Service excellence at TONI&GUY

Service excellence at TONI&GUY: Achieved through research and education

By Dr Les Graham

Toni Mascolo OBE KCSG contributed more than 55 years of expertise to the hairdressing industry and is recognised for changing the face of modern hairdressing. He opened his first hairdressing salon in 1963 and then led the expansion of TONI&GUY to become an international hairdressing conglomerate.

Toni Mascolo OBE KCSG (6 May 1942 – 10 December 2017)

TONI&GUY currently has 475 salons in 48 countries with an annual turnover in excess of £175 million. TONI&GUY not only provides hair services to clients, but also has 24 TONI&GUY Creative Academies where it trains hairdressing professionals across the industry.

Since 2014, TONI&GUY and Durham University Business School have worked in partnership to conduct research investigating how to achieve exceptional service performance.

Education has always been a central value of TONI&GUY. In order to retain the business’s edge and to enhance its capability to stay ahead of competition, Toni Mascolo met Dr Les Graham to discuss how research-led education could be used effectively to achieve this.

The agreed aim of the collaborative research project was to provide evidence, insights, and knowledge to develop and advance the skills of people at all levels throughout the organisation, and franchise partners, to achieve even higher levels of service delivery excellence and customer delight.

The TONI&GUY-Durham collaborative research was initially based on the research programme of the Principal Investigator, Dr Les Graham, working with Professors Tom Redman and Ed Snape. This early research looked at features in the salons across the business, the customer journey and employee-client encounters that contributed to the customer perceptions of service delivery. From discussion of the evidence and insights achieved from this initial research, a number of policy changes and training initiatives have been implemented by TONI&GUY. These include the ‘Hospitalian Training’ programme for all staff, the ‘Clean and Beautiful Place’ philosophy across the organisation and the ‘Front of House Team Training’ programme.

More recently, the project has been based on research from the International Centre for Leadership and Followership (ICLF) within Durham University Business School, which is recognised for its international reach and academic impact. Dr Les Graham, working with Professor Olga Epitropaki, Dr Yuyan Zheng, Marisa Plater, Sara Gracey and Natalie Brown, has studied the effects of leadership on employee well being, motivation, proactive service delivery behaviours and customer outcomes. Large-scale research studies have been conducted using data from different sources collected from salon managers, employees and clients to investigate the impacts of different styles of leadership including servant leadership and service leadership.

Servant leadership theory stresses the importance of the leader’s competence and their conscious, genuine concern for serving and helping others. Servant leaders care about their people and focus on their well being, empowerment and development to their fullest potential. Service leadership is a leadership style specific to the culture and context being worked in and focuses on the setting of service standards and recognising high-quality service.

The findings and results of the research confirmed the beneficial impacts of a servant leadership style for employee creativity and proactive service behaviour. Service leadership behaviour was found to affect employee service performance and client outcomes through creation of a more positive service climate in each salon. Leader passion and positive mood were found to be important predictors of leadership effectiveness.

The improvement of leadership capability was recognised as a strategic priority by the TONI&GUY executive and in April 2018, the ‘TONI&GUY Leadership Programme’ was launched. Sara Gracey, supported by Dr Les Graham and other team members have delivered a programme of leadership knowledge sharing workshops to people from across the TONI&GUY organisation.

In a series of four different workshops, each focused on a different topic, the evidence and underpinning theory from the research have been presented and discussed. Moreover, the way in which suitable interventions and policy changes can be realised has been explored. In total, 29 workshops have been delivered to 178 attendees.

To find out more about the research of the International Centre for Leadership and Followership, visit durham.ac.uk/business/leadership-followership