Hospitality Culture: Leaders and Development

Developing Hospitality Culture: Role of Leaders and Culture

• Module focuses on developing hospitality culture and the roles of leaders and culture in this process.

Importance of Leaders

• Leaders set an example that others will follow.
• Walt Disney saw himself as a bee, going from area to area, gathering pollen to stimulate everyone.
• It is a daunting challenge to get everyone in an organization committed to high guest service standards.
• Leaders like Walt Disney, Herb Kelleher, and Horst Schultz invested personal time and energy to establish organizational cultures that embody corporate values and foster employee belief.
• Managers who aren't founders can still exert considerable influence.
• The behavior of an organization's leaders is the most important influence on its culture.
• Employees emulate their supervisors, supervisors are influenced by their managers.
• Top-level managers set the cultural values.
• Supervisory personnel are cultural keepers, teachers, and translators that ensure quality service delivery.
• Managers need to consistently model excellent service and reinforce its importance to their teams.
• Employees watch their bosses and take cues about priorities and values from their actions.
• Any manager who ignores actions inconsistent with the culture sends a message that those behaviors are acceptable.
• Customer experience quality is everyone’s job that should be supported by actions, rewards, training, and achievement measures. Celebration of service achievements reinforces the culture's values.

Culture and Reputation

• Corporate culture shapes reputation.
• Companies that value customers, employees, and shareholders tend to have strong reputations.
• A strong, unified culture is vital in a competitive market.
• Poorly managed cultures lead to weak organizational cultures.
• Poorly managed cultures are subject to being defined or subverted by parties unconcerned with the organizational mission.
• Subversion is when something is ruined or overthrown from the foundation.
• Gaylord Entertainment Company's vision is customer-focused, with values based on the Grand Ole Opry's traditions.
• A leadership team teaches these values to employees, called STARS. Gaylord fosters cultural commitment using communication.
• The STARS First program and guarantee allowed employees to directly contact top management if employment promises weren't kept.
• Guarantee built the trust that management truly believed in its STARS First cultural value.
• Gaylord Hotels emphasize its hospitality focus with its vision statement.

The Manager's Most Important Responsibility

• Important elements of focus include corporate culture, communication, creating strong vs. weak cultures, and ensuring it supports service excellence
• A warm, friendly work environment is noticeably different from one that is cold and impersonal
• Hospitality managers are responsible for making a positive cultural differences.

Importance of Culture

• Strategy and Employee Commitment are vital.
• The firm's competitive strategy guides decisions on structure, service, market niche, delivery systems, hiring, and training.
• Employee commitment turns plans into action; understanding and support are essential.
• Hospitality firms need strong employee commitment for exceptional service.
• The Boulders in Arizona uses the vision, “Seek opportunities to create memories,” and emphasizes employee recognition programs.
• The vision guides employees to provide excellent service, even without specific actions defined.
• Employees must understand the vision and have the skills, knowledge, and ability to meet guest expectations and deliver excellent service.
• Culture is the organizational software that guides motivated employees on how and why to serve customers well.

Culture as a Competitive Advantage

• Unique, valued cultures are hard to copy and provide competitive edge.
• Organizations with strong, difficult-to-duplicate cultures attract customers and employees.
• A positive, spirited culture is far superior to a typical nine-to-five work environment.

Management by Culture!

• Strong cultures reduce the reliance on bureaucratic controls and managerial directives.
• A robust culture supports employees in guiding guests, even in the absence of managers.
• Guests actively shape their experiences with employee guidance.
• Passive = not active or operating

An Example: The Chef

• Professional values can complement organizational values.
• Professional chefs possess strong cultural values.
• Chefs should consistently deliver flawless, high-quality food.
• Standardized chain recipes exist to reinforce product quality and consistency within the culinary cultural values.

Culture as Competency

• A robust organizational culture becomes a core competency.
• Organizations pursuing strategies against their culture will likely fail.
• A commitment to service excellence requires supportive cultural norms, beliefs, and values.

Definitions of Culture

• Culture involves shared, learned ways of thinking, behaving, and acting.
• Formal definition: shared philosophies, ideologies, values, assumptions, beliefs, attitudes, and norms binding a diverse community.
• Culture is how people act and think in their jobs.
• Culture influences and is influenced by its members.

Culture and the Outside World

• Culture addresses how members relate internally and externally.
• A group's basic assumptions on adaptation and interaction define culture.
• Some managers foster an "us-versus-them" mindset, a closed or negative view of the outside.
• This results in unacceptance of external ideas, downplaying industry practices, and secrecy.
• Open cultures encourage learning, benchmarking, and considering external innovations.
• Open, learning organizations adapt to customer changes and needs quickly.

Culture and the Internal Organization: X and Y

• Relating to the outside world involves members' views and assumptions of relationship to that world and how to respond to external events.
• Internal relations are the views on collective mission, means of interaction for that mission, and how they influence decisions.
• Internal interaction can be democratic, supportive, friendly, and participatory.
• Internal relations can also be hierarchical, rigid and autocratic.

Theory X and Theory Y

• Theory X and Theory Y management styles are sets of assumptions about behavior, according to Douglas McGregor
• Theory Y: People enjoy work, find it satisfying, and want to excel.
• Theory X: People only work as hard as necessary.

Teaching the New Values

• New hires bring in cultural assumptions from past experiences, so new cultural values need to be taught right away.
• Companies like Disney, Ritz-Carlton, Gaylord, and Four Seasons spend considerable time and money on teaching their cultures to new employees in the orientation.

Culture Fills the Gaps

• Cultural teachings shape beliefs, values, and behavior.
• Guidelines are provided to the culture's members as they interact with each other and their customers
• Schein states the teachings guide the members in how they should perceive the world around them, feel about the events they face, and think about what they do and don’t do within their jobs.
• Excellent hospitality organizations define and teach their culture, so employees know how to treat guests and each other as the culture will fill in the inevitable gaps between what can be predicted and what actually happens.

Beliefs, Values, and Norms

• Values = preferences that influence behavior.
• Values define right and wrong, desirable and undesirable behaviors.

Norms

• Norms set standards of behavior.
• Organizations possess intricate sets of norms.
• Cultural norms for hospitality employees are shaped by both employees, supervisors, and guest expectations.

Norms in Advertising

• Ads sell services and visually communicate guest experience to both prospective guest and trains employees on behavioral norms.

Norms of Appearance

• Strict norms of appearance and grooming are set.
• Examples: hair length, piercings, nail length/color, jewelry, tattoos.

Folkways and Mores

• Folkways = ingrained habits without much thought.
• Shaking hands, addressing by first/last name, or wearing a tie are examples of folkways.
• Mores = behaviors essential for the organization.
• Customary behaviors preserve the operation and survival.
• By dictating right and wrong, they form the basis of ethics and accepted behaviors.