How to become a hotel manager who thinks strategically
In your role as a Hotel Manager, you may spend time doing routine jobs day in and day out. Meet guest, deal with issues, plan sales and organise resources for your team to effectively function.
However these task may take up most part of the day and you will not be left with much time to thing about the strategic moves you need to make.
You may have heard or seen this matrix before which tells you that your task should be divided into 4 quadrants. Based on this matrix, you should be spending most of your time in the Urgent important to finish things today, however as you begin spending time in the not urgent and important, you will be able to reduce the Urgent Important tasks by being prepared for the future
What are the Important and Not Urgent task that will help you to become strategic?
Make a yearly calendar
Make a yearly calendar for your hotel and yourself with key dates for milestones that you want to achieve. To do this start with the long term KRA for the hotel and work back words. Think about the desired state of the hotel over 3- 5 years period.
What do you want to achieve in the hotel. Break it down into a specific and measurable goal.
One you have a long term vision, think what is it that you can do today to help you reach your vision. Build the calendar with dates that will help you get to that goal.
Once you have the calendar, plot the tasks into the matrix. Everything after 3 months should go into the Important/ Not urgent section and you keep working on it daily to get the result
Read and Stay Current
When you read, you will get ideas that will help you to change the direction of the hotel in response to what the market is doing.
It is not necessary to change at every idea once you have your strategic goal, but knowing where to turn and when is something you will learn when you start to read.
Industry sites like Skift that produces great content is a great go to resource to keep you up to date. Bookmark this site as well to help you in your reading and visit often.
Train your team
In order to execute your long term vision, you need a capable team who can help you to achieve success. Training your team will give you a strategic advantage that cannot be easily replicated.
By making sure that the team is trained well you can ensure that your plans are executed effectively. Training has an Return on Investment far greater that the cost. A 20 minute training on up selling will produce repeated income for your hotel till the employee works with you .
If you have ever struggled with training your team because of high attrition, our online content library provides enough resource to help you
In conclusion
In order to be a strategic hotel manager
- Make a yearly calendar and plan your next year to look ahead
- Read and stay current
- Train your team to achieve success