In pursuit of a good hotel manager (part 1)Recently someone contacted me to find out if I knew of anyone who could be recommended to manage their hotel. Apparently, the owners had looked at several candidates and found none to be a suitable fit. This doesn’t surprise me: finding tomorrow’s managers and leaders is only just one of a ‘multi-dimensional’ challenge Sri Lanka’s hospitality industry currently faces and I predict it to get worse in the not so distant future.
There can be no doubt that the hospitality and tourism industry in Sri Lanka will continue to grow. At what annual pace of growth it would do is entirely another story. Nevertheless, demand for managers and senior staff is set to increase. Of these, the vast majority - will be due to replacement demand from people seeking jobs abroad, staff getting ‘lured’ by lucrative offers from new competitors, employees moving into new roles and others leaving the industry. Having said this, it is encouraging to note that some effort – albeit too little and a tad too late, is been initiated to address these skills gaps, especially with the development of certain training programmes aimed specifically at helping people advance their career. However, if one is to believe that management and leadership skills will continue to grow in importance in the next two to three years, the sector will face significantly enormous pressure in the future. On one hand, Generic training programmes, when properly and professionally executed can teach skills associated with entry and early-career levels to provide an excellent basis from which to develop. On the other hand, industry's managers and leaders of tomorrow require far more tailored and personalised training if they are to continue to develop. On both counts, the outlook for the industry appears gloomy with very little done to address these gaps. Research carried out a few of years ago revealed that only 41 per cent of businesses in the UK hotel industry offered training in the past 12 months and that most of it was generic. Of those who offered training, a mere 36 per cent provided training directed at addressing individual needs. Essentially, only 15% focused on assisting individuals with the specific professional development opportunities they required. If that then is the situation in the UK…can it be any better in Sri Lanka?
J.Willard Marriott once said: ‘We have realized for a long time that you can't have a service business with a lot of employees without having people who know how to manage. So we have been teaching our management how to manage, as well as our employees how to take care of their jobs. Good management and trained personnel are the most important factors in our business. When we had six or seven hot shoppes, I'd drive to every one of them every day, sometimes twice a day. Every time I visited, I'd find something was wrong: the beer was flat or wasn't cold; the lights hadn't been turned on at night; or the barbeque machine wasn't clean. There were just a lot of things our management didn't do or didn't see. So I then decided, that, if we were going to open a lot of places, we had to hire competent people to do what I was doing - going from one outlet to the next, training managers.’ The words uttered by J. Willard Marriott were of his observations on what occurred in 1964. Relevant then and relevant now, although it hasn’t changed for better, especially in Sri Lanka’s hotelscape!
Let’s face it, hotel managers have to be better prepared today. There's so much competition that you have got to know your business and what you're doing. Experience will tell that success is never final, but the decisions we make along the way determine the end and final outcome. Are we exceeding guest expectations, do our associates have all the tools necessary to do their roles and are empowered, who are the rising stars that are our next generation of leaders, what can we do more of, besides gaining feedback and asking these questions? It also comes down to simply being present within the operation, not managing from your office. The close attention to the fine details of any operation – be it a hotel, restaurant or whatever, makes that operation better than the rest or be the best-in-class.There are many managers, but there are very few good managers and discovering those good managers is increasingly tougher than looking for the proverbial ‘needle’ in the haystack.
To be continued
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