P h oto :
M o sc ow M ar r iott H otel N o vy A r b at
qualities of employees. In my
experience, I can say that even
if you take a non-experienced
line employee and you put them
under the wing of a great execu-
tive, these employees will make
miracles happen.
I would say the first and the most
important quality is “leading by
example” or “walking the talk.”
Here passion, honesty, and integ-
rity play a huge role.
As a leader, most of your job is to
inspire team members to push
themselves, to do their best and
to grow. You cannot do this with-
out passion, integrity, and hon-
esty. You cannot do this if you
are not doing it yourself already.
For example, I am a very passion-
ate and demanding manager,
but also, I am very demanding
to myself as well. For me, there is
no big difference between lead-
ing your children at home and
your employees at work. Children
will not do what you say but will
do what they see you are doing.
Secondly, I would say creativity
and being a great communica-
tor are important qualities. If
you want to be ahead in today’s
VUCA world, you must be creative
and innovative at the same time.
Creative thinking and constant
innovation are what make you
and your team stand out. Use the
trial and error system because
if you wait too long to get to
the perfect state, it’s going to
be late already. Most importantly,
you need to improve throughout
the process. On the other side,
what I regularly see happening
is that the leader’s vision, innova-
tion, and the idea of where we
want to be is not clearly commu-
nicated to the team members.
So, the team feels lost and does
not work at the highest perfor-
mance level. Therefore, learn to be
a great, transparent communica-
tor. Don’t forget that words have
the power to motivate people and
make them do the unthinkable.
Thirdly, I would mention empa-
thy and empowerment. The time
of the dictatorial style of leader-
ship is long time over. Developing
closer connections with your
employees, understanding their
problems and feeling them is a
great way of improving perfor-
mance. Setting standards and
principles of behavior help a lot.
At the end of the day, employees
are not robots, even robots break
down sometimes so develop your
empathy to the level where you
will be able to feel your employ-
ees without even asking a ques-
tion. And the last but not the
least quality I would mention is
empowerment. As they say, “If
you want to go alone, go fast; if
you want to go far, go together”
Empower your employees, give
them tasks, mentor and coach
them. If you continue to micro-
manage your team, it will develop
a lack of trust. Give them a chance
to be responsible by providing
them with all the resources and
support they need to achieve the
objective. If they make a mistake,
take responsibility and continu-
ously improve the skills of your
team.
You also do a lot of busi-
ness training all over the world
for different companies. What
are the main topics that hotels
want trainings for their staff?
es, that’s true. There are 10
countries on my list for now.
Mostly hotels but also a lot of
other industries that believe they
can improve service in their com-
panies, such as banks, retail, and
pharmaceutical companies.
The most popular topic is develop-
ing leadership skills, followed by
service excellence, where we work
on conflict prevention, empathy,
love for yourself and others, etc.
There are also requests for sales
training but I always say, “learn
to keep and satisfy your cur-
rent clients and they will bring
new once” There is no point in
teaching selling skills when your
employees do not have the basic
communication skills to provide
outstanding service.
Also, here I would mention the
importance of implementing
blended learning for the best
results. Blended learning is a mix
of traditional face-to-face educa-
tion and mobile education. There
are many mobile applications
but the one I personally recom-
mend is Service Guru. It is a mix of
education, communication, and
motivation.
What I find very interesting is that
if other industries understand the
complexity of the problem and
ask for a long-term strategy, our
hospitality industry is still trying
to solve the issues with a pill (one-
time training). When I talk about
service strategies, they seem to
not realize the potential they
must work on in the long term,
rather than operating just from
today to tomorrow.
Y
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