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’? →