This is our regular e-message to people who are interested in leading their lives with passion. We will send you a short note with information, stories, examples, and practical things you can do to lead your life, work, and organizations with passion. You are receiving this message because you have attended one of our presentations, expressed an interest in our work, asked to be put on our mailing list, purchased one of our books, or are one of our friends, colleagues, or associates! If you would like us to take you off our mailing list just reply to this e-mail and type 'unsubscribe’ in the subject field and we would be happy to do so. Leading With Passion We like the term 'leading with passion,’ because it has two very significant, but related meanings. The first suggests leading off with passion. That is, making the very first priority in your life to live, work, and play passionately, and to fully embrace every possible moment. Second, it means that we can lead our organizations, teams, and projects with passion - creating passionate work environments by transferring our own enthusiasm for the organization to all others who come into contact with it.

The General Manager
When you walk into that very special event at your favorite hotel – a fundraising event, or a wedding or an annual meeting – you expect the room to look exceptional and the service staff to be friendly and helpful. If you were to show up at the Sheraton Old Town (SOT) in Albuquerque, NM, the person who would make sure you got that unforgettable experience would quite possibly be Phillip Gallegos. He’s 22 years old and a banquet setup supervisor with around 30 people who report to him.

For grumpy people (like most of us are once in awhile....) “I do anything I can just to make the person smile,” he says, “and eventually, by the end of the day, I do have that person feeling a little better about themselves and a little happier with everything. Even if it’s by getting them a soft drink complimentary on the house or it’s going out of your way to make sure everything gets put away for them, carry boxes to where they need to go, just little things like that.”

What creates the kind of environment where a young man can have such responsibility and be so dedicated to creating great customer service?

One reason is Adrian Perez. “I just give that guy so much respect because we were down in the slumps for a little bit,” Phillip says, “a time period where things were not going so good and the other General Manager wasn’t as friendly or courteous and didn’t give us that motivation to excel and do better. Adrian, now he is a gentleman who pushes us and lets us know that we are welcome and that we are wanted here and that we are the best and that just makes me want to do better every day.”

Adrian is Executive Vice President of Heritage Hotels, which has 8 properties both in New Mexico and outside the state. But for Phillip, Adrian is, most importantly, also General Manager of the Sheraton Old Town. “He turned this place around,” Phillip says.

“He sets the environment,” Dominic Sedillo, the Front Desk Supervisor we featured in our last Leading with Passion, says. “I think that what gets to a lot of employees is the fact that he talks to them. He is not stuck on himself. He is not ‘I am head honcho and I’m going to my office and I make the big bucks and I am just going to sit here at my desk and let everyone else run the hotel.’ He goes around to every single department – it doesn’t matter where you are working.”

“He leads by example,” Dot Cook-Simmons, former Heritage Hotels HR director, says. “He thinks this is the most marvelous job and he loves waiting on people. He loves the guests we have and that is the most important thing to him. He celebrates employees and their good work. He never misses congratulating an employee nor patting him on the back for a job well done.”

Adrian creates a fun atmosphere for employees who have to please demanding guests every day. Cook-Simmons uses the example of the Sheraton’s Employee and Manager of the Year event. At that meeting there was a marshmallow eating contest, musical chairs between the presentations of awards, a big luncheon for everyone, and one of the employees with a great voice sang, showing another talent she had to the group.

The Results
So does caring for employees and having fun make a difference? Well, it certainly plays a part in getting real business results.

Within four months Adrian and his employees took the hotel’s Guest Service Index (GSI) from a score of about 7.0, which is in the bottom 33% of all Sheraton Hotels, to 9.37, which is in the top 1% of all Sheraton Hotels worldwide. “We are very proud of that statistic,” Adrian says. GSI is a measure of everything - check in, speed of check in, friendliness of staff, and awareness of the service promise, among others. “We are taking it from the ‘outhouse to the penthouse’ really,” he says. Their goal is to be in the top 3% of all hotels worldwide, and the way to do that, he says, is to empower the staff. “Our profit is up across the board because we have happy employees. One happy employee does the work of three,” he says. An employee evaluation tool they use is called ASI - the Associate Satisfaction Index. “It has gone through the roof in the last 5 months or 6 months,” he says. Employees are not only happier, but they are staying longer.

