or how ambitious the revenue goals are because they’ll approach every table afraid of a question they can’t answer, rather than take your guests through a tour of the menu, they hide from it. They certainly won’t upsell and your guest experience will be inconsistent. Train first and the results follow.

Leading Through Change

Looking ahead, AI is the trend I’d point to above all others, it is one of the most powerful tools available to any organization today. The companies that lean into it thoughtfully will pull away from the ones whose people either avoid it or misuse it out of uncertainty. AI can improve accuracy, efficiency, resourcefulness, creativity, the uses are as endless as the impacts strategically and culturally.

My advice to anyone who wants to lead at the intersection of people, culture and business strategy, go learn the operations, go learn the finance, go learn the market and learn to find your voice before you worry about your seat. Transparency, the discipline to make a decision and stick to it and the willingness to hire genuinely skilled people and then get out of their way, that’s the leadership that survives change. Everything else follows from there.