Blogging

How to Build Traffic for Your Blog

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If you want to build and increase traffic for you blog (and who doesn’t want that?) and are searching the web for helpful suggestions, chances are that you’ll find tons of sites that promise you to have found the number one secret for more traffic overnight… but with everything that sounds too good to be true, this one is probably as well, and building a bigger audience comes down to hard work.

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While many factors come into play when trying to increase traffic, I believe it really comes down to three: Continue reading How to Build Traffic for Your Blog →

Development, Leadership

Take care of the Big Rocks first

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‘The Big Rocks’ theory is by far one of my favorite lessons in leadership, and it took me some time to really understand. I am sure that you must have heard about this story in some way shape or form before, but there is a difference between just hearing and understanding it, and truly believing in it.

My boss loved to tell me his lessons in leadership in vivid stories, some of them made sense right at the beginning, some of them needed lots of fine tuning, and some are better off never told again.

Regardless of how busy I thought I was in my role as housekeeping manager in a unionized property putting out the fires of the day to day while making everyone happy in being always responsive and helpful, my boss reminded me at the end of each day that I accomplished nothing, as I did not do anything to make anything better for the next day. He said that I was so focused on the small rocks that I could not possible take care of the big ones.

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Image courtesy of dan at FreeDigitalPhotos.net Continue reading Take care of the Big Rocks first →

Development, Leadership

The hidden powers of delegating

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Developing from being a good manager who is excellent in executing tasks like scheduling, payroll, and managing his team members by setting expectations and holding them accountable, to a leader who delegates tasks to his team member and focuses more on developing and growing his people, is necessary if you want your organization and yourself to succeed.

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Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The obvious power of delegating is that by ‘delegating’ tasks and responsibilities to your team you can focus on the vision and long-term goals of the organization. Continue reading The hidden powers of delegating →

Leadership

On edge

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Did you ever ask yourself why we make the most mistakes when the occupancy is low and operations are quiet, or why our service scores are falling down during the slow weeks of the year?

It’s December and we are fully committed with no rooms left to sell, every guest is paying rack rate, and the guest expectations are the highest of the year. Yet everything seems to be falling into place, operations are mostly smooth (exceptions proof the rule as always), and our guest satisfaction index goes up.

How is it possible that we do better when we have less time and resources at hand and are expected to do more compared to when we seem to have all the time in the world and people standing around only waiting to serve a guest? Continue reading On edge →

Development

Training is a waste of time and money!

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If you believe in the importance of ongoing and continuous training in your department or division, chances are that more than once in your career your superiors will challenge you and tell you that ‘training is a waste of time and money’, and a luxury that the hotel simply cannot afford at that time.

‘Excuse me… how could you say that?’

Reality is that training can be very expensive and a burden on your operations, if not executed effectively and if you don’t have a process in place of following up on the set expectations of the training. As a trainer it is your responsibility to show your organization the return on investment that it will have, and that you can measure it and how.

Having to convince your financial controller, you’ll need to be able to measure the improvement because of your training and show statistically how it will gain money for the hotel by having more happy employees who will attract more happy guests, who will spend more and stay more often (service profit chain) and not just lose money.

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Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Where to start? Well, first you should start by identifying where your company wants to get even better and where it needs to improve. Don’t design the training first and then try to push it through at any cost, but identify the necessary areas for improvement first and built the training on it. Continue reading Training is a waste of time and money! →

Development

Changing the culture

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Changing the culture is the basic requirement for any enhancements or achievements. If you are aiming to improve your associate or guest satisfaction, reinforce you standards of excellence or improve your star ratings, the first step is to establish a culture with a mindset wanting to be the best at every turn.

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How exactly do you change a culture? Continue reading Changing the culture →

Development

Think about your future!

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‘Alex do you have a moment, I need to talk to you?’

Ever so often I get approached by one of my staff wanting to talk to me about their future, what’s my outlook on their next career step and the path of their journey. It’s understandable that you want to know what your next position should be so you can start learning the necessary skills and work on improving on your weaknesses, but nine out of ten times this question is solely generated by impatience and the need to compete with friends, colleagues and former classmates. Being ambitious is a good thing and important to be successful, but it shouldn’t stem from jealousy of your friends and coworkers. Continue reading Think about your future! →

How To

How to prepare for a Skype interview

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If you’re just graduating from hotel school, and are searching for a job abroad, chances are that you’ll be invited to a Skype interview at one point. When I applied for job in New York while living in Europe about six years ago, using Skype for a professional interview was not common yet, and I was asked to fly over to the US for a personal interview at my own expenses. Now it seems that Skype simplifies the process, and makes the interview more convenient, but does it also make it easier to get the job?

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While Skype made it much easier (and less costly) to interview with potential employers around the globe, it’s helpful to keep in mind, that Continue reading How to prepare for a Skype interview →

Development, Leadership

‘I never turn a blind eye’ – Sincerely yours, Karma

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You come to work on Monday morning after a rejuvenating weekend with your loved ones, 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 the above sound familiar to you?

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Continue reading ‘I never turn a blind eye’ – Sincerely yours, Karma →

How To

How to prepare for an interview

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So you decided that a career in hospitality is the right choice, send out tons of applications, and finally made it to the interview. How can you best prepare yourself for the interview and what’s important?

I have been sitting on both sides of the table many times, and tried to learn from my mistakes a long the way. Recruiting new employees is one of the most important things you can do, as the right person can change the culture in your department, and support you in leading in the right direction. Hiring the wrong person on the other hand, can turn out to be very very costly, and it can be very difficult to tell from only meeting a person for a couple of minutes during the interview.

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Image courtesy of Ambro at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

So how can you prepare yourself for the interview to communicate that you’re the right person for the job? Continue reading How to prepare for an interview →

How To

How to be successful

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I still remember working over twelve hours a day and 80 hours a week only a couple of years ago to achieve much less that I can accomplish now in less than 3/4 of the time. While I certainly learned to work smarter and be more effective with the growing experience, I do not believe that my IQ changed since then making this huge improvement possible. So what happened?

How to be successful in the hotel industry and move ahead of the competition? It’s a people’s business, and everything comes down to one person respecting and being able to communicate to another, it’s that simple!

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While a Bachelor’s or even Master’s degree became a basic requirement for most management positions in hospitality, it doesn’t matter much from that point on in your career how smart you are, if you’re not able to communicate with other people and get them wanting to follow your lead. So what do you think is more important, your intelligence quotient or your emotional (EQ) and moral intelligence (MQ)? I am telling you that ‘intelligence is overrated‘ and only the cost of entry, it’s the capability of being aware of yourself and others that will make you successful! Continue reading How to be successful →

Guest Relations, How To

How to handle guest complaints

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Guest complaints are common, not just in hospitality, and the more comfortable you get dealing with them, the better for you and your customers! Unfortunately practice itself does not always make perfect, only perfect practice does. So while everyone working in a hotel in any guest related position is confronted with tons of complains during their career, not everyone masters the skill of dealing with them effectively.

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Four Rooms

So how do you handle complaints and a guest who had a bad experience? Continue reading How to handle guest complaints →

Leadership

Support is everything!

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At one of the hotels I worked at we faced the challenge of being consistent in how we assigned room upgrades to our guests, and were not in line with the directions of our loyalty program. We had over 70 percent of return guests and were giving upgrades left and right, not just to the next room category, but to junior suites and up as well. This not only reduced the feeling of being special and recognized when receiving upgrades, it also caused our guests to feel entitled to the upgrade and to complain whenever we could not accommodate them. Even more we were not able to up-sell any of our guests that were actually willing to pay for a nicer room. We had a change of GM’s and our new leader made it very clear from the beginning that we would honor the guidelines of our loyalty program in assigning upgrades, and even assigning very frequent guests to the rooms booked, and that we as managers would be expected to be consistent with this. As expected it was a bumpy start and we had to deal with plenty of unhappy guests for a couple of months. Many of them asked to speak to the Hotel Manager and General Manager to express their unhappiness and to complain about the individual providing the service and denying the upgrade. To our surprise the GM stayed consistent with the message given by his managers and front line staff, and supported us 100 percent. After a couple of months the guest complaints disappeared, guests started appreciating upgrades again, were giving us higher scores on guest satisfaction surveys and started to book suites at a higher rather than always hoping for an upgrade. Continue reading Support is everything! →

Leadership

The Cost of Bad Leadership

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Do you believe that you can learn as much from a bad boss as you would from a good one? Wouldn’t you learn how bad judgement, behavior and management has a bad impact on your organization, what not to do and how you could make a difference?

Having worked for a good boss and leader is invaluable for your career, as you understand the importance of integrity, respect and moral values and principles. What is the take-away from having worked for a bad boss?

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You can argue that you learn from both, the good and the bad boss, but at the end of the day you are just finding excuses to keep yourself motivated if you’re working for a bad boss. Continue reading The Cost of Bad Leadership →

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’? →