Key Leadership Qualities for Hospitality Professionals

For leaders in businesses whose soul is immediate customer satisfaction, success depends on accurately assessing customers’ needs and motivations. Nowhere is this more evident than in the hospitality industry, where the essence of success lies in understanding and satisfying a diverse range of people whose ideas of satisfaction range from the stereotypical to the most unusual. It follows that interpersonal skills top my list of key leadership qualities in hospitality management.

Customer and employee satisfaction as leadership metrics

In the hospitality business, customer satisfaction is the goal. If you are the manager, you must have the skills that drive the process, from project management to information technology. Interpersonal skills, however, are the key to understanding customer needs and leading in ways that motivate employees to meet those needs. In short, your interpersonal skills are leadership qualities that deliver customer and employee satisfaction. While successful managers across all industries share many common strengths, managers who lead hospitality businesses share several specific characteristics. These include a close affinity with guests, the ability to build productive, collaborative relationships and networks, and the flexibility to “fail fast” and change course. Managers who can instil the organisation with a commitment to the guest while understanding the realities of the role are better positioned to succeed in a rapidly changing industry. [tutor_course id=5574] It is fitting that in hospitality management, where measures of success range from the tangible to the abstract—from the quality of room service to the atmosphere in a hotel lobby—a manager who understands the quirks of consumers and knows how to motivate employees is well positioned to succeed.

Leadership is personal

None of the qualities listed here are innate, but the extent to which each is evident in a manager can both define and stem from that manager’s personality. These soft skills, or personal skills, are also more difficult to teach than hard skills. How would you rate your essential soft skills?

Communication

Competence in this area includes listening skills and verbal, non-verbal and written communication. Good communication is a function of these skill sets:

• Ability to define goals.
• Ability to clearly establish plans for achieving objectives.
• Ability to communicate tasks to the responsible parties.
• Ability to praise or reprimand when giving or receiving feedback.
• Ability to communicate effectively across all areas of the professional world while adapting to the demands of the business and the relationships it requires.

Collaboration

Collaboration is the cornerstone of the hospitality business. In hospitality management, for example, a general manager who values customer service but does not promote teamwork through the sharing of goals, ideas and information at every level is essentially disconnected from the employees who deliver that customer service. The best managers collaborate.

Decisiveness

Decisiveness is considered one of the top three attributes that can build a leader’s credibility. Decisiveness signals confidence, but that confidence will evaporate if you do not build a reputation for well-reasoned and generally beneficial decisions. The other two attributes are personal presence and open communication.

Empathy

Only 40 per cent of frontline leaders are competent or strong in empathy. We know from research that empathy is declining. That is unfortunate, considering it is one of the most critical capabilities needed to lead and drive employee engagement in a diverse, dispersed and ever-changing environment.

Charisma

Charismatic leaders inspire followers through the strength of their personality and communication skills. Five characteristics that define a charismatic leader are confidence, creativity, vision, determination and communication skills.

Flexibility

Businesses are not static, so managers who can adapt are managers who can position a business for success. The best leaders—those who can adapt to change most effectively—can quickly diagnose a situation, assess the challenges involved and apply a diverse set of behaviours optimised to address the challenges they have identified. In addition, they can perform a delicate balancing act to address a range of challenges without developing “tunnel vision” on one problem to the point that other issues are neglected.

Reliability

What matters here is not so much what it means to be reliable, but what it means not to be reliable. In the hospitality business, a reputation for unreliability is a death sentence:

• What happens if your employees know that what you say and what you do are often at odds?
• What happens if you consistently fail to deliver on your company’s goals and mission statement?
• What happens if customers spread the word that the quality of the products/services you offer is unreliable?

Passion

In the hospitality business, constant person-to-person contact means that the attitude employees bring to work will be visible to guests. A manager who is passionate about a project or goal can instil that passion in employees. Conversely, a leader who does not bring enthusiasm to work sets the stage for uninspired employee performance.

Patience

It does not take genius-level emotional intelligence to appreciate that patience truly is a virtue. Impatience in a manager, however, is a fatal flaw. A manager’s impatience can create many problems:

• Poor understanding of circumstances/challenges.
• A rushed approach that leads to incorrect assumptions and poor results.
• Failure to gauge the complexity of a situation and develop robust solutions.
• Distrust and scepticism on the part of both the manager and employees.

Integrity

This is about trust, honesty, honour and ethics, and it is a game changer. A manager who lacks integrity will fail in the long run, and others will suffer greatly in the process.