Kimberly Grant and Leveraging Teams to Impact on Hospitality Brands
Kimberly Grant remains a committed executive in the hospitality industry after more than 30 years of holding various leadership positions throughout food and beverage. From casual dining to luxury and bespoke experiences, Grant has demonstrated operational and financial acumen in spearheading strategies that bring growth to the brands she leads. Today, as an independent director for Performance Food Group (PFG), her input helps accelerate the expansion of the Fortune 100 company. The company has achieved a market cap of more than $10 billion during her tenure.
Grant credits a combination of her organizational approach and fostering skilled leadership teams with the success she has achieved in her career. With each engagement, she evaluates the impact the brand can have on the market space already identified, as well as areas for expansion. By establishing operating tenets, she provides a framework for businesses to define and direct their accomplishments with measurable, tangible results. “We created tenets that had to fulfill certain criteria before we could even consider it. And it wasn’t just for me, it was also for my leadership team,” explained Grant in a recent interview.
Kimberly Grant also strives to generate and achieve buy-in from key stakeholders in an organization, both in the C-Suite and beyond. Collaborating with subject matter experts can have a direct impact on a project’s viability, and Grant has shown that including teams from the ground up can lead to success at scale.
“When you show that you do believe in them and you do value what they can develop and come up with, maybe it needs to be tweaked or refined, they stand a little straighter, and they just get excited about it, and you get better work out of it, and then they own it,” said Grant. “So when it comes time for you to implement the idea, you’d be hard-pressed to fail at that point because you have these cheerleaders and these advocates that want it to work.”
According to Grant, people are the foundation of the hospitality industry. Fostering positivity among staff and creating genuine customer experiences can generate value in an industry driven by human interactions and creativity. She witnessed this firsthand as she defined her vision for her career in the industry. Starting with then-Morrison Restaurants (later Ruby Tuesday Restaurants), Kimberly Grant worked a variety of roles as she made her way into management positions.
“I realized that I really loved the hospitality industry,” she said. “I worked my way through all the positions, bartender, line cook, kitchen manager, all these different things, and I was offered the opportunity to become a manager.” The mentorship and value given to her own opinion as the brand more than quadrupled its number of restaurants gave Grant affirmation of the value of her ideas and opinions.
Investing further in her education and expertise paved the way for Grant to continue moving toward executive leadership as she earned her MBA in finance and banking. Her time with Ruby Tuesday culminated in her role as president and chief operating officer, a position she held concurrently for four years as a board member for the luxury resort Blackberry Farm.
Kimberly Grant’s demonstrated ability to span both casual and fine dining experiences and understand the nuances of each target audience led to additional opportunities in the hospitality industry, including a role as global head of restaurants and bars for Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts. With Four Seasons, she oversaw operations and strategy impacting over 600 restaurants and bars across over 120 venues. Helping to redefine the company’s approach to luxury experiences for both customers and employees, Grant’s innovative brand strategies, which introduced an omnichannel marketing approach novel for the time, helped bolster the company’s global operations during a planned succession period during a CEO transition.
Under her leadership, the Four Seasons’ dining portfolio flourished. She also implemented new dining concepts and retooled training processes. “At Four Seasons, I came up with this thing where we had this kind of word that we used around quality or the guest experience, and it was around being epic,” Grant explained. “What being epic meant was these four words: excellence, passion, innovation, and creativity.”
While Grant’s companies recognize her for the innovation she brings to every engagement, she continues to explore how a people-first approach can fuel success even further. Her leadership style, which accounts for the input and experiences of contributors from all facets of the organization, is rooted in her time working in the hospitality industry from the ground up. She learned the challenges faced by teams and how the quality of human interactions can drastically affect the quality of products and services.
By focusing on new ways to leverage the talents within her team, Grant instills a culture of trust and value with employees at all levels of an organization. During her time with Four Seasons, she prioritized working with existing team members to grow and reward their talents rather than outsourcing resources. “Well, we could get a celebrity chef for sure, but we have five of the world’s best chefs in our own hotels,” she explained. “They’re all Michelin-starred craftsmen in their own right. Why don’t we have five of them come together and create your concept instead of relying on one celebrity? Why don’t we make them the celebrities?” In doing this, she noticed that customer outcomes improved while also increasing employee satisfaction and retention.
Kimberly Grant also understands the importance of tapping into the true potential of existing talent, and she has proven how to maximize employee output. During what she calls cross-learning exercises, she encourages teams and even companies to swap professionals to expose them to new ideas. Through these experiences, Grant and her staff have witnessed how training can be a key differentiator for hospitality brands. “The cooks are the same cooks,” Grant said in comparing causal and luxury dining. “The only difference is they train them better than we do. They spend more time on giving them the skills that they need to do their job well. Anyone who’s a hard worker, curious, and passionate can do anything.”
Kimberly Grant remains invested in the hospitality industry and its people through her work with PFG. Leading by example, she prioritizes people and teams to create successful outcomes across operations, marketing, strategy, and finance all while contributing a unique point of view.