Employees who work harder with higher quality, more satisfied customers, and higher profits – not a bad business result.

The Keys to Creating a Highly Productive Environment
There are three key elements, according to Adrian, that cause such success, and he gives concrete examples of how the Sheraton Old Town takes the concept and makes it real. The first is communication.

Communication – Regular Meetings & Listening
Adrian gives employees access to the senior management or any level of management. He wants any employee to feel like he or she can come to him or to their manager or their supervisor with a true “no retribution” policy. “What we have done is we have established that every Thursday morning at 8:00 a.m. one employee from each department meets with me and my assistant General Manager for breakfast. We talk about our dreams and our desires and our goals and what we want to be when we grow up and we talk about what makes us happy in life and we talk about the hotel’s goals and dreams. We talk about how we can get there together and sometimes you can find meeting ground and other times you can’t.”

Keeping his managers motivated is just as important as motivating the rest of the employees. When the leadership comes to work with a terrible attitude it is contagious. His managers work long hours, so Adrian works hard to find ways to make work fun, interesting, and exciting for them. The key is listening, he says. “Say a manager says ‘You know I have been a front office manager for 9 years and I would really like to learn housekeeping.’ Give them that opportunity. You know give somebody else an opportunity at the front desk and move them to housekeeping for two weeks and see what happens. But it is really truly just listening to what your managers want. And then they will tell you. People always come to our hotels and they will say your managers seem like they are really happy here and they seem like they have a lot of fun. What is it that you’re giving them? I say I listen. I just listen to what they tell me.”

Empowerment – Using the Measurement Matrix
Empowerment certainly seems to be the buzzword these days, but Adrian goes beyond proclaiming it as important – he puts it into action. The SOT does significant training to make sure employees have the tools to make good decisions. “One of the tools that we use is called measurement matrix.”

The matrix gives employees guidelines for decision-making because, Adrian has found, if you try to empower people without any training it does nothing. “You can empower somebody,” he says, “but if they don’t know what to do with the empowerment then they don’t use the power.”

Employees have the ability, however, to go above and beyond the matrix.

Adrian calls it the WOW factor – sweeping people off their feet. “Because you can solve the problem,” he says, “but then our guests expect more. Let’s say my heater wasn’t working. Well yes the heater is working now, but when I came to the hotel the heater should have worked in the first place so offering a dinner for two or a complimentary bottle of wine or an upgrade to a suite or a free stay next time - those are the kind of things that we call the WOW system that really takes guest service to another level.”

Building the Team
Sometimes – contrary to what some time and motion study aficionados might think – the most important things are invisible. “I think the biggest thing is intangible and that is building a team,” Adrian says. Cliques can be divisive in any organization, but in hotels it can be even more debilitating because there are so many discrete organizational functions - food and beverage outlets, the bar, the sales team, maintenance, the housekeepers. Unifying those groups is essential to customer service success.

“When our associates know that if a housekeeper fails that a maintenance man is there to pick them up, or that if the maintenance man fails then a front desk person is there to pick them up, or if a server fails the whole team will come rally around him or her - that is something that takes time. It just takes time to develop that trust.” Trust, to Adrian is not given, it is earned.

But how do you do that? Lots of people talk about building the team and trust, but somehow can’t pull it off. For Adrian, “It really starts with leadership and I know it is kinda cliché to say that, but it really starts with the senior management and really taking the time to get to know people. You know go into their work areas. Sit and talk to them. Not about business but about their life. Building those kinds of bonds with people is kinda the glue that holds the foundation together. When you do that as a senior leader you know the hopes and dreams of your staff and they become part of you.

