Max Lawrence, Hospitality Assured Director gives guidance on how to harness empowerment to foster improvement and creativity of your team to achieve business excellence.
The Hospitality Assured Standard for Business and Service Excellence is a world renowned accreditation for continual improvement and the quality and excellence agenda in the hospitality industry. Businesses that achieve accreditation tend to be high preforming driven organisations. No business operates in a silo and is the sum of many components. This blog focuses on the human element of the operation.
“Our people, without them where would we be?”
Harnessing empowerment and fostering the improvement and creativity of your team is the “holy grail” for any operation. Yet in so many operations managers fail to recognise the value of colleague engagement. One of the key aspects of leadership that often gets overlooked is having those heartfelt conversations, taking the time to understand the goals and aspirations of each member of your team and strive to provide an environment of coaching, development and mentorship for individuals to reach their full potential. You may encounter some members of the team that are comfortable and do not want to move ahead, they are happy where they are. Find a pathway to turn this around. Every person is an opportunity and naturally people want to contribute, expand and make a difference in their role. Sometimes they just need to see this and be given the change to create new and innovative ways to do things. Understanding that creativity is the provenance of all colleagues. Engaged minds and rehauling the organisational climate is the key to fostering innovative ideas and leads to a stronger and more meaningful team developing.
Creative teams will function better if they take the time to first come up with an explicit written charter that lays down the ground rules, ideally in one sentence. This can eliminate the downfall of many creative teams where everyone waits for someone else to take action. Teams that develop a charter end up being more nimble, have more proactive behaviour and achieve their goals more readily than teams that don’t and all the rich diversity and divergence dovetails back into the common vision.
With that organisational architecture in place people are free to experiment and recombine their strengths in advantageous ways in a culture of trust, respect, honesty, equality, growth and excellence.
“Being creative, innovative and committed to improvement can be exhilarating”
12 Steps to Creating a Successful Team:
- Don’t provide the solution. Challenge individuals to work on the issue and present some innovative resolutions
- Ensure a good work life balance for all of the team
- Celebrate success and provide a mechanism for individuals to recognise the contributions of their peers
- Set goals & measure progress
- Empower
- Coach
- Build trust
- Communicate concisely and with clarity
- Be a role model – all eyes are on the leader
- Ensure processes are lean, streamlined and customer focused
- Offer training opportunities not just in career disciplines but in self awareness and life skills
- Stamp out negativity and friction as it occurs
To find out more about how Hospitality Assured can help your organisation, please do get in touch with us www.hospitalityassured.com
About the Author: Max Lawrence
Max, Director of Hospitality Assured, has extensive experience in business and hospitality management in both the United Kingdom and Europe, and has a passion for promoting quality and professional customer service in business operations, advising large and small businesses to never mistake silence for satisfaction.
