…PATIENCE!
When I started my journey in hospitality I was told that experience was the most important thing necessary to have a successful career in hotel management, and that I had to learn as much as possible in as many areas of the hotel as possible so that I would become a well-rounded hotel professional later and could then share my experience with others.
Later this shifted somewhat to attitude, and recruiters were looking for the right talent with the right attitude, even before experience – this is mostly for entry-level roles, and obviously changes with experience becoming more and more important the higher you grow up the ranks. Everything else could be learned and coached, but having the right attitude couldn’t be taught.
Being in the hospitality industry, a business that’s all about people, having a service mindset towards your guests and colleagues, and a passionate can-do attitude was the most important thing a recruiter could ask for. It would be ok to hire a candidate who did not have as much experience and invest more efforts and resources in proper training.
And while having the right attitude continues to be important, hotels are struggling more and more with high turnover. Fresh graduates are looking for an exciting challenge and are not always willing to put in the patience necessary to build a solid and stable foundation to grow their career.
Becoming a successful leaders requires to put in time and does not happen overnight, and there are certainly no short-cuts to success. In larger cities with always new hotels opening and attempting to attract talent with higher salaries or promotions, too many fall into the trap of jumping from one job to another too soon without being fully ready for the next step and never learning what it means to really improve processes and people.
One of my previous hotel managers once told me that to grow, you need to stay in a role for more than two to three years, otherwise you will never have the confidence that you gain from starting something meaningful and seeing it all the way through to successful completion, never have the confidence you gain from making it through a challenging situation and making things better. This all takes patience.
Nowadays you can find too many managers being promoted up as far as department head level, but never fully having learned what is necessary making them unsuccessful and eventually giving up changing professions. This is not fair to them, as they’ll blame themselves, lose passion for what they were doing, and turn into bad bosses for their talent who still have their journey ahead of them and deserve better.
Becoming good at something, anything, takes dedication and patience, and there are no short-cuts to long-term success.
Depending on the cultural settings that you are working in and other factors, one of the three attributes will matter more to you then the others, patience, attitude or experience. And while attitude can be more important to you in a heavily unionized setting, in this age of great change, patience will be the #1 most important thing to be successful in hotel management.
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