All posts by Alexander Kellermann

Leadership

The smoke screen!

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The difference between an effective and ineffective manager in addressing poor performance and holding people accountable is the ability to look right through the smoke screen to the root cause of the problem and to see things for what they are.

I remember my first real review, and I say real because it was the first time one of my supervisors actually took the time and invested the efforts to tell me things I did not want to hear, tell me that I was not perfect and the areas that I needed to improve and how I could do that with his help. Believe me I was able to give my boss tons of good reasons (and truly believed in them) for why I did things that way and how this was not my fault and so on… sounds familiar to you?

Well, my boss did not let go, kept pushing and went after me until I gave in. It took me a couple of days to truly understand and accept his feedback, and looking back, I will be forever thankful that he invested the energy to help me change and improve. Continue reading The smoke screen! →

Leadership

Keep calm and get perspective!

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The key to be successful in your career is to make the right decisions that keep you on the right path! How do you know what’s right and wrong, if you have not been in this situation before, how do you know, if you should apply for the next position or remain in your current role? You need perspective…

Anyone graduating from hotel school and working in his first roles in the hotel industry is cursed with impatience and the urge to get promoted as soon as possible, but definitely faster than the classmates from school. It feels like a race…

Too often we make the mistake of moving from one position to the next because of this impatience to get ahead, just to get nowhere. Continue reading Keep calm and get perspective! →

Leadership

Stop making excuses and start taking risks!

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How can you motivate yourself and get the courage to push yourself out of your comfort zone and take calculated risks?

What motivates you to try something you have not done before? What gives you the courage to take risks, make unpopular decisions, or go against the tide?

I recently attended a leadership training, and one of the exercises was to write a speech that your boss would give about you at your retirement party. What would you want your boss to say about you looking back at your career? Would you not prefer having taken risks and not having to wonder ‘what if’?

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Image courtesy of Teerapun / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Trying to write this speech about yourself feels like a wake-up call (without a snooze button), and you suddenly think of all the things you should have already done by now. It hit me that the best time to start making a change and stop being afraid would have been a long time ago, and that the second best time is right now. It’s like trying to write your own review, you are more critical and tough on yourself than your boss would ever be (unless you are seeing yourself in the victim role in which of course you are right all the time and everyone else around you wrong). Continue reading Stop making excuses and start taking risks! →

How To

How to deliver excellent service

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To deliver excellent service, it is not enough to understand how to do it and to have the skills to do so, you need to experience it first.

Working in hotel operations every day we often tend to forget what it means to really empathize with your guests and to put yourself in your guests’ shoes. Everyone knows or has been told a million times that you are supposed to use the guest name at least twice in every guest interaction, if possible, and yet at every hotel I ever worked in, we would always struggle to consistently deliver on this promise. Why is it possible that something as simple as using the guest name can yet be so difficult to do consistently across the hotel at every turn? Continue reading How to deliver excellent service →

How To

How did I become a micro-manager?

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How did I become a micro-manager?

Yes, without noticing it, wanting or being able to admit to it, I developed to be a micromanager with my first managerial roles. Thankfully I had a mentor that pushed me to see my leadership path for what it was, ineffective.

Well, in order for me to be able to change my leadership style, delegate responsibilities, empower my employees to make their own decisions, grow and learn from their own missteps and successes, I first had to understand how I became a micromanager. I was very successful in my previous positions as line associate, always exceeded expectations, and a perfectionist with great sense for details. So what happened?

I didn’t change my power alley. I didn’t understand that I had to develop and that what got me into the position of a manager wasn’t automatically going to make me an effective leader as well.

I didn’t want to accept that I had to change. Now I understand that everyone needs to make this change at one point, and many never make the jump from (micro-)manager to leader.

Most micro-managers were very successful at one point in their career, and never developed their power alley, never took the risks of making the jump.

Starting to delegate responsibilities and empower employees to make their own decisions (and not asking at every single step of the way for approval) isn’t easy as it comes with accepting and supporting the missteps of your employees along the way. But it will make your team more effective, and enable it to go beyond. Continue reading How did I become a micro-manager? →

Leadership

Who are ‘they’?

