Creating Cultures of Confidence with Mint-on-the-Pillow Management
By Darnell Lattal, President & CEO, Aubrey Daniels International
Certain work settings — such as hotels — have unique pressures because every day the actions of employees are visible to customers and every employee action can affect future business. Hotel employees face a multitude of high expectations, low tolerance for failure, and many responsibilities, including the following:
- Attending to a tired customer needing room service
- Dealing with late-night, loud partiers
- Troubleshooting technology, from Internet services to working televisions
- Answering the front desk phone within a few rings
- Providing a clean room and fresh supplies
- Ensuring an easy check-in process
- Serving food graciously
- Acquiring knowledge of the surrounding area to give guests recommendations and directions
- Reacting effectively to medical emergencies
The list goes on—and on.
The reasons for visits to hotels vary, but guests require professional behavior from staff. Down time, resolving disputes, complaining of aching feet… Personal imperfections cannot be aired in front of the customer. After all, the hotel industry is one of the few businesses in which people who ask for services are called guests.
Consider the pressure to be constantly “on” that employees in such settings often face. From the parking attendant to the registration desk to the cleaning service, every element is visible — the employees are part of the setting and they have a presentation burden that employees in other businesses don’t carry in this way. How such employees show up literally does matter.
Positive Under Pressure
Making it all look easy isn’t easy, but hotel management expects a pleasant environment for their employees, as well as for the hotel’s guests. Examine your work setting to see how personal and professional pressures are handled by management (from senior leaders to supervisory levels). Ensure that you look beyond old-fashioned hierarchies of command and control to create a culture of confidence, where every employee feels valued and supported.
Build in ownership and genuine reward for doing and saying the right things. Rewarding and recognizing the right behaviors and results instills pride—the sense that this “house” is mine; this business is a reflection of my professionalism, not just that of senior leadership. What I do does matter, and how I treat others can affect the outcomes they experience. How I feel about rude or discourteous guests matters as well, and my feelings are supported by my leadership.
This work environment can only be attained by treating employees as well as you treat your guests. This requires knowledge of the science of behavior and applying it to all that each employee does. Once that knowledge has been conveyed across and within organizations, every person becomes aware of the effects of his or her actions on others. This tends to create a flatter organization, meaning “we are each other’s keeper”— doing our best to please those who use our services and to bring out the best in one another as well. Understanding behavioral principles creates an understanding that even the smallest behaviors can affect others and sometimes in much greater ways than intended.
Behavior is a stream of influence. If you take the time to educate your employees and yourself, you can create a powerful and exciting stream of reciprocal positive relationships that last long after leaving the hotel (and coming back again), be it by guests or your employees.
Never underestimate the influence that every employee has on your customers. Don’t just tell employees what to do and address them only when they do something wrong. Consider how to ensure they are their own boss, managing issues effectively on the spot that add value and reputation to your business. Once you have created operations in which you know that good decisions are made, and you know your employees tell you the things they did well and not so well, the work setting takes on a new vitality. Employees respond particularly positively when they know you will hear their side of any problem or conflict.
Leadership needs to free employees to make decisions as they gain skills. Once employees are observed making the right decisions, give them control over small and then larger aspects of their work. Let them know that they are as responsible as any manager is for generating goodwill with the customer. A culture where more control is in the hands of employees adds to the goodwill you will receive from your staff, as well as your guests.
Requiring the supervisor to override a charge for a dinner item that was late or cold, making the front desk person seek permission to reduce the charge for the Internet when it did not work, or not allowing housekeeping personnel to leave extra supplies if they notice a guest is using more soap and shampoo than allotted per room — many overly controlled processes can be given to the employee so that ownership greatly increases — if you do it right. Of course, you want to avoid turnover, burn out and low productivity, or fraud or theft by unreliable employees, but take care not to manage to exceptions and errors when managing the vast majority. While hotels and directly facing customer service industries have unique challenges, they also have unique opportunities to create a highly reinforcing workplace.
What makes for a highly engaged workforce, handling unique and varied demands and unusual requests with grace and skill? It is all about the conditions that managers and supervisors set up and the way they view their employees. If each manager or supervisor is told that the job of supervisor is to bring out the success of each and every employee and this is the way that each manager will be evaluated, such a role requirement will change forever the way supervisory staff look at their employees. In such a culture, when employees succeed in handling issues well, the supervisory team will feel good. And when employees fail, the supervisory team will look at what it can do to improve employee training, knowledge, emotional comfort and skills.
When a management team is trained in the science of human behavior, they understand that mistakes of employees are not about character, but about contingencies. Once the management team understands human behavior, they need to share this information with employees so that everyone understands:
• how to shape and guide the responses one receives, including aggressive responses from customers, in a manner that is clear, objective and shows compassion for the person who made the request
• how to evaluate one’s own behavior and how the conditions at the moment and one’s history with certain situations can lead to either successful mastery of conditions or responses that do not pay off
In doing so, every employee can be your best voice, eyes, ears and action to achieve excellence. Remember that the new role of the manager/supervisor is to be chief coach — steeped in the science of behavior to skillfully apply the power of reinforcement. Build that culture of confidence in which your employees are not only committed to the customer, but to the goals of your organization to bring out the best in all they do. As their manager, leave your employees symbolic mints on their pillows in recognition of all they do for those valued guests — and for you.
Darnell Lattal, as president and chief executive officer of Aubrey Daniels International, is a specialist in the design and implementation of behavior-based business strategies to achieve core initiatives. In partnership with her clients and through her extensive corporate engagements, Ms. Lattal has contributed to organizational redesign and change management, executive coaching, achieving high performance, performance measurement and behavior-based systems design, leadership and teamwork within and across organizational structures, succession planning and implementation, ethical decision-making and creating a solid leadership legacy based on self-awareness and self-management. Ms. Lattal can be contacted at 678-904-6140 or info@aubreydaniels.com Extended Bio…
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