What is a glass sofa?
Have you ever noticed how business has a fascination with glass? I don’t mean hospitality’s reliance on it for serving drinks and the fact that asking for ‘a mug of lager and a cup of wine, please’ sounds rather odd.
Glass seems to be everywhere in business. The glass ceiling stops people moving up. The glass cliff makes being at the top more precarious. The glass wall stops people moving across into different roles or opportunities.
I recently came across another absolutely fascinating glass metaphor in a LinkedIn post by leadership consultant and self-proclaimed Boardroom Whisperer Kate Davis. With thanks to Kate, I am going to shamelessly pinch it and take it into the world of hospitality.
A glass sofa is a problem people have become so used to that they no longer see it as something that should change. It becomes part of everyday working life, part of the furniture. Everybody knows it is there and has learned to tippy toe around it. Then someone new joins the business, walks straight into it and suffers the inevitable metaphorical bruises.
You do not have to be Albert Einstein to work out that the negative, nasty things an organisation tolerates say a great deal about its culture. But the point the glass sofa analogy makes is that sometimes people become so used to a problem they stop noticing that they are tolerating it. Get your head around that one!
What do glass sofas look like?
So, what sort of things are glass sofas? Here are just a few that I have come across over the years. I suspect you could think of one or two examples of your own.
- The regular customer who bullies members of staff but is allowed to get away with it because they spend a lot of money.
- The high-performing Operations Director who delivers exceptional results but leaves a trail of frightened GMs behind them.
- The Regional Manager whose visits fill every GM with dread.
- The chef who humiliates and berates waiting staff but gets away with it because the food is exceptional.
- The Managing Director who humiliates people in meetings because ‘that’s just their style.’
- The founder whose behaviour nobody challenges because ‘it’s their company.’
- The Purchasing Manager who treats a supplier like something stuck to the bottom of their shoe because ‘we’re the client.’
- The favourite who seems to play by different rules.
- The sexist joke that gets laughed off.
- The phrase, ‘That’s just how things are around here.’
And what do you see when glass sofas like these exist? Heads are bowed in meetings, collaboration and creativity do an Elvis and leave the building, and if you listen carefully enough you can actually hear the crunch, crunch, crunch of people walking on eggshells. Glass sofas may be invisible, but they can do a lot of damage.
You may have noticed I am rather partial to a metaphor, so allow me to throw one more into the mix before I let you get on with what is, no doubt, a busy day.
Would I be right in saying that every organisation has its elephants in the room? I think so. The good news is that hospitality is getting much better at talking about them and tackling them. Perhaps the one thing we really need to look out for is when the elephant in the room becomes the glass sofa.
How do you find them?
So, what could you do to find the glass sofas in your business? Oh no, brace yourself, there’s another metaphor coming. You could hire someone to have a really good look under the bonnet and report back, or you could roll up your sleeves and get under the bonnet yourself.
You could start by talking to the newest people in your business. Ask them what surprised them during their first few weeks, what made them think, ‘That’s a bit odd?’
Or ask those who are leaving. They will be able to tell you all about the glass sofas they have been giving the swerve to.
And once you’ve found them, do something about them. Smash them to smithereens.
Now that’s something we can all raise a glass to.
In summary
A glass sofa is a problem that has been around for so long that people stop seeing it as a problem at all. In hospitality, it could be the customer who bullies staff, the manager everyone dreads, the chef whose behaviour is excused because the food is exceptional, or simply the familiar phrase, ‘That’s just how things are around here.’ The danger is not only the behaviour itself, but the fact that people gradually learn to work around it. One of the best ways to spot a glass sofa is to ask the people who have just joined or those who are leaving. And once you find one, the message is simple: do something about it.