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I don’t know why ‘they’ did this. ‘They’ asked me to tell you. ‘They’ want us to do this now. Does this sound familiar to you?

Who the heck are ‘they’? Not only in the hotel industry, but in any business, if anything went wrong, an unpopular decision was made, or simply anytime someone didn’t want to step out of the comfort zone, accept ownership or responsibility, it’s ‘they’. Convenient isn’t it?

Simply put you will talk about ‘they’ when you don’t want to accept responsibility, and even more importantly, when you don’t identify yourself with your organization, or better yet, with the leaders that you are working for and their decisions.

So whose fault is it that our employees and us talk about ‘they’ every time it’s not pleasant, favorable or popular? By the way it’s not just our employees, you hear them talking about ‘they’ at any level of the organization. For our front line employees, ‘they’ is their managers, and for those managers, ‘they’ is their directors and executives, and the buck never stops…

So whose fault is it again? Well, the easy way out is that ‘they’ are the top leaders or top brass of the organization for not encouraging their employees to take responsibility and ownership, and hindering trust and empowerment by micromanaging from the top down. The cost of this dysfunctional environment caused by this lack of ownership is unbearable, and the only reason why a hotel fostering this mindset is able to stay in business is that this mindset was allowed to become an industry standard. Continue reading Who are ‘they’? →

How To

How to win customers

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How to win new customers and turn first time customers into loyal ones is very simple in theory, yet only achieved and maintained by very few in reality.

I believe the three pillars of excellent service that would want you to come back again for more and tell your family and friends about it when experienced to be genuine care, ownership and emotional intelligence.

We know the importance of excellent service and always talk to our employees about the meaning of genuine care, ownership, and understanding the needs of our customer, but too often forget the true power of it. Continue reading How to win customers →

How To

How to achieve Harmony

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Establishing a harmonic work environment isn’t easy, and I learned that you can only achieve harmony once you stop trying to and worrying too much about it. When I started as a manager a couple of years ago I remember experiencing plenty of conflict every day caused by a changing leadership team, inadequate staffing levels, and unexperienced managers (myself included). It took us about twelve month to get to a setting that allowed us to improve and accomplish greatness as a team. I recall coming to work and I could not believe to experience a day without any conflict, and I clearly remember my hope and concern that it would not last and stay like that… almost to a point that I wished I would be able to avoid any possible conflict only to guarantee this just achieved harmony. But it never worked, I wasn’t able to turn a blind eye either, and the conflict didn’t stop.

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Image courtesy of stockimages / FreeDigitalPhotos.net Continue reading How to achieve Harmony →

Development, Leadership

Make Mistakes!

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Making mistakes, being able to accept responsibility for them and learning from them, can help you grow and get better.

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I remember when I was working within the butler services in Vienna, I had a family arriving to one of our Imperial suites for their vacation. The Imperial suite was the category right below the Presidential suite, the hotel had seven of them in total, and they differentiated in design and layout, from traditional to modern. Given that the family paid rack rate for the suite, I arranged for VIP amenities including flower arrangements, a majestic fruit basket, open bar and a bottle of Champagne. The suite looked incredible and it took me a couple of hours from start to finish to set everything up to perfection. Continue reading Make Mistakes! →

Leadership

Service Profit Chain

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You most likely heard about the service profit chain before and the ‘magical’ concept behind it. At the end of the service profit chain stands the purpose of your company, the long-term profitability and sustainability of your hotels.

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The St. Regis Butler Service

How can you get the most profit for your hotel, and who gives you the most amount of money? … of course happy guests! Happy guests will spend more money each time they stay with you, stay more often and longer, and tell their friends about it. And you probably know how powerful word of mouth can be. Working at my previous hotel in Shanghai the HR director went on a business trip to the US with representatives of the owning company to experience the brand and what it stands for. At one of the properties during their trip the HR director ordered room service for the group who decided to stay in for the evening, and wanted to order a simple Chinese noodle soup, something that her guests would appreciate and enjoy. Once the order was delivered up to the room, it was not what she had in mind for her guests and called the room service order taker back to correct the misunderstanding. The order taker didn’t try to empathize, told her that it wasn’t a misunderstanding, and that she received what she ordered (needless to say a very disappointing and discouraging experience). The HR director came back from the business trip and told this story of how one bad interaction can leave a lasting negative impression at the next operations meeting and general assembly, and I keep telling this story as an example of how powerful word of mouth can be (unfortunately negative word of mouth will always be more popular than positive). So striving to keep your guests happy and satisfied makes sense.

How do you keep your guests happy? Right, with happy associates. Sounds too easy to be true? Well, did you ever receive really good service from someone who did not enjoy her job or doesn’t care? You probably could tell that it’s not sincere and just doesn’t feel right. Happy employees deliver passionate, sincere and caring service to make your guests happy. They will go above and beyond, not because they have to, but because they enjoy doing it. Having learned in a very traditional hotel in Austria, I was very much focused on standards and service excellence, always wanting to strive for perfection, and having the highest expectations for myself and for others in return. In my first real management position in China, I was trying to train the employees in my team to deliver exactly this, excellent service without exceptions, and perfection at every turn. I still remember the review with my previous boss very vividly, and how he told me that I need to change my management style to be successful… something that I found difficult to believe, and didn’t want to hear at first. I wasn’t happy about him telling me that I need to change and tried to argue his feedback. It took me a couple of days/weeks to understand that he was right, and I am still thankful that he didn’t care about having to push back on me trying to argue and simply wanted me to grow and become a better leader. He told me that standards and striving for perfection is important, but the foundation for all this will always be fun! You need to enjoy what you are doing and have fun at it! As a leader you need to be able to motivate your employees to be successful and achieve great results because they enjoy what they are doing, and not because they have to.

Now we covered that we want to build a culture that encourages our employees to have fun at work, make our guests happy in return so that they spend more money and tell their friends about it. But who exactly is responsible for happy employees? It’s not only your manager or HR department, but it’s the leader in you and every employee in the hotel. Everyone has the power to be a real hero, and make the people around you happy!

The Service Profit Chain is not magical at all, but very real, and there is nothing more encouraging and exciting than working in a business whose success is directly linked to the happiness of its employees. Wouldn’t you want to work in a place like this?

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Leadership

Put the ball through the hoop!

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‘Taking the basketball and putting it through the hoop’ is an equivalent of getting things done, making stuff happen, and taking action. Working in a hotel like in any other people’s business you can rest assured that many things are not going the right way and that people make mistakes every day. Amazingly, however, most are eager to tell you what’s wrong, how it is affecting your business, and seem to know exactly what you should be doing about it to correct it, rather than helping to get it right themselves. Imagine a coworker approaching you about a problem, how it came it to it, and what she is doing about it to solve it.

Ìÿ÷ è êîðçèíà‘Putting the ball through the hoop’ is not a skill set, it’s an attitude, and a mindset to be part of the solution, not the problem. It’s wanting to change things to the better and making a difference. It’s about delegating tasks, and holding people accountable to it.

I have heard my former boss telling me this about a thousand times at our weekly meetings, when I would tell him about the challenges in our department and what I believe that he/we should be doing about it. ‘Take the ball and put it through the hoop’ would be his response at the end of every meeting, and he would be very enthusiastic and excited about telling me the true meaning of it over and over again. It’s about taking action, and not just talking about it. It’s about making a decision, and not being afraid about making mistakes along the way.

Continue reading Put the ball through the hoop! →

Leadership

My real Hero

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Before I moved from Europe to New York City about six years ago, I left my old computer with my mom and showed her how to send e-mails. I took me an entire afternoon to walk her through the process from starting the computer to hitting the ‘send’ button, and make her feel comfortable with it.

The-Man-of-Steel-dc-comics-34648365-2880-1800Once I arrived in New York I got a text message from my mom telling me that the computer and e-mail does not work. So I called my friend in my home town to stop by and go over it again with my mom. He didn’t talk to me for weeks, so I guess he must have had the same frustrating experience as I did. Continue reading My real Hero →