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Hospitality Management Series: Service-Based Leadership Transforms Your Operation
Hospitality Management Series: Service-Based Leadership Transforms Your Operation
Hospitality Management Series: Service-Based Leadership Transforms Your Operation
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Hospitality Management Series: Service-Based Leadership Transforms Your Operation

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45 easy-to-read articles describing and explaining Service-Based Leadership - a powerful style of leadership that will transform any hospitality or service operation.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherEd Rehkopf
Release dateApr 22, 2012
ISBN9781476129624
Hospitality Management Series: Service-Based Leadership Transforms Your Operation
Author

Ed Rehkopf

Ed Rehkopf is a retired hospitality veteran. During his long and varied career, he has managed two historic university-owned hotels, managed at a four-star desert resort, directed operations for a regional hotel chain, opened two golf and country clubs, worked in golf course development, and launched an operations resource website for the hospitality industry.

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    Book preview

    Hospitality Management Series - Ed Rehkopf

    Hospitality Management Series:

    Service-Based Leadership Transforms Your Operation

    Ed Rehkopf

    Published by Ed Rehkopf at Smashwords

    Copyright 2012 Ed Rehkopf

    Smashwords Edition, License Notes

    This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

    Table of Contents

    The Absolute Importance of Leadership

    Authority, Responsibility, Accountability

    Constituencies

    Two Important Leadership Lessons

    A Few Observations on Leadership

    Personal Responsibility and the Will to Lead

    Owning Your Failures and Recognizing the Limits of Your Influence

    Good Leadership – It’s Just Common Sense

    Service-Based Leadership

    Becoming a Service-Based Leader

    Leadership and Relationships

    Building Strong Relationships

    Charisma and Trust

    Consistency and Common Decency

    Ego-Driven Failure

    Our Need to Serve

    The Hierarchy of Service

    Morale Matters

    Adding Value to Your Organization

    Organizational Leadership

    Creating a Lasting Organizational Culture

    Leadership and the Bully Pulpit

    The Ultimate Value of People

    Leadership: Respect, Not Like!

    Leading Change

    Do the Right Thing

    How to Get the Best from Your Service Team

    The 100/0 Principle

    Projecting Confidence

    Value Your People

    Consequences

    The Soft Stuff

    Overcoming Obstacles

    Problems as Opportunities to Lead

    Passively Creating a Hostile Work Environment

    Give Them More than Just a Paycheck

    The Importance of Consistent Organization-Wide Leadership

    Empowering Employees

    Service-Based Leadership and Employee Empowerment

    Necessities for Employee Empowerment

    The Many Ways to Kill Employee Empowerment

    Leadership Growth and Adaptation

    The Enemies of Effective Leadership

    Principles of Employee Relations

    A Leader’s Code of Ethics

    In Conclusion

    The Absolute Importance of Leadership?

    Strong, stable, and consistent leadership is the single most important requirement for successful hospitality operations. While there are many styles of leadership suited to any industry or endeavor, experience over many years makes it clear that a service-based approach to leadership works best in the service industry with its often young, mixed gender, and multi-ethnic workforce. This style of leadership has as its primary motivation service to others – to customers, to the owners of the business, and to the employees.

    This leadership style differs from others in its focus on serving the needs of employees to provide them with the proper tools, training, resources, motivation, and empowerment to serve the company’s customers. In simplest terms, when employees are served by their leaders, they will better serve customers, who by their continuing patronage serve the company’s bottom line. An understanding of the importance of this style of leadership can be inferred from the simple question,

    How can employees provide quality service if they are not properly served by the leadership, engagement, and example of their managers?

    While it is recognized that the general manager must be a strong leader, it is also critical that the organization’s subordinate managers and supervisors are also trained to be strong service-based leaders. While some degree of a leader’s skill-set seems to be inborn, such as personality and an analytic mind, and others, such as confidence, judgment, and basic communication abilities, are developed early in life, the great majority of a leader’s skills are attitudinal and can be learned.

    But to expect that managers with varying backgrounds, education, and experiences will have a common understanding of what constitutes effective leadership is naïve in the extreme. Unless junior managers are systematically trained to develop the skills which have to do with building and sustaining meaningful work relationships with their constituencies, particularly employees, their leadership development will be hindered and haphazard. This results in the general manager’s vision and message of service not being communicated consistently or faithfully to line employees. Instead of having a cohesive team dedicated to a common purpose and acting in a concerted way to further the aims of the enterprise, the company is a collection of tribes who don’t necessarily approach the mission or their jobs in the same way or with the same attitude.

    Without leadership consistency, employees get a mixed service message, and their morale, engagement, and commitment will vary from manager to manager and department to department. It’s really quite simple – If your management team does not provide consistent:

    > Vision, values, and example,

    > Communication and engagement,

    > Training, resources, support, and

    > Regard for and treatment of employees,

    You’ll never gain consistency of employee commitment, contribution, and performance.

    But the good news is that successful leadership skills can be taught and learned. Warren G. Bennis, widely regarded as a pioneer in the field of contemporary leadership studies, has said, The most dangerous myth is that leaders are born – that there is a genetic factor to leadership. This myth asserts that people simply either have certain charismatic qualities or not. That’s nonsense; in fact, the opposite is true. Leaders are made rather than born.

    Given the primary importance of leadership in any successful venture, it should never be left to chance. Even if confident of your own leadership abilities, do yourself and your managers a favor by promoting a consistent, company-wide conception and application of leadership. When consistently reinforced by your leadership and example, it will have a dramatic impact on their performance, as well as that of the enterprise.

    Authority, Responsibility, Accountability

    Authority, Responsibility, and Accountability are three terms that are used frequently in connection with positions of leadership. What exactly do these terms mean and how are they related?

    Authority is defined as a power or right, delegated or given. In this sense, the person or company that hires a leader vests him with the authority to manage or direct a particular operation. It is expected that this individual will exercise the full scope of his authority to properly, profitably, and professionally manage the operation.

    Responsibility is defined as a particular burden of obligation upon a person who is responsible. Responsible is defined as answerable or accountable, as for something within one’s power or control. Therefore, a leader is responsible and has responsibility for the operation for which she has been given authority.

    Accountability is defined as subject to the obligation to report, explain, or justify something; answerable. A leader is answerable for the performance of the operation for which he has authority and is responsible.

    Authority may be delegated to subordinates. For example, a general manager may delegate the authority to collect delinquent accounts to the controller. The controller then has the right to perform tasks associated with collection, such as sending past due notices, charging finance charges on delinquent accounts, and recommending bad debt write-off for seriously overdue accounts. However, even though the general manager delegated the authority, she still has the responsibility to ensure that collections are done properly. As the saying goes, You can delegate authority, but not responsibility. Even when you delegate, you are ultimately responsible for your organization’s performance.

    As a leader, you are accountable for those functions and tasks that have been delegated to you. Likewise, should you delegate any functions or tasks to subordinates, you must ensure that they are held accountable for properly performing them. This requires that you properly explain your expectations to subordinates.

    This is most easily done when performance parameters are objective, say telling an advertising executive she must retain her major accounts or else she’ll be replaced. More often, performance parameters are more complex and involve subjective evaluations. Regardless of the difficulties in defining these parameters, it must be done. Otherwise, there is no way to hold a subordinate accountable for results. It is for this reason

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