Hospitality Leadership Skills & Traits Assessment
By Robert O'Halloran
A leadership style refers to a leader’s methods and behaviors when directing, motivating, and managing others. A person’s leadership style also determines how they strategize and implement plans while accounting for the expectations of stakeholders and the well-being of their team. Leadership is the ability of an individual or a group of people to influence and guide followers or members of an organization, society, or team. Leadership often is an attribute tied to a person’s title, seniority or ranking in a hierarchy. However, it is an attribute anyone can have or attain, even those without formal leadership positions. It is a developable skill that can be improved over time.
Ask anyone in business, what is leadership? Or what makes a successful leader? and the likelihood will be that you will have differing answers. The reason? People see leadership differently. Leaders are seen as people who make sound and sometimes difficult decisions. They articulate a clear vision, establish achievable goals, and provide followers with the knowledge and tools necessary to achieve those goals.
It is noted that leaders are different than managers. Leaders look at a set of facts or a situation and see them differently from a manager. Managers are great and they are in demand because they can typically communicate intent, coordinate resources and control processes. Leaders need to be in front of these processes, laying a foundation of vision for an organization. Consider Fred Smith the founder of FedEx. It is well known that he was told that his idea for FedEx would never work by his college professors at Harvard. Obviously, that was not true. Never say never when a leader has the passion for their business, their people, and their ideas. Organizations depend on successful leaders to communicate a mission, vision, and goals. They are also critical to unite team members to engage in these goals and help achieve them.
Leaders of our industry are engaged, knowledgeable and thoughtful of their surroundings and communities. They tend to have an internal compass that points to the next level and growth, whether it be in terms of size, number of units or the highest quality. Leaders are team-oriented because they are aware that no one can do everything alone.
Leadership Capabilities and Traits
In my own workplace we had the opportunity to name our program and advance to school status beyond a department, it sounds better, doesn’t it? Because we labelled ourselves as Hospitality Leadership, representatives of the school are asked questions about what that means to us, and do we have a set of standalone leadership courses? The quick answer is no! However, what we can say is that we offer leadership throughout our program and curriculum (integrated). For example, the following leadership traits and capabilities represent our organizations leadership framework. The traits and capabilities are descriptors of parts of leadership that are valued or should be valued.
Integrity - Accountability, morals, trust, justice, honesty, and someone that models their values and beliefs. Think about these descriptors, they help to describe people of integrity and honesty. Leaders who demonstrate these characteristics generate followers and people who can believe in their leadership.
Competence - Implies high performance standards, welcoming feedback, and that a leader is in the continuous learning mode or what has been referred to as life-long learning. They are problem solvers and are data driven and are effective interpersonally. Think about your own interactions with employees and guests in the hospitality industry. You often hear the description by someone of “I am a people person.” That is great and we remain a service industry where guest and employee interaction is critical. It is great to be nice, polite, and pleasant, but at some point, a guest will want a competent person to deal with; someone that knows their job. Competence is critical, did you ever wonder about a supervisor you had or have, and you cannot figure out how they got the job to be in charge? It happens.
Communication - Communication is important on many levels and a leader can communicate verbally or in writing and is thoughtful in his or her writing whether a white paper or an email. Effective communication skills also mean being a good listener. We all know people who over anticipate and think they know what you are going to say next. Advice, stop and listen, do not interrupt. By listening you also show respect for your team and their input! Leaders then can help to put ideas, decisions etc. in perspective and do so in a clear and direct manner. I have found that people appreciate direct talk and clarity.
Growth - As previously noted, growth has multiple facets and can include professional development and providing a team with the tools to do a job. Growth can also mean mentoring the next generation of leaders. Leaders need to know who they are, their strengths and their weaknesses and what they bring to the table for problem solving and decision making.
Empathy - There is a whole subsection of Servant Leadership that is often cited and discussed. Servant leadership is different from other types of leadership because it focuses on leading by example and putting the needs of employees and organizations above the needs of an individual leader. Servant leaders set an example of service for their employees to follow. They are inclusive, and compassionate.
Vision - Leaders have vision. As previously noted, they articulate vision and goals, embrace creativity and innovation, and work well with change while considering all stakeholders. Many entrepreneurs are in a stage of leadership.
Courage - Finally, leaders must have courage because they embrace risk and make the decisions. What I find as a professor is that students often are hesitant to make a definitive decision for fear of being wrong. Note, everyone is wrong sometimes! Courage also implies that a leader is willing to be first and will work through a bumpy path and work to solve any problems encountered and make a difference.
The premise in our program is to offer leadership learning opportunities (part of our teaching) to students throughout the curriculum. We note that the seven traits and capabilities above are integrated throughout our undergraduate curriculum and in our graduate programs where they may optimally fit more than once.
Leadership Qualities
Leaders have other qualities that can be observed and utilized to provide an example intended to move an organization forward. For example, emotional intelligence, is knowing yourself and your own emotional hot buttons and therefore helps a leader read the emotions of their team. Other qualities note, modeling by your behavior, being visible and understanding your own weaknesses. Are you as a leader passionate about what you do! Your tasks, your business, your people?
Leadership is personal. You can and do develop your own leadership style. Think about interviewing for a job and asked, please share a scenario where you were the leader or stepped in to be the leader. As a twenty-two-year-old college student that can be a daunting question. All university hospitality students work and have internship requirements and have opportunities to lead. Those opportunities can be in courses, project groups, clubs, or outside school activities. Leadership is not only by position, for example, Gandhi who by profession was an attorney, became the leader of the independence movement in India.
Additionally, leaders show attention to detail and are accountable. They are not afraid to have their performance measured and assