HOSPITALITY NOTES part 2 - ch.2 (Original Non-Fiction)

serejandmyself (70)in #life • 8 years ago

Content:
PART 1 - CH.1
PART 1 - CH.2
PART 1 - CH.3
PART 1 - CH.4
PART 2 - CH.1

Part 2

Chapter 2 Career Path

In the previous chapter, we touched on the basics of ethics in the hospitality field and thing to watch out for when you choose your career path. Now discuss how to plan your work and coordinate your own actions in order to have a successful career path.

When it comes to planning anything we often tend to fast-forward things and run ahead of ourselves. This often can be let off easy in other things but when it comes to your working tasks I would not advise on doing so.

So the first thing to learn is to coordinate your own work in accordance with your own skills and the time available to fulfil the tasks set ahead of you.

This might mean to stop before you decided on the next task; it means that keeping a working diary is a must, otherwise, you will not be able to keep track of things.

Also, this would mean that when you decide to fulfil the next task, you first must go back to the previous task that you have set for yourself and analyse its completeness. Try thinking that quality is much more important than quantity when it comes to (anything) success.

When you are ready and up to date with tasks (that means you can analyse each one of the tasks that you have and know what you need to do in order to complete them), let's now move one step prior to that!

Before you even begin coordinating your tasks, you need to learn to formulate them. This simply means, that each person who you will delegate the task to, or someone who you are presenting the ready work for, must be able to understand what you are trying to achieve.

Apart from that, learning to formulate your tasks means to learn how to break them down into simpler and easier steps, so then you are able to carry on each one of those steps without jumping ahead to the next one and eventually fulfilling your goals.

Remember, that keeping it simple and easy, breaking it down and making it step by step is a key to success.

While being able to work with tasks by yourself is a great achievement, you cannot go any further before you learn to delegate responsibility. Saying that, it is not only meant for managers, but for simpler things (some even might touch your day to day life activities.).

How often is it, when we are struggling with a problem but simply don’t know how to solve it? That doesn’t mean to throw it away to someone else.

What it does mean is that hospitality (like many other fields) is a team based machine. And for a team to work best, people must be able to put in something for that machine to run.

It means that each person can run a “wheel” and the whole machine will run faster and better.

It is well noted that some managers and shift leaders try to have all the work done by themselves, sometimes they even succeed in the task… Often, though, this success is short lived. They either get tired or worse run out of interest.

So, as a team leader, you must be able to find the right person, with the right set of skills for any task. Sometimes, you might think that there is no one better than yourself to fulfil it… Well, this is typical weak manager thinking. A thinking of a manager who is unable to teach others to carry out the work needed. And here arises the question - why has this person chose a manager path?

We can conclude that in fact delegating a task to the right person, who was taught by you to fulfil that particular task, is much more difficult than it may seem, but certainly provides greater results for the whole process.

In order to be able to delegate the responsibility to the right people correctly and to be able to solve your tasks, you will have to learn to work with timetables.

This means being able to provide the perfect and correct working schedules. Those simple at first glance tables can provide the best results when produced correctly.

Making a working schedule might at first seem easy. But make sure that each person on the team can fulfil a certain task for that day and that together they form the best team for the day.

Working schedules are always overlooked by managers, often because of workers requests. Well, please make sure that you understand that a good working schedule (which includes yourself), is what will save you from making any mistakes in the first place. In other words, this is what saves you from wasting your time on things you could have done better from the beginning.

Once again, you might delegate completing a working schedule to someone else but never overlook its importance. Make sure that you run your own working schedule and that it includes all the necessary tasks and people in order for your team to succeed.

The next step we want to move ahead to is control of the delegated tasks. And this is something that has to be already included in your own working schedule as a daily (and even more often) activity.

Control doesn’t mean diving into each mistake that you bump into. It means taking into consideration what has been and hasn’t been done by your team, noting it down, delegating the task and then controlling (once again) its fulfilment.

That process is not always the same. There are times when you have to teach your team to fulfil tasks, times where you have to help and times to complete the tasks by yourself.

Quality control can only be achieved by the right TQC (discussed in previous chapters). It means to know what you are looking for, what are the weak and the strong points and who the weak and the strong team members are.

To achieve the quality you must be able to control every aspect of the work carried under your supervision. That means compiling checklists to run that control. And to spend enough time daily to work with those checklists and not to forget to analyse them and carry out the necessary work in order to fix the mistakes found.

Control includes regular checks of daily work. This can be anything from trying the food or drinks; calling the hotel to make a booking; asking a guard to give directions and so on.

More often regular checks compile to walking around the building and making sure that all the work has been carried out. Of course, such checks must be done on each station by the correctly delegated team member who is able to control each point of work.

The best results can only be achieved when all of the team works together, combined and coordinated by the person who “runs the show”.

This person often has deputies and those deputies often have the largest amount of task to complete daily. More so, those tasks can be a routine to carry out.

That means that helping your deputies whenever possible is another one of the many keys to successfully fulfil tasks. This means, overall success for the team and for your business.

Helping your deputies’ means not doing the job for them; first of all, it means to be able to formulate the tasks that you want them to achieve on a daily basis. It means making sure they understand the tasks; have a working schedule to complete those tasks; have the correct tools to do it and they are able to do the work (and delegate it if needed).

Running daily briefings is not enough, it means seating down and going over their work a few times a week to be able together to go over the control points. Analysing them and finding together with them the correct solutions. More so, it means overseeing those being achieved and helping when necessary.

Remember, together we are stronger and can achieve anything quicker.

This chapter concludes the second part. In the next part of the book, we will move on to speak about the touristic business in general, try to analyse why people spend so much money in tourism and the regulations that apply to this business.