You know a good pub licensee when you see one, but what makes a really great one? There may be many answers to this but someone who not only does their own job really well but is able to inspire the people working around them to excellence has to be a rare and valuable asset.
It also helps if they can negotiate without getting giddy, claustrophobic or wedged in the steep and narrow corkscrew of stone stairs that lead up to the clocktower of a certain church in London's Soho. This is where training company Watershed was staging a course with the ambitious title Good to Great.
The intrepid delegates included the managers of the Manchester branch of Waxy O'Connor's, B-Bar in Windsor and a couple of Corney & Barrows plus operations managers for regional brewer McMullen's and bar-restaurant chain Giraffe.
They were on the first day of a five-day programme and they were, with a certain degree of surprise, learning about mindsets.
The morning was spent plotting their own mindset across four quadrants - a sophisticated version of the familiar left-brain-right-brain split that is supposed to structure our personalities.
Delegates discovered whether they were left-brainers leaning towards the blue and green quadrants and good at analysis, organisation and getting things done, or whether they were more of a creative right brain sort, using their imaginations and relating well to other people, and tending to fall into the yellow and red quadrants.
Hippy nonsense? Not according to Stephen Waters, who devised the programme.
"Great managers, for me, are people who really understand how the people who work with them are different from them and from each other. They want to be better understood.
"We aren't being prescriptive here, we don't tell them how to do things," he explains. "But we can help them find out who they are and understand the impact they have on other people. That can suggest to them how to be a better coach, how to be a better boss.
"You can tell them all this but it's more powerful if they find out for themselves.
"The problem is that most pub managers get caught up in the here and now, the cut-and-thrust of running a bar every day, and they don't know how to make interventions that can change a business," he continues.
"For example, you might have a morale problem on the team and you need to do something to raise morale, but a lot of managers don't realise they have the power to do that because they never take a breather."
In part, Good to Great is that breather. The other four days would, in fact, teach practical skills, such as communication, influencing others, team-building and coaching, but this first day was the platform upon which they could build to make those skills most effective.
The practical impact of understanding themselves, though, was almost immediate.
Those mindsets not only give people positive characteristics. Others around you may perceive them in a negative way. A good organiser might seem bossy, an innovator impulsive. The afternoon was devoted to making some concrete decisions about what each of the delegates could do back at the pub to make them better managers.
"You're great if you can work alongside everybody who works alongside you, not just do things in your own way," explains trainer Serena Hartley. "It's about how you make a change, the specific actions you take and what you are going to do differently tomorrow.
"There are pitfalls in staying within a particular quadrant, where you are comfortable, and ignoring the areas where you could do more. We all have a high degree of confidence in doing what we know we can do well, but it's the zone we don't like going into that gives results."
Delegates were paired with a complementary personality - someone who was biased towards their opposite quadrant - and asked to come up with action steps to address their weaknesses.
It was a revealing session and backed up, to an extent that was almost worrying, Stephen's point about managers not getting the chance to step back from the hurly-burly and think about what they are doing.
Nina confessed she was a "control freak" and announced she would "give people a chance to take risks".
"I want to get one of my assistant managers more involved in the business side so I can look at the bigger picture," she explained.
Keiran had come on the course because he "wanted to knock the old school out of me and put a different spin on things".
As someone who tends to take his emotions into work he wanted to get into the "mean quadrant" and "stop doing everybody else's job" by having more structured meetings with his assistants.
Duncan was good at seeing opportunities and changing things - but didn't always tell his people why. "I think they might have felt alienated because I didn't give them the background to my decisions," he said.
"I need to analyse why I'm right, justify myself to staff and gain a consensus."
Keith, too, was fine at taking action, "but I don't measure the results and things get brushed under the carpet".
"I'm too hands-on and need to stand back. That will give me more time, I'll feel more in control and be able to follow through on things - and I'll have more sense of achievement."
It was Lucy, though, who brought the biggest gasps from the room.
"I've gone six years without a holiday - but I'm going on one next week. I'll be setting my assistant managers a series of tasks while I'm away - and I won't be calling them!
"I have to make them believe I have faith in their abilities."
The important thing was that delegates applied what they learned straight away, concluded Serena.
- Watershed was set up by Stephen Waters, former managing director of the Pitcher & Piano chain, to bring a new dimension to training in the pub, bar and restaurant industries.
The idea behind it is that the "atmosphere" crucial to a successful venue comes not only from its design and food and drink offer but from the person running it, and their ability to infect staff with their passion for the business and carry that across the bar to the customers.
Watershed training therefore goes beyond the practical skills required to run a pub and encourages normally extrovert managers and licensees to look in on themselves for a moment and reflect on how their attitudes and behaviours affect the operation of the business.
Stephen admits that it hasn't been easy to convince pub and bar operators to invest in such personal development training, which is seen by many as an optional "add-on" to learning more practical skills. But in recent months the concept, he says, has started to "sink in".
Watershed's two main programmes, the five-day Good to Great and The Badge, a two-day course aimed at less experienced managers, have attracted a growing list of clients. These now include more traditional pub groups such as McMullen's and Capital Pub Company as well as independents and bar chains including Glendola Leisure, Corney & Barrow, Geronimo and Match.
For more details contact www.watershedschool.co.uk