Creating the Environment
Part of it is having fun. The first time we ran into Adrian he was leading a quarterly employee meeting – wearing a pilgrim hat and having a great time cheering his employees on to loud ‘We will rock you’ type music. If you are a leader and want your employees to have fun you have to be fun-loving yourself. You have to give people permission to let loose and have fun.

“What we have tried to do is to take off the handcuffs and we have tried to allow ourselves to have fun,” he says. “You don’t treat someone who comes into your home formally and rigidly and not show your true personality. You try to make people laugh. Once one starts to have fun people see that it is acceptable and then you create that kind of atmosphere and people understand that it is okay to joke and it is okay to laugh and it is okay to build friendships and it is okay to get crazy and to put on strange hats and run around the room and it is okay to make people laugh and make fun of yourself and it is okay to try new things.

“What you are really doing is just creating a true entrepreneurial society. You are really creating people who are not afraid to take risks and that is what it is about.

The examples of how Adrian and his management team build a great working environment are too numerous to mention in this article. Here are a few.

• They have employee parties and buy $500 worth of odds and ends with door prizes and giveaways. Family members are invited so that employees can show off their workplace, and introduce their boss. Adrian takes a personal interest in meeting the family and thanking them for “lending Joanna to us for 10 years.”
• Adrian gives a 110% award, straight from him, when he catches an employee doing something right. “I pin that on them and it really is almost a peer pressure. If one employee has it all the other ones want it. It is the exclusive 110% club and that helps to build teamwork.”
• They treat employees like they are important. “If you are 35-years-old and you work in the housekeeping department you don’t have the most glamorous job, but it is my job as your manager to make it glamorous. To make you feel special.”
• They celebrate. “You want to be a part of something great. Nobody wants to be part of a loser. Everybody wants to be part of a winner and so every day we look for things to celebrate. We find ways to ring the bell or to hoot or holler or high five and it is hard sometimes because you come to work and you are tired or whatever the case may be but you have to find ways to celebrate.”
• They make housekeepers (maintenance, bus boys, et.al.) the stars. Working in a hotel can be grueling work. There are challenges in every department. Finding how to make each employee feel important is critical to customer satisfaction and overall success, Adrian believes. He used housekeeping as an example.

You have to let (housekeepers) know, number one, that their job is not cleaning rooms. Their job is not to clean up after people. Their job is to be an asset manager. They really are the people who keep our assets worth what it is worth. They keep us all employed.

We let them know ‘Without you, Jane housekeeper, this hotel would fall apart and all of these people who make decisions are really making decisions that rest upon your back. The promises we go out and tell our guests rest upon you and so even if the guest has a bad check-in experience if they go to the room and the room is spotless you have turned it around for the team.

So we treat them like they are the point guard. They are the stars. You know when we are in meetings with all of my staff I ask all the housekeepers to stand up and we all cheer for them and we all give them high fives because we know without them nothing gets done. They are kinda like the garbage collectors in society. If the President of the United States goes out on strike what happens? Well the country still runs. Nobody even knows about it. The garbage collector goes on strike and they say the country could be shut down in a matter of weeks. Well whose job is more important?

Communication, empowerment, and team building are Adrian’s secrets for success. When is the last time you invited members of your employees’ families to visit your offices? Are you constantly on the lookout for ways to make work fun for your leadership team and employees? When’s the last time you had a good laugh at work? Do you have real tools to empower your staff, or do you just kind of let them loose to see if they’ll fail? Have you made your least-paid, least senior employees the stars of your organization? Have you made them feel truly important – or just like cogs in the machine?

You want happy customers who come back time and again? Do what Adrian Perez does – treat employees “just like you would a VIP guest.”

Leading with Passion is a regular communication from Michael Kroth and Patricia Boverie. Michael and Patricia have been researching passionate work since 1999, and their book, Transforming Work: The Five Keys to Achieving Trust, Commitment, and Passion in the Workplace, is about the indispensable necessity of passion for personal and organizational success in the workplace.

© Copyright 2004, All Rights Reserved Patricia Boverie and Michael Kroth