As you rise through the ranks of hotel management, you spend less time running shifts and a lot more time training and doing paperwork. As an executive committee member, your job is to provide your team with the proper training and equipment to ensure their success. Believe me, it makes the job a LOT easier if you work on building your team from your very first day in the industry.
Entry-Level Hotel Managers
When first starting out, managers are usually assistant managers in operations. You are the department head’s right hand man (or woman) and will have the most interaction with the team members. While you will obviously not have the knowledge or skills of the department head, it will be up to you to make him or her aware of the problems and challenges within the department.
For example, as an Assistant Banquet Manager, you would oversee:
- Banquet Houseman Supervisor
- Banquet Housemen
- Banquet Captains
- Banquet Servers
As the person that is running daily shifts, you have the opportunity to influence team members the most. Just as young officers in the military rely on their sergeants, you should be working with your staff supervisors to gain as much knowledge about the property and its clients as possible. All the while, start working on building a mentoring relationship with your department head. Your job at this point is to absorb as much knowledge as possible to make both yourself and your immediate boss promotable.
Department Head Managers
At this point, you are in charge of an entire department. You will have a direct relationship with your EC member. In the case of a banquet manager, your EC member would be the Director of Food & Beverage. More than likely, you will have at least one other department head (the restaurant manager), and possibly more, such as an outlets manager or room service manager.
While being mentored by your F&B, you will also be in charge of the training of your entire staff. Relationships that were forged at the assistant manager level will start to pay off in this role. Your supervisors will know and respect your abilities, and they will also be your main contact points for the staff. Work in conjunction with your assistant managers and supervisors to train the staff on a daily basis as well as holding training sessions.
When hiring, don’t just plug a hole, but take the time to find the right person for the job. This is true for every position in your department. One bad hire can wreak havoc in the department, so take a special interest in every hire. When conducting interviews, be sure to have your assistant managers sit in on the interviews so moving forward, they know what you expect from prospective employees to consider them hirable.
Begin delegating some of your tasks to assistants. This shows your managers you are investing in them as well as letting them know about the possibilities of career advancement. After all, you would not be taking the time to teach them department head duties if you did not have the intention of moving them up the chain as you get promoted.
After a year or so as a department head, your team should be able to run the operation in your absence with the same level of service and quality as if you were overseeing every function yourself.
As you begin to delegate more of your tasks to your team, the mentoring relationship you have with your EC member should grow accordingly. As you are delegating your tasks to your managers, encourage your EC members to delegate tasks to you. At the very least, you want to be involved in setting monthly/yearly budgets as well as the monthly paperwork. You want to absorb as much of your EC members work, or at least understand how to do it, as possible.
Point being, both of you are looking into the future. When the EC member goes on vacation, he or she knows the department is in good hands. Then, when he or she gets promoted or moves on, you are at the front of the line to take over the position.
Honestly, this will take more time on your part. In my case, it was about eight months of six-day work weeks, so I could spend that extra day every week with my boss to learn his paperwork and duties. Eventually, my investment paid off, as I was promoted to Asst. Director of Food & Beverage and my F&B got promoted to Operations Manager, making me the de facto F&B.
Executive Committee Member
All of that hard work you did climbing up the ladder is about to pay off. As an EC member, you are now responsible for every manager and team member in the entire department. For instance, a Director of Food & Beverage would oversee:
- Banquet Manager (and his or her entire department)
- Restaurant Manager (and his or her entire department)
- Outlets Manager (and his or her entire department)
- Room Service Manager (and his or her entire department)
- Executive Chef (and his or her entire department)
- Purchasing Manager
In addition, you will now have the duties of protecting the integrity of the F&B menus with the sales and catering department. This will require constant interaction with the Director of Catering and the Director of Sales (who will share responsibility of oversight for the Convention Services Manager).
Along with that fancy title also comes a TON of paperwork as well as negotiating with vendors. You are now responsible for EVERY aspect of the food and beverage operation in the hotel. It makes it all that more important to rely on managers working under you to ensure you are doing your job properly.
Instead of mentoring one or two managers that were working as assistants under you in your department, you will be mentoring three, possibly four or more managers (all of your department heads). You are no longer responsible for running actual shifts, but this does not mean you are not involved in the operation aspects of the business. Quite the contrary. It is now your job to critique the operation and hand down recommendations to your department heads.
It can be a tricky time, especially when first taking over, but you will need to trust all of the training you have done to this point is going to pay off. Rather than giving managers a solution, present them with the problem and allow them to develop a game plan to address it. You can then critique their plan but allow them to carry it out and present you with progress reports. Then, you can evaluate its success or failure and work with them to improve it.
Being a good manager is not about creating personal shine but rather about an entire department that shines. When your department performs exceptionally well, believe me, your boss will know who is responsible for it.
Far too many managers manage in fear of their job, meaning they don’t want to share what they know for fear of being replaced by the manager they are educating. You have to manage in anticipation of being promoted, knowing full well the moment that happens, one of YOUR managers can move into your role and provide you with the same level of support and dedication you provided to your boss.
Struggling to find the right managers for your property or hospitality organization? Joseph David International has been successfully placing hospitality managers for more than a decade. To learn more about our hospitality recruiting services, click here.
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