One tip we have repeatedly given to younger managers in the hospitality industry is to find a mentor and attach yourself to his or her side. What we have not discussed, however, is how managers working their way up through the ranks can also become mentors to their own staff members. This will play a key role in not only making your staff more promotable but also in making you more promotable.
Without mentors, the hospitality industry would be dead. Sadly, there are always going to be managers that manage out of fear, meaning they are afraid to delegate and share information with their subordinates for fear of being replaced. During my career, I worked for “fear” managers, but I was also lucky enough to have three individuals I considered to be true mentors.
The first of these was Luciano Bochetti while I was working in the restaurant industry. He took me from being a new restaurant GM to someone I would like to think was a complete restaurant manager. He taught me how to look at every aspect of the operation. We were both proud of the fact that with very limited resources, we turned one of the more challenging restaurants in the operation and a perennial loser to a better than break-even operation that was growing in sales in less than a year.
Two of my other mentors were Brian Sheridan and Jordan Cooper. I worked with both of these individuals during my days as a Banquet Manager and Assistant Food & Beverage Director for Hilton and Crowne Plaza. Mr. Sheridan was a numbers guru, and willingly spent hours with me teaching me the ins and outs of budgeting and the sometimes-insurmountable pile of monthly paperwork required by Directors and department heads in this industry. If I had a question, he answered it, period. He would go into detail on every line of the P&L to show me where the numbers came from and how we got to the final figure.
Operationally, the biggest influence of my career was Jordan Cooper. Mr. Cooper has been in this industry for decades and is very much a no-nonsense type of manager. He would call someone out in a second, but he would never embarrass someone in front of their staff. I cannot even begin to add up the hours I spent with this man touring the property for his insight so I could see what he saw or the time that I would spend sitting in his office, just brainstorming about different ways to improve the F&B operation of the hotel.
He was someone that appreciated managers owning up to their mistakes and did not penalize you for coming to him with a problem. Instead, he would ask you your plan of action to fix it or help you work through a solution to ensure this never happened again. It was always about learning from mistakes, not penalizing you and making you afraid to come to him with them. He was not exactly an easy man to work for, but to this day, he was the best General Manager I have ever had in the industry.
With all of those experiences in mind, here are some key characteristics mentors need to possess:
- Willing to Share Knowledge and Experience – as stated above, a mentor cannot and will not be afraid to share knowledge. The goal is to make your staff promotable, thereby making the overall operation more successful.
- Personal Interest – a mentoring relationship often goes far deeper than just work. In essence, a good manager must be happy in his or her personal life to be happy in his or her professional life, because both will impact each other. A good mentor is investing in his or her managers as not only a hospitality manager but also as a person.
- Great Attitude – there will obviously be times when everything is not all strawberries and whipped cream, but a good mentor will generally have a very positive approach to things. Even when things are going bad, it is treated as a learning experience. As a mentor, regardless of the situation, you must keep the manager or staff member you are mentoring excited and positive about the industry.
- Respect – this goes both ways. A mentor is generally respected in his or her field and will also treat his or her staff with respect. Going back to Mr. Cooper, he made it a point to address every staff member in the hotel by their first name every time he saw them. It was something small but to the part-time housekeeper or houseman that just started, it put a little pep in their step when he called them by name and said good morning to them. Point being, no member of the staff was too small or too inconsequential to warrant his time or attention.
- Guidance and Feedback – as would be expected, a major part of the mentoring role requires the mentor to breakdown events and provide feedback about the positives and recommendations on how things could be better (or help you work your way through a better solution). This is where a thick skin will come in because you may not always like what your mentor has to say, but you need to remember it is not personal. This is about making you a better manager and making the operation more successful.
- Promotes Growth – mentors do not hold employees back, period. There will come a time in every mentoring relationship when the manager you are mentoring has gone as far as he or she can go in their current role. When that time comes, a mentor will help that manager find another opportunity within the existing organization or not try to talk that manager out of taking another opportunity with another company if he or she is truly ready to take their career to the next level.
As a mentor, there will no doubt come a time when a manager has areas of need where you are not an expert. For most managers, multiple mentors should be the norm. Again, I go back to my example where I actually had two mentors at the same property educating me in different areas of the operation. It was not a competition, but a combined effort to make me a better manager.
As you go deeper into your career, you will no doubt have managers relying upon you to be their mentor. Keep these character traits in mind as you take them under your wing. That is truly the only way we can ensure the next generation of hospitality managers are as good or, hopefully, better than the managers in the industry today.
Can your hospitality organization benefit from having more managers with a “mentoring” attitude? If you are looking for quality executive-level hospitality managers, look no further than Joseph David International. As one of the top hotel recruiters in the country, we have been successful because we don’t just put together a list of candidates, but we look to find the ideal candidate to suit your property or organization’s specific needs. For more information about our hotel recruiting services, click here.
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