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MANAGEMENT WORKSHOP The Leadership Gap Today's growing demand for spa industry leaders is outpacing our ability to groom them. But there is a solution. By Lisa Starr to perform well. A successful spa director requires a wide array of both hard and soft skills; an understanding of financial imperatives; marketing/sales savvy; teambuilding and leadership abilities; high customer service standards; and a positive, upbeat attitude. They may also need to handle facility management, purchasing, vendor relations and even janitorial duties, especially in the day spa environment. Very few career paths provide the opportunity to excel in so many different areas, and yet it is rare to find educational institutions offering curricula that even touch on all of these disparate capabilities. So, how do the spa directors of today (and tomorrow) get the training they will need to excel? There are approximately 20,000 spas in the U.S. alone—an estimated 80,000 worldwide—and it's quite certain that these spas aren't in the hands of 80,000 graduates of formal spa management training programs. And that's assuming a need for only one fully trained leader; many spas also have management 90 DAYSPA | APRIL 2013 teams that should be providing a career path for the spa leaders of tomorrow. Analysts agree that as the spa business continues to grow and evolve, the need for fully trained and capable spa leadership will continue to escalate more quickly than the supply of candidates. HOW GREAT IS THE NEED? Anna Bjurstam, Global Spa & Wellness Summit (GSWS) Board Member and founder of Raison d'Etre Spa Consulting & Education, championed the need for research on this topic, which has been cited by many spa industry leaders as a global challenge to spa success. "This is a huge education gap in our industry… Spas are sometimes not keen to offer education, for fear that staff turnover will make ROI difficult, but if we do nothing, we will not get anywhere." Last year, GSWS commissioned research firm SRI to tackle the research and analysis required to better understand the scope of the issue. SRI spoke with and/or surveyed more than 700 spa industry leaders, current spa directors and educational providers, which resulted in ©ISTOCKPHOTO.COM "Spa director" is one of the most challenging jobs