Stern alum Susan Salgado never expected her passion for building inclusive and engaging communities to lead to a career in hospitality. After earning her Ph.D. from NYU in 2003, Salgado found herself shaping workplace culture as a director at Union Square Hospitality Group.
Now, as the founder of Grason Consulting, Salgado helps organizations across a wide range of industries improve workplace culture, leadership and engagement. The firm specializes in creating strategies and working toward cultivating collaboration and inclusivity to drive long-term success in different businesses.
In an interview with WSN, Salgado reflected on her journey from academia to hospitality, effective leadership and approach to creating a positive organizational culture.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
WSN: How did you become interested in organizational culture?
Salgado: A lot of people think that my whole career is about hospitality and restaurants, but that was the last part of my journey. My career started with trying to find ways to build understanding among people who are different from one another. As a Lehigh University student, I was appointed to the commission on women and minorities to help understand the climate of the school, which piqued my interest. I also took a class on organizational behavior, and I felt like the whole picture came together for me. The idea of organizational culture, which was not popular in the late 1990s — it was a very academic thing. I decided that I wanted to be a dean or president of a small college after getting my Ph.D., but after my research at the Stern School of Business, that shifted to hospitality. Then, I wanted to study how people are really the source of competitive advantage for an organization, and why that matters.
After earning her MBA at Lehigh, Salgado pursued a Ph.D. in organizational behavior at Stern, where she focused on understanding cultures in the workplace. She said that she collaborated with management professors Elizabeth Morrison and Ya-Ru Chen to research diversity, feedback behavior and collaborative performance, before honing her studies in on the relationship between diversity and academic performance.
Salgado said that her frequent visits to Union Square Cafe sparked her interest in hospitality as a Stern student. While having dinner with her husband and his family at the Flatiron restaurant Tabla in 1998, she followed her curiosity and decided to approach prominent New York City restaurateur Danny Meyer. Meyer is the founder of Union Square Hospitality Group, which is known for creating establishments like Gramercy Tavern and Shake Shack. After Salgado persuaded Meyer to let her study their restaurants for her dissertation while at Stern, he hired Salgado as his team’s first Director of Culture and Learning in 2003.
WSN: How did working with Danny Meyer at USHG shape your career?
Salgado: Danny is an extraordinary leader, and he’s very charismatic. However, if he’s at the heart of the team and acts as the glue that holds it all together, that’s not sustainable if they want to keep growing the company. USHG didn’t have any system for making sure that that culture was spread to new businesses as they opened, or that it stayed consistent while the businesses were running — as I reported that, it struck a nerve with them. They then offered me a job to help build that infrastructure, and for my first six years there, I was focused primarily on building a blueprint for the culture. I was really passionate about bringing the ideas from Union Square outside, and I knew that people could benefit from what we had learned. When we started getting calls from people who wanted to learn more about what we were doing and how we were creating this great culture, Danny allowed me to take on some projects and test-drive it. We then wrote a business plan and officially opened Hospitality Quotient in 2010, which I ran for the next seven years.
Hospitality Quotient, a consulting business under USHG, strives to help companies across various industries build a customer-focused culture. The aim was to apply USHG’s success to other companies and improve engagement, customer service and development in businesses beyond the restaurant world.
Under Salgado’s leadership as managing partner and co-founder, Hospitality Quotient worked with clients in health care, retail and entertainment, helping them implement similar effective systems to improve organizational culture. Salgado described that through Hospitality Quotient, she had the opportunity to work with Jordan Roth — the president of the Jujamcyn Theaters in New York — when he wanted to make the Broadway show venue more welcoming for visitors.
WSN: What was one of your favorite projects through Hospitality Quotient?
Salgado: The first projects that we did were in health care, and that’s where we’re most vulnerable in our lives. If there’s anywhere that we should have great customer experiences, it’s in health care. There was a lot going on with Medicare when we were opening HQ, and hospitals were looking at their patient experience scores seriously for the first time. So, there was a huge opportunity for us to enter. After we conducted training for all the staff in one year, the patients’ likelihood to recommend scores went from 27% to 85%. That was thrilling to me, because I knew that patients were getting better care because of the work that we did and that made it even more purposeful.
In 2017, Salgado decided to leave USHG and founded Grason Consulting, a New York-based company that helps organizations align their values with day-to-day operations. She said that USHG allowed her to bring her clients that she had built relationships with to her new company, which provided a strong foundation for Grason’s first year. Now, Salgado independently works with businesses to address challenges related to communication, collaboration and workplace morale to ensure long-term success.
Salgado said that she came up with the idea to establish a consulting firm after seeing many people leave their jobs due to disappointing company culture after the COVID-19 pandemic. She added that refining organizational culture will be in high demand going forward, as employers continue to create a positive and uplifting work environment to attract more workers.
WSN: What advice would you give to students who are currently exploring different career paths?
Salgado: As a young person, you have so little to lose. Give it a chance, things take a little bit of time to figure out. By the time you hit a year and a half in a role, it’s that sweet spot where you need to be thinking about whether this is where you want to stay or if there are other opportunities that you want to pursue. People can be anything they want and I think I’m a testament to that. I’ve worked so many different jobs in different industries, so it’s really the hard work and patience that you need to put into your career to grow fast.
Contact Lekhya Kantheti at [email protected].
