Good leadership is elusive and hard to qualify.
It also can be transcendent, guiding employees and affecting casino patrons.
During the recent Raving NEXT webinar on leadership, Christopher Orozco, a professor at California State-Fullerton and a Raving NEXT Partner, noted the connection between leadership and good business practices is tangible.
“If we take care of our employees, they take care of our guests,” Orozco said during The Human Side of Casino Strategy: HR, Leadership, and the Experiences That Drive Performance in 2026. “It’s a win-win all around.”
As part of the Raving NEXT leadership roundtable series, The Human Side of Casino Strategy advanced tenets about “the essence and purpose of HR, how that can align with tribal nation building, tribal goals, and just be a social force for making lives better,” according to Orozco.
Orozco noted a recent survey revealed that operators’ concerns included lack of staffing; rising labor benefit costs; employee retention; and engagement, service consistency or staff responsiveness.
“These are the consistent issues that we struggle with, but none of them have quick fixes,” said Raving NEXT CEO Deanna Scott. “And I think that’s where the frustration comes from. The teams that understand this and work in this, is that fixing a lot of this takes not just one – ‘oh, we’re going to buy this piece of technology and boom, retention is fixed’ – there’s a multi-prong approach, including programmatic training and then leadership commitment.”
“How we approach those things might take different strategies, but they are all connected for the purpose of our guest experience, and our employee experience, as well,” Orozco said.
Orozco said that among tribal operators, culture is of paramount importance. Whether it’s operations, education, healthcare, or any other aspect of tribal enterprise, it’s important to realize, by default or design, culture is tacitly understood.
“When we think about culture, we’re thinking about mission,” Orozco said. “What is it that we do every single day? We’re thinking about vision. Where are we going? Who do we want to be? We’re thinking about our values. What unites us? How do we act? How do we treat one another? We’re thinking about all those things.”
“Culture is everything,” Orozco added. “It defines who we are. Culture by design or culture by default. Design means that we’re intentional about it. We’re going to determine who we want to be, who we are, what we’re doing every single day, how we’re going to treat one another. That’s intentional. It’s strategic.”
But leadership is not something that just happens. In order for leadership to be effective, it takes effort and diligence.
“Most of all, it takes genuine care for our people,” Orozco said. “That’s where it starts. We have to genuinely care about the well-being people that we’re responsible for. And then we can get to work, and then we can start doing that hard work.”
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