By Pham Ha, Founder and CEO, LuxGroup®
A founder can become the greatest strength of a business and its most persistent constraint. The judgement that identifies opportunities, wins trust and brings people together can eventually concentrate too many decisions in one person. Customers expect the founder’s attention. Managers seek the founder’s approval. Employees learn to wait.
The leadership challenge changes as the enterprise grows. Creating a company requires personal initiative. Building an organisation that can thrive beyond its founder requires developing initiative in others.
At LuxGroup®, our ambition to become A House of Small Giants makes this transition particularly important. Each specialist business needs leaders who understand its customers, develop its people and take responsibility for its results. My responsibility is to create the conditions in which they can succeed.
For me, that is the practical meaning of a simple principle: leading is serving.
Service begins with responsibility
Serving does not mean satisfying every request or avoiding difficult conversations. Leadership sometimes requires refusing an attractive investment, challenging poor performance or protecting employees from commitments the organisation cannot fulfil.
Service means accepting responsibility for the conditions under which others work. It means asking whether people have clear priorities, usable authority, reliable information and sufficient resources. It also means holding them accountable for how they use those advantages.
A leader who gives inspiring speeches but leaves responsibilities unclear creates frustration. A leader who promises autonomy but reverses decisions without explanation creates dependence.
The test is what happens after the leader leaves the room. Can the team act intelligently? Can it recognise a problem, make a decision and explain its reasoning? Does it know when to seek help?
Understand yourself before directing others
Leadership begins with self-awareness because a founder’s behaviour carries unusual weight. A casual remark can become an instruction. An expression of impatience can silence a useful question. Enthusiasm for an idea can make financial scrutiny feel unwelcome.
I therefore see self-awareness as an operating discipline. Leaders must understand their motivations, recognise their emotional responses and examine the gap between their intentions and other people’s experience.
This requires listening beyond the most confident voices. The employee who identifies an inconvenient problem may be serving the organisation better than the manager who offers immediate agreement.
At LuxGroup®, the principle of People First® should make honest feedback possible. Its credibility depends on how leaders respond when feedback is uncomfortable.
Move from solving problems to building capability
Founders often gain confidence by solving problems personally. They know the customers, remember previous crises and can move quickly through informal relationships.
Yet every problem solved personally can become another lesson in organisational dependence.
The alternative is deliberate coaching. Before supplying an answer, a leader can ask: What is happening? What evidence supports your interpretation? Which options have you considered? What would you recommend?
These questions develop judgement while keeping responsibility with the manager.
Consider a service failure involving an itinerary, a transfer and a cruise departure. Resolving the immediate guest concern matters. Afterwards, leadership must examine the handover, identify who owned the complete promise and improve the process.
Serving the team means helping it become more capable of preventing and resolving the next problem.
Design the conditions for team performance
Teamwork depends on purpose, composition and working arrangements. Bringing talented people together is only the beginning.
Across LuxGroup®’s travel, cruising, hospitality, dining, transport and cultural activities, collaboration can create distinctive journeys. It can also create confusion if everyone contributes but nobody owns the overall result.
A cross-brand experience therefore needs an accountable leader, agreed responsibilities and a clear understanding of costs, revenue and service recovery.
The customer experiences one journey. Our internal boundaries must support that experience.
Leaders serve by making coordination easier: clarifying commitments, resolving competing priorities and ensuring that information reaches the person who needs it. Meetings should produce decisions, responsibilities and follow-through.
Give authority that people can actually use
Delegation becomes meaningful when authority matches responsibility.
A manager accountable for service quality needs sufficient discretion over staffing, training and daily decisions. A leader expected to develop new products needs access to market information and an approved scope for experimentation.
Authority must also have boundaries. Safety, legal obligations, significant capital commitments and decisions affecting several businesses require proportionate oversight.
For LuxGroup®, the proposed parent-company model should make these distinctions explicit. The parent provides direction, capital discipline and shared capabilities. Specialist leaders exercise judgement within agreed limits.
The goal is practical: people should know what they can decide, what they must consult on and what requires approval.
Adapt your leadership to the situation
Service requires sensitivity to context. A newly appointed manager may need close guidance. An experienced leader may need resources and a clear objective. A safety incident requires immediate direction. An unfamiliar opportunity requires questions and exploration.
Applying one leadership style everywhere can create avoidable damage.
The founder must distinguish between intervention that protects the business and intervention that merely reflects personal preference.
This distinction becomes easier when expectations are explicit. Agree on the outcome, the constraints and the review point. Then allow the responsible leader to determine the approach.
Trust grows when people experience consistency between the authority they receive and the freedom they can exercise.
Make culture visible in decisions
At LuxGroup®, Delivering Happiness®, Luxury is Culture® and Touching Hearts® express our purpose, belief and philosophy. Their value depends on everyday conduct.
Culture becomes credible when a leader tells a guest the truth, treats a supplier fairly, respects an artist’s rights or supports an employee facing a difficult situation.
It also appears in commercial choices. Cultural storytelling requires knowledge and care. An attractive narrative should be supported by accurate interpretation and appropriate attribution.
Our HEARTS™ values should help people exercise judgement when no procedure provides a complete answer.
Leadership serves culture by turning broad principles into observable expectations and by applying those expectations consistently, including to senior executives.
Protect the future while serving the present
Financial discipline is part of responsible leadership. People depend on the organisation’s ability to pay wages, honour supplier commitments and sustain operations.
A promising investment can still create a dangerous cash shortage. A profitable business can still lack liquidity.
For ambitions such as Vietnam Waterways® 2045, leaders must connect vision with staged commitments, evidence of demand and realistic operating capabilities.
Serving the future means preserving room to learn and adapt. It requires the courage to pause when assumptions weaken.
The founder’s final responsibility is to develop people who can carry the enterprise forward. At LuxGroup®, I want leadership to be measured by stronger teams, sounder decisions and greater capacity to act responsibly.
A House of Small Giants needs leaders who help others stand taller. That is the legacy service can build.
