We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Anna Dolce a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Anna , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear about the best advice you’ve ever given to a client?

One of the most valuable pieces of advice I’ve ever given a client was this:

Stop trying to fix the symptom. Find out what the symptom is protecting.

Most leaders look at declining performance, employee turnover, inconsistent service, customer complaints, or stagnant revenue and immediately search for operational solutions. More training. More accountability. More systems. More oversight.

In this particular case, the client believed they had a performance problem. They were frustrated with their team and convinced that employees simply weren’t meeting expectations.

What I observed was something different.

The issue wasn’t performance. The issue was fear.

Employees were spending more energy protecting themselves from mistakes than creating exceptional experiences for customers. Leadership had unintentionally created an environment where people were focused on avoiding criticism rather than taking ownership.

The result was predictable: service became mechanical, initiative disappeared, morale declined, and customers could feel the difference.

My advice was simple:

Before asking why people aren’t performing, ask what conditions make performance feel unsafe.

Once leadership shifted its approach, communication improved, ownership increased, turnover stabilized, and customer experience improved significantly.

What made the biggest impact wasn’t a new system or a new training program. It was understanding that business results are often downstream of human experience.

That lesson has stayed with me throughout my career.

Many organizations believe they have a strategy problem when what they really have is a human experience problem affecting performance, culture, customer loyalty, and revenue.

Anna , love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

My career has been unconventional, but one theme has remained constant: understanding people.

Across hospitality, operations, strategy, entrepreneurship, real estate, international trade, and consulting, I’ve seen that business performance is ultimately driven by human experience.

Throughout my career, I developed a knack for identifying gaps between a brand’s intended experience and the reality customers and employees encounter. Whether in hospitality, retail, or service businesses, I could often spot the causes of underperformance, weak loyalty, or stalled growth before they appeared in the metrics.

That insight became the foundation of my work.

Today, I advise hospitality, luxury, and service-driven organizations on leadership, culture, employee experience, and customer experience. My focus is helping leaders uncover hidden revenue loss caused by overlooked human factors.

I believe most businesses don’t have a strategy problem—they have a human experience problem.

Organizations often invest heavily in marketing, technology, and operations while overlooking the cultural and emotional dynamics that shape every interaction. Those dynamics directly influence engagement, loyalty, service quality, retention, reputation, and revenue.

I don’t view culture as a soft concept. I view it as a measurable driver of business performance.

I’m currently building Hospitality Intelligence Group, a global advisory firm focused on the connection between hospitality, human behavior, culture, leadership, and financial results.

A key framework emerging from this work is The Invisible Revenue Audit™, a diagnostic process that helps organizations identify revenue leakage caused by leadership blind spots, cultural friction, and employee and customer experience gaps.

What I value most is helping leaders see what has been hiding in plain sight. The greatest breakthroughs often occur when they realize the issue they’ve been focused on isn’t the real problem.

At its core, my work helps businesses create experiences customers return to, teams want to be part of, and leaders are proud to build.

Do you have any insights you can share related to maintaining high team morale?

I think one of the biggest mistakes leaders make is assuming morale is something they create through perks, incentives, or team-building activities.

Morale is usually a reflection of the environment people experience every day.

Teams don’t lose morale overnight. They lose it when they stop feeling seen, trusted, respected, or psychologically safe. They lose it when communication breaks down, when effort goes unnoticed, when leadership becomes disconnected, or when people feel like they’re being managed rather than led.

My advice is to stop asking, “How do I motivate my team?” and start asking, “What is making motivation difficult?”

The answer is often hidden in the culture itself.

The strongest teams I’ve seen are not necessarily the most talented. They’re the teams where people feel ownership, where expectations are clear, where accountability is fair, and where leadership creates an environment that allows people to do their best work.

High morale is rarely the result of what leaders add. More often, it’s the result of what leaders remove—fear, confusion, inconsistency, and unnecessary friction.

When people feel safe, valued, and connected to a purpose, performance tends to follow naturally.

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

I think my reputation has been built on observation more than anything else.

I’ve never been interested in repeating conventional wisdom or offering surface-level solutions. What has always fascinated me is understanding why things happen beneath the surface.

Throughout my career, whether I was working in hospitality, operations, entrepreneurship, or consulting, I found myself looking for patterns that others often overlooked. I was less interested in symptoms and more interested in root causes.

That perspective helped me see connections between leadership, culture, employee experience, customer experience, and business performance that many organizations treat as separate issues.

I also believe that trust is built when people know you’ll tell them the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable. Some of the most valuable conversations I’ve had with clients came from challenging assumptions rather than reinforcing them.

Over time, that combination of curiosity, observation, and honesty became part of my reputation.

People often come to me because they sense something isn’t working in their business but can’t fully identify what it is. My work has always been helping them see what has been hiding in plain sight.

That’s ultimately what I’m known for—helping leaders uncover the human dynamics that are quietly shaping their results.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://annadolce.com
• Instagram: @anna_dolce
• Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/in/annadolce