Careers in the hospitality industry can be particularly difficult to master as managing profitability, quality and service levels requires passion, attention to detail and a high level of business sense. This blog provides tips and advice for mastering your hospitality role to set you up for success. I call these tips and bits of advice Hospitality Gems. Enjoy!

Good Leaders Seek Feedback, Listen and Collaborate


A critical leadership skill that is the most simple, yet effective method of improving your performance as a manager is to seek out and listen to employee feedback. Ask employees what they think. Ask them what is working well and what isn't.  Ask them how we could do things differently and still achieve the department goals and objectives.  And definitely ask them how you are performing as a leader and what you can do to improve.

 This is often a difficult leadership skill to master because we naturally do not like hearing that as a leader we are not performing well in certain areas. But this is exactly the kind of information effective leaders seek out. We can't fix what we don't know is broken. Ask your employees to tell you what is broken then act upon it. 

Of course, not everything employees bring up are true problems.  It is your job to understand which feedback items are genuine issues that make work difficult or unpleasant and which issues are non-factors.

One important method of addressing the day-to-day work problems your employees identify for you is to incorporate employee ideas into the eventual solution.  This is called empowerment.  If employees feel like their input is valued and their ideas are implemented, then they feel like they are part of the solution.  On the flip side, if management unilaterally creates new policies or procedures they think will solve the problem then mandate that employees follow them then employees feel less valued, less motivated and eventually morale will be in the tank.

So brainstorm solutions to issues as a team. It is up to management to set the vision and department objectives but management should then relinquish enough control to empower employees to come up with their own solutions that support that vision and achieves those objectives.  Who knows, maybe the employees will come up with a creative solution that is more effective than the ideas you might have had. 

Whatever you do, don't take employee feedback personally.  For example, if an employee says you are not organized and it is making their job harder, the first natural response is to get defensive and argue that you are organized and maybe the employee just needs to be more efficient. This reaction is the fast lane to disaster because your employees will know you totally missed the point, will no longer trust you, will no longer provide you with the valuable feedback you need to be a successful leader.

Instead, ask probing questions to better understand what exactly they mean and determine root causes of their frustration.  It could very well be the case that what the employee is saying is true. This is a golden opportunity for you to plug a gap in your job effectiveness and take a step in the right direction to becoming a better manager.

As employees see changes in the right direction and learn to trust that you are seeking feedback in a "safe" manner that doesn't lead to hard feelings or worse, retaliation against the employee who provided the feedback, they will begin to feel like they are being heard and respected. Employees who see progress being made to address their concerns feel empowered to make more suggestions which leads to a more productive work environment and growth in your leadership skills.

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