Development, Leadership

Rule #1 Don’t Get Comfortable!

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Everything is difficult before it gets easy, and what was once out of your comfort zone now belongs to your daily routine. So our goal should be to become most comfortable at our job, correct?

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In contrary our goal should be to always look for opportunities and challenges that push us out of our comfort zone and help us grow further. If we never step out of our comfort zone and make mistakes, we never learn new things and our career stagnates.

Don’t be happy if you know all the answers and know how everything works, don’t be happy if you are the smartest person in the room, and look for ways to continue to challenge yourself.

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Leadership

Leaders Vs. Managers? What Are You?

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Everyone is talking about leadership, and how we need to evolve from managers to leaders, but only few really get the difference! It’s a beautiful word and the thought of leading people is very appealing, but how can you make the step from managing to leading? And how can you get people wanting to follow you?

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Continue reading Leaders Vs. Managers? What Are You? →

Development, Leadership

The Only Thing Standing Between You And Your Goals Is…

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The only thing standing between you and your goals is more than what the Wolf of Wall Street is trying to tell us.

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It’s not just being afraid to follow your goals for one reason or another, it’s having a clear understanding of what your goals really are to begin with.

‘What are my goals’, is one of the most important questions you can ask yourself at the beginning of your journey and your career in hospitality!

I am recruiting graduates from hotel management schools for the position of housekeeping floor manager now for years, and my experience is that many, if not most, do not have clearly defined goals and are rushed to get promoted as fast as possible, and definitely faster than their peers from school. Continue reading The Only Thing Standing Between You And Your Goals Is… →

Development, Leadership

Do You Have The Right Attitude To Succeed?

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You come to work on Monday morning after a rejuvenating weekend with your loved one, and get confronted by a coworker with a negative attitude within the first ten minutes… you kept working endless hours over the weekend to complete the project in time for the upcoming presentation and put in endless efforts, but your peers missed the deadline and your presentation got cancelled… you always try to do your best and work hard, and the person next to you is sleeping on the wheel, yet there is no sign of accountability… other people in your organization have ulterior motives and employ unethical techniques to advance themselves…

Does any of this sound familiar to you?

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Don’t get yourself in the victim role and develop a negative mindset, but rather continue to focus on yourself and on doing the right thing. I am not saying that you shouldn’t hold people accountable to their behavior, actions and performance (without it your business cannot succeed), but you cannot make it personal either, get emotional about it, or let it change anything of who you are and what you believe in. If you believe in Karma and that one’s actions always have consequences, even if you yourself are not able to address it or do anything about it, you can trust that no one gets away with cutting corners or unethical behavior. Focus on being at your best every day and on growing the people around you the best you can, and you will always have a feeling of accomplishment by the end of the day.

I have come across a lot of smart people with the skill set to be very successful in their role, and who yet fail to work as a team, fail to get the best out of their teams and coworkers, and fail to deliver the expected results because of their attitude.

If you believe that 10% in life is what happens to you, things that you cannot control, and 90% your attitude about it, you know what you have to focus on first – yourself and your outlook on things!

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Development

Do You Have The Right Perspective On Your Career?

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What’s my career goal, is one of the most important questions you can ask yourself at the beginning of your journey and your career in hospitality!

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I am recruiting graduates from hotel management schools for the position of housekeeping floor manager now for years, and my experience is that many, if not most, do not have clearly defined goals and are rushed to get promoted as fast as possible, and definitely faster than their peers from school. Continue reading Do You Have The Right Perspective On Your Career? →

Leadership

Step Out Of Your Comfort Zone!

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Your comfort zone is your worst enemy if you want to grow and move ahead.

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This is the place that you feel most comfortable, and it’s the area where you know exactly what to do and what not to – chances for you to make mistakes are very small, if you just remain there! Continue reading Step Out Of Your Comfort Zone! →

Development, Guest Services, Leadership

What You Must Know About Five Star Service – Never Assume!

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I recently attended a Forbes five-stars training at my hotel. The Forbes trainer started the training by explaining how it feels to receive five-star service as a guest, and the genuine care and attention to detail that come with it. The trainer continued that while many of us have been working in the hotel industry for very many years and believe to exactly know our customers that we should never assume that a certain guest doesn’t care about us offering service that goes beyond and only cares about the basics. Continue reading What You Must Know About Five Star Service – Never Assume! →

New York City

Most Amazing Performance By NYC Garbage Man

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Only in New York City can you find stars in any corner and in any walk of life. This morning when walking the streets of West Village with my wife, we experienced the most amazing Broadway performance by a NYC garbage man. It was so captivating and inspiring that everyone around us stopped for a moment to enjoy this memorable NYC experience.

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It does not matter what you are doing as long as you do it with passion and all your heart is into it. Continue reading Most Amazing Performance By NYC Garbage Man →

Leadership

The #1 Rule Of Housekeeping – Inspect What You Expect

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I recently went to a training about leadership and rooms operations, and one of the facilitators stated that if we want our teams to be effective and successful that we need to ‘inspect what we expect’. Continue reading The #1 Rule Of Housekeeping – Inspect What You Expect →

Leadership

Are You Just Busy Or Are You Making A Difference?

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If you are a manager in operations in any unionized hotel in NYC you are most likely working a lot of extra hours every day and find yourself busy from the moment you walk into the door to the moment you realize that you worked again over 12 hours and on top of that even forgot to take lunch break… and yet you still don’t have the feeling that you accomplished anything meaningful on your way home. Continue reading Are You Just Busy Or Are You Making A Difference? →

New York City

The Perfect Moment Under The NYC Streetlight

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I love New York! I love New York because it’s full of these perfect moments. These moments when you don’t regret the missed chances of yesterday, when you don’t worry about tomorrow, when you can just enjoy this one perfect moment in the present.

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I just returned with my wife from walking along Hudson river, when we passed by a group of four musicians with a small audience playing their newest songs. We were immediately reminded by bands like Foster the People, Beirut or Gotye and so impressed that we joined the small audience as well that quickly turned into a crowd of cheering fans, and with that it wasn’t a couple of street musicians anymore, but a band playing a concert. Continue reading The Perfect Moment Under The NYC Streetlight →

Guest Services

Is The Customer Still King?

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I am all about personalized service and believe that it becomes more and more important if you want your business to remain relevant. I never believed in online shopping until I started shopping at huge department stores like Bloomingdales or Macys. It’s a challenging experience and you feel like that you need to be thankful to receive good and caring service, forget about the customer is king, here it’s the employee who is king and you can trust they make sure that you know by their attitude. I try to avoid asking for help as much as possible and now switched to online shopping just to avoid their customer service.

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Is this the future? Are we moving to impersonal online shopping as the quality of service decreases? Continue reading Is The Customer Still King? →

Guest Services

What Your Hotel Can Learn From Starbucks

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It’s all about personalized service, and any hotel is striving to deliver the best service possible. I work at a 5 star property in Manhattan and all hotels in our comp set are beautiful, have luxurious rooms and facilities, and state of the art technology. So why should travelers spend their money at your hotel and not at the competition next door? Well, your answer is probably because your hotel provides better service, right?

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I am Sam

Nowadays it’s not so much about the product anymore, and all about the service… personalized service to be more specific. Welcoming your guests by their name is the simplest and most effective way to provide this personalized service… but only in theory! What if I told you that every luxury hotel I ever worked at either struggled or the very minimum had room for improvement with using the guest name consistently? Do you think this is acceptable? Continue reading What Your Hotel Can Learn From Starbucks →

Leadership

Figure It Out!

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One of the key elements of being an effective leader is your ability to come up with solutions to solve problems and improve processes. Don’t get me wrong it’s ok to ask your boss if you need help finding a faster and better way to get things done, and I certainly don’t want you having to reinvent the wheel…

But with this being said you need to be resourceful and show that you can Figure It Out by yourself or with the help of others without having to ask your boss every single step of the way, if it’s not absolutely necessary. Continue reading Figure It Out! →

Guest Services, Leadership

Give Me Solutions Not Problems!

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I strongly believe that constructive feedback is a must and I want my team to come to me with solutions to opportunities rather than just problems.

Most companies have a culture of complaining and I believe that it’s their leaders’ fault for accepting this. It’s essential to share feedback with your boss and I understand that sometimes it’s important to simple vent, but keep in mind that the goal is to make things better. Chances are that most problems are not news to your boss and that rather than being part of the problem you want to be part of the solution.

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Office Space

Continue reading Give Me Solutions Not Problems! →

Leadership

What You Must Know Before Training Your Employees

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I attended a training this week with focus on rooms (front desk and housekeeping) operations within the hotel industry, and was amazed by what I learned. It was not so much the knowledge and expertise shared by the instructors, but the way how it was shared with the group. We had over 80 attendees in the training, and the instructors would divide the group into smaller teams of five to ten participants maximum and rotate them from one exercise to the next, so that the training would be much more intimate and personal, and everyone could try hands on what was discussed and learned just a moment ago. Continue reading What You Must Know Before Training Your Employees →

Guest Services, Leadership

Forget About Who’s Getting The Credit!

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President Truman once said that ‘it is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit’, and it captures one of the main challenges within any industry – we hesitate to take ownership and go the extra mile, if we feel that others are not stepping up to the plate as well and that we do not get the proper credit for our efforts.

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We want to do great and go beyond, but it’s important for us that everyone else does the exactly same thing too. How often do we complain about having too much on our plate, if the person next to us works as dedicated as we do? We usually don’t! We mostly complain that others are doing less than we do, and that this is not fair. Why should we do more than others? Continue reading Forget About Who’s Getting The Credit! →

Leadership

We Have Always Done It This Way

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You know how every other leadership article is always about change, and how we need to evolve and do things differently to stay relevant and competitive. It always made perfect sense to me, and it seemed the right and logical thing to do. Of course you need to be able to change, evolve and adapt as effective leaders.

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Well I never really took a moment trying to truly understand why it would be so difficult for others to make that change, to adopt to new things and to evolve. I never really tried to put myself in the shoes of others who couldn’t seem to make that change. Continue reading We Have Always Done It This Way →

Leadership

Sometimes You Win, Sometimes You Learn

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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 Sometimes You Win, Sometimes You Learn →

Leadership

My Day As Director of Housekeeping

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My day as director of housekeeping usually starts the night before when I go over my Outlook schedule for the next day to make sure that everything that I wanted to accomplish the next day or week is covered. It’s important that I don’t overload my schedule and set myself too many tasks to accomplish. I try to stretch my goals and get as much done as possible, but if it’s unreasonable, I’ll only feel frustrated the next day when things don’t go as planned.

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The Grand Budapest Hotel

Now if you were ever working in operations before you know that things can and will change all the time, and fires can come up all day long that require you to put them out quickly and move your schedule around… and that’s expected! It’s fine to make changes to your plan, you just need to have one in the first place to make sure that you don’t lose focus and get off track. Continue reading My Day As Director of Housekeeping →