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Leadership isn’t about keeping every ball in the air. It’s about knowing which ones can fall.
By Rebecca Donley
from Oregon Restaurant & Lodging Association blo [6]g
Picture life as a juggling act. You’ve always got a dozen balls in the air. Deadlines, responsibilities, relationships, crises, guest requests, meetings. But here’s the catch: not all the balls are the same.
Some are glass. Some are plastic. Drop a plastic one and it bounces. Drop a glass one and it cracks, maybe shatters.
The glass balls are the things you can’t easily repair: health, family, relationships, trust, integrity. Plastic balls are the ones that can survive being dropped: a meeting rescheduled, a project delayed, a delivery running late. Frustrating, yes—but fixable.
Leadership isn’t about keeping every ball in the air. It’s about knowing which ones can fall.
In hospitality, this metaphor lands hard. Every day we juggle guest expectations, staff needs, vendor delays, property issues, community relationships, and personal lives. And all of it happens under the spotlight. The curtain rises whether you’re ready or not, and the audience is always watching.
One shift can throw a dozen crises at you: a guest demands early check-in, a supplier runs late, a line cook calls out, the fryer breaks, and your kid’s school leaves a voicemail—all before noon. In that moment, every ball feels like glass. Drop one, and it feels like the whole act will collapse.
The temptation is to treat every ball as glass. Every guest complaint, every review, every “urgent” issue feels like life or death in the moment. But it isn’t. The true glass in this business is staff trust, team safety, and the financial health that keeps the doors open. If those break, no amount of flawless service can undo the damage.
But the juggling ball theory is a reminder that not all mistakes carry the same weight. Some balls scuff. Some balls shatter. The difference is in knowing which is which.
For me, the theory shows up most clearly in the tug-of-war between work and personal life. I’ve always defaulted to work being most important. If something had to give, it was my own time, my own health, my own relationships.
But over time, I’ve started asking myself different questions. If I’m tempted to leave home ten minutes late so I can have coffee with my partner, I ask: what’s truly glass here? Is being seen on property at 8:00 a.m. every morning to “set a good example” really a ball worth cradling? Or is the connection across the breakfast table the thing that actually matters most?
The truth is, almost every time I’ve prioritized personal glass over work plastic, the only person who even noticed was me. I am consistently hardest on myself.
That realization has shifted my whole view of hospitality work. When you’re “on stage” managing events or running the desk, every moment feels urgent. But stepping back has given me perspective: hospitality is not heart surgery. If we drop a ball for a guest, no one bleeds out on the table.
That doesn’t mean our work isn’t important. It means our glass is different. For me, in this industry, the glass balls are staff trust, staff well-being, and keeping the lights on at the business. If we keep those intact, our staff will take care of our guests. If we shatter them, no amount of flawless service can repair the long-term damage.
Of course, knowing the theory and applying it are two different things. The hardest part is that you don’t get labels on the balls. In the moment, you’re making judgment calls under pressure, and sometimes you get it wrong.
Trust can take years to rebuild. Safety is non-negotiable. Well-being, yours or your staff, is the foundation of everything else.
They are not perfect questions, but they are simple enough to use in the heat of the moment, when every ball feels fragile.
I’ll never forget one evening as manager on duty when a guest began screaming at my front desk host, Mark, over her housekeeping service. She claimed the room hadn’t been cleaned properly and that he was “endangering her health.” Her voice was loud enough to carry through the lobby, and other guests began to turn their heads.
I stepped in. That’s what a manager does, right? I told her it wasn’t appropriate to speak to my team that way, but asked her to show me the problem so I could handle it personally.
She brought me up to her room. To my eye, it was spotless. Housekeeping had followed her special requests to the letter. But she insisted it was filthy and unsafe. I offered to move her to a different, fresh, room. She declined. So I re-cleaned her room, stripped and re-made her bed, cleaned again. Still, she was unsatisfied. I offered again to move her to another room. This time she agreed, but the process had dragged out for hours. I didn’t leave her room or the property until nearly 1 a.m.
At the time, I thought I was protecting my staff. I thought, if I dealt with her directly, they wouldn’t have to. But in reality, I had made a bad call. By giving her my full attention, I left my team without a manager during a busy evening. Other guest issues went unresolved. Shift changes were delayed. Cashier banks had to wait. All the small but essential moving pieces of a hotel fell behind while I was locked into a battle I couldn’t win.
Most of those things, like the late counts, the bookings, and the guest requests, were probably plastic balls in the grand scheme of things. But there was one glass ball I dropped: Mark’s trust. By standing with that guest for hours, I sent the message, even though I didn’t mean to, that her satisfaction mattered more than his dignity. I showed him that a guest could yell at him, accuse him unfairly, and my response would be to reward her with my time and attention.
That was the real shattering moment of the night. Not the guest’s complaints, not the delayed checklists, but the fact that I demonstrated, through my actions, that respect for my staff was negotiable. That glass ball cracked, and I had to pick up the shards.
This is the part no one talks about enough: you will drop glass balls. You will misjudge. You will get it wrong.
The key isn’t perfection…it’s repair. It’s apologizing to the staff member whose dignity you let slip. It’s re-centering your priorities after letting your personal health erode. It’s doing the hard work to rebuild trust, even when it would be easier to pretend nothing broke.
Sometimes the repaired glass is even stronger, like scar tissue. Mark eventually told me he appreciated that I acknowledged what had happened that night, instead of brushing it under the rug. That honesty mattered. The trust wasn’t automatic, but it was salvageable.
The juggling ball theory has stayed with me because it’s not about perfection, it’s about judgment, grace, and growth. It reminds me that hospitality is live theater, not surgery. The show will go on, even if a plastic ball bounces out of sight.
What matters is protecting the fragile pieces that can’t be replaced: the trust of your staff, the safety of your people, the integrity of your leadership, the connections that sustain you outside of work. Those are the balls that can’t be dropped.
Everything else? Let it bounce. | Rebecca Donley, Oregon Hospitality Foundation