A good GM is one you do not wake unless you have to. A great GM tells you in advance what counts as "have to," writes it down, and lives by their own rule when you call at 02:30.
The five always-wake conditions
These are not "judgment call" situations. The night auditor, security guard, or duty manager calls without hesitation. The GM has agreed in writing — usually in the property's operating manual — that these five categories override any sleep, any vacation, any "do not disturb" instruction.
The judgment-call conditions
Most overnight escalations fall here: a VIP arrival complaint at 22:30, a noise dispute that involves a wedding party of 40 people, a power outage that affects half the property for 90 minutes, a fight in the lobby that did not involve injuries. The duty manager makes the judgment call — wake, message-only, or document and discuss in the morning.
The discipline: the duty manager errs on the side of waking the GM for borderline calls in the first 30 days after a hire. By month two, the GM has corrected enough false positives that the duty manager has calibrated the threshold. A GM who reacts angrily to a wake-up they would have wanted breaks the calibration loop and gets woken less, including for things they should have been woken for.
The post-wake discipline
When the GM is woken, the duty manager delivers the information in a structured way: what happened, what has been done already, what decision is needed now, what can wait until morning. A 4-sentence call lets the GM go back to sleep with confidence. A meandering 15-minute call destroys the GM's next day and trains them to avoid the duty manager going forward.