Leadership in hospitality.
The greatest, and perhaps most overlooked, source of talent and inside hotel information can be found in the people who are carrying out the day to day tasks in the hotel. The person who knows the most about how efficient, profitable, and customer-pleasing your policies and processes are is the person who is using them every day to do their job. There are two major reasons this source of knowledge can be overlooked by management, one when bringing on outside managers who may have little experience in the hospitality but have proven to be successful problem solvers. The need to establish themselves as a leader will often prevent asking for help from the people they manage. Second, even field-proven industry warriors overlook talent in the trenches because they’ve been there, done that, wrote the book on it. However, there are many changes over time in the way daily operations are carried out. A guy who started as a bellhop twenty years ago and worked his way up to general manager may not have experienced the new PMS bogging down when twenty people are standing in line to check in. Or perhaps he’s never seen the confused look on a guest’s …