Status or Appearance : Hospitality (Wo-)Men in Black

Evil Erik believes that style is black and therefore has decreed that "management" has to dress in black suits, since it is such a classy color!

When he now stands in front of the department heads, he sees a flock of penguins and feels like an Ice-Bear, ready to eat one or the other alive, while warning "his" managers time and time again:

"You know what the difference is between you and me? I make you look good!"

Erik's favorite movie is " Men in Black " and he is constantly using quotes from these flicks :

• You'll dress only in attire specially sanctioned by me.
• You'll conform to the identity I give you and do what I tell you.
• You'll have no identifying marks of any kind.
• You'll not stand out in any way and " anonymity " is your name.
• Your entire image is crafted to leave no lasting memory.
• You're no longer part of the System, you are above the System.

So when senior and junior executives are running around in the hotel, they make sure they avoid the guests as much as they can, they hide behind the pillars in the lobby and the restaurants and avoid any eye contact, thus "succeeding " to create no impression.

What Evil Erik's fatal mistake is, he forgets that the hospitality business is a people business and it is not the General Manager but the senior, and even more, the junior managers who can make the difference between his hotel and the competition through pro-active and pleasurable guest contacts.

But he tells the junior managers: " Don't do that, don't do this, because you are too young and don't understand......" and/or "Stay way from that problem, which is senior manager's level......"

What he, and many of his colleagues, should ask themselves : "How am I going to turn a junior supervisor into a senior executive and how can I challenge them with senior manager ideas ?"

Senior executives all like having junior managers around, they need someone to shove grunt work off to from time to time.

But proper managing is all about learning, plain and simple. If a junior manager is not capable of learning new things or a senior manager incapable of teaching, they both do not belong in the positions they have.

What is he teaching them by telling them to fade into the ( black )dark and stay out of the limelight?

Why does he let them live in terror of making taking decisions?

Or even worse, why is he telling junior managers that this is how he has done it since the last 25 years and how fantastic it worked......

The old ways of management are not good enough these days, they weren't good enough back then and this mentality is feeding one thing: stagnation!

So Evil Erik should not fear teaching moments, should not shy away from teaching a new practice to his subordinates, and if he cannot explain it, then that should give him ample motivation to learn things better himself.

The point of explaining management, marketing, strategic thinking, long-term planning, and the like, is not to add complexity, but to help manage complexity.

Guests have seen more than their share of bad managers who've had years and years of experience and do not trust those managers, simply because they have the experience required to be called " senior " ?

A junior manager with little to no experience can often be a lot more valuable to the guests than a manager who has 5 years of experience under his belt and just assumes he knows it all.

With senior managers, guests have to be lucky that they learned from their previous mistakes (and every manager makes mistakes, no matter how good he is or how much experience he has), that they haven't picked up too many bad habits and that they are open minded.

If guests are being served by an executive like that, they consider themselves very, very lucky because there really aren't that many " service stars " around and this kind of personalities are, without doubt, the main reason for repeat customer behavior.

What " real " managers must realize is that a junior manager can easily be molded into the kind of manager they want them to be. They haven't really had a lot of time to pick up bad habits, and they are eager to prove that they belong to the company so they will be very eager to learn and improve ( or, unfortunately, worsen.... )

All Erik's hotel needs is a couple of people who are willing and capable of teaching these young managers. Of course, with junior managers he does have to live with the fact that they will make rookie mistakes. He will have to review their work a bit more, and make sure that they learn from their mistakes but if he does this from the beginning, he'll quickly notice that the extra reviewing tasks will soon take up less and less work.

More and more hospitality organizations don't really differentiate between juniors and seniors. They pretty much only hire young managers who just graduated, these managers never get assigned easier tasks or anything like that, and they have to do the same kind of stuff that people with more experience need to do.

The result is that such hotel groups have a bunch of young managers who already do a great job, and they're constantly getting better. What matters most is attitude and talent; not experience or education.

Just because so many losers have "stuck around" in hotels for 25 years, it doesn't mean they have seniority over anybody else.

It just means they have survived, conned as well as misled owners, colleagues and guests and, most importantly for their status, wore black suits all those years !

Last but not least, Evil Erik should recognize that best practices in hospitality do not come naturally to anyone, even he could not have reached his ( unmerited ) title without help, support, and in his case even pity, from other senior managers.

Seeing all these black (wo-)men running around in lobbies, restaurants and banquet facilities creates fear in the observant guest, the fear for being served by miss-promoted managers who are afraid to learn and now hide in black.......

A true senior manager is one who is willing to learn, research, mentor, train and discover alternative ways to develop and maintain his skills, but also ready to wear yellow suits and red bowties !

PS:

May I please remind all readers that any resemblance of Evil Erik's expertise and behavior to existing hospitality "managers" is purely coincidental and without any intention.......