Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts Case Study: The Ecosystem of Culture - Why Culture Only Shifts When HR Operates as One System

Insights From  Natasha Rudy, Regional Director of People and Culture and Cristina Herdocia, Regional Learning and Development Manager AT Four Seasons Hotels

At this year's Engage Employee Summit, Natasha Rudy (Regional Director of People and Culture) and Cristina Herdocia (Regional Learning and Development Manager) from Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts gave a talk that reframed how HR should think about culture change entirely. Their argument, in short: culture doesn't shift because of a poster on the wall, a values training session, or even a brilliant founder. It shifts — or doesn't — because of one group of people: middle managers.

The Story Behind the Beautiful Buildings

Four Seasons is known for its luxury properties — 136 hotels, 61 residential developments, 56,000 employees across 50 countries, plus a private jet and a yacht that get most of the headlines. But as Herdocia pointed out, that's not really the story. Luxury is an emotional experience, created every day by employees acting with a genuine heart. The real story is the people behind the brand.

That philosophy traces back to founder Isadore Sharp, who built the company 65 years ago on what Four Seasons calls the Golden Rule: treat others as you wish to be treated. It's deceptively simple, but Rudy was clear that it isn't a slogan — it shapes how the company leads, trains, and treats people internally.

A Property Under Pressure

Even with that foundation, things can slip. In 2023, the flagship Mayfair property in London — more than 400 employees, decades of institutional history, seasoned leadership — saw its engagement scores start to decline. Several pressures were converging at once:

• A new Michelin-starred restaurant had just launched, raising expectations and workload.
• Ultra-luxury competitors were opening nearby, intensifying the local war for talent.
• Post-Brexit immigration reforms were tightening an already difficult hospitality labour market.

Mayfair needed a response — and the usual HR playbook wasn't going to be enough.

Why More Initiatives Weren't the Answer

The team's first instinct was familiar to most HR professionals: recognition programs, values training, check-ins, wellbeing activities, engagement surveys. All the right moves, done with real effort — and yet the results didn't match the exhaustion of delivering them.

Herdocia named the real problem plainly: organisations tend to treat engagement as a set of separate initiatives they “own,” when it's actually an interconnected ecosystem. No single element survives or thrives in isolation. For example:

• Recognition builds confidence, which drives engagement and ownership, which in turn feeds growth.
• Trust grows when managers act on what employees tell them — psychological safety and employee voice reinforce each other.

Four Seasons mapped this explicitly as what they call the Thriving and Engaged Team Ecosystem. But mapping the ecosystem wasn't enough on its own. Something — or someone — was still missing.

The Missing Piece: Middle Managers

Rudy asked the question that reframes the whole talk: who actually holds the power to change culture? Not HR, not the CEO, not even a legendary 94-year-old founder still sitting on the board. It's the middle manager — the person running a department day to day.

Crucially, the team started from a position of good faith: no manager gets up in the morning wanting to be a bad leader. So if change wasn't happening, the more useful question wasn't “how do we train them harder,” but why simple daily actions weren't happening — things like:

• Asking someone how they're coping with their workload.
• Having a real conversation about career aspirations.
• Asking for feedback from the team before making a decision.

The answer wasn't a skills gap. It was that managers were operationally exhausted, unclear on what was expected of them, and didn't fully believe culture change was their job.

Six Mindsets for Change

From listening to employee feedback and running focus groups, Four Seasons identified six mindsets that needed to shift among Mayfair's leaders:

• Providing constant, constructive feedback
• Being a trusted and authentic leader
• Providing growth to the team
• Leading team wellbeing
• Empowering the team
• Rewarding and recognising for change

Turning Managers Into the Protagonists: The Elevate Programme

Rather than adding more to managers' to-do lists, Four Seasons built a nine-month programme called Elevate, running 21 Mayfair leaders through the six mindsets via a repeating five-step cycle:

1. Team members become teachers. Structured conversations forced leaders out of task-mode and into genuine listening, surfacing issues as simple as wanting a more organised department so people could leave on time.
2. Peers become coaches. Leaders shared real examples of what good leadership looked like in practice — how to earn trust, support growth, or remove favouritism from recognition.
3. Formal learning. Podcasts, TED talks, and masterclasses came only after listening and peer learning had built buy-in. Notably, formal learning made up just 20% of the programme's total mechanism mix.
4. Immersive group sessions. Leaders experienced the target behaviours themselves rather than just discussing them — a genuine turning point, since once a leader felt what psychological safety or recognition felt like, they wanted their own team to feel it too.
5. Reflection and action planning. Each cycle closed with leaders committing to specific changes before returning to the floor.

Across the nine months and six mindsets, the 21 leaders generated 378 micro-actions and left with their own personal engagement action plans. Sustaining that shift over time now runs through monthly commitment reports, where managers review their own accountability against these behaviours — because, as the pair put it, culture lives or dies in line managers.

The Results

Over two years, Mayfair saw:

• A significant drop in employee turnover
• A marked rise in overall engagement scores
• Notable gains in the three manager-specific metrics the team watched most closely: whether employees trust their manager, would recommend their manager, and feel recognised by their manager
• Improvements in related indicators, including psychological safety and feeling free to speak up at work — reinforcing the ecosystem thesis that moving one part of the system moves the rest

The model has since proven scalable, evolving into Leadership Lab for newer managers and an upcoming programme called Shift for people stepping into their first management role — helping them make the leap from managing themselves to managing others.

What This Means for HR

The bigger takeaway, as Herdocia and Rudy framed it, is a shift in identity for the HR function itself. Less “what initiative solves this problem,” more:

• How are your systems reinforcing your culture?
• Are your activities and elements connected — or competing for people's attention?

Culture, in their words, isn't what an organisation says it values — it's what its systems, leaders, rituals, and daily actions make inevitable.

To register your interest for the 2027 Engage Employee Summit click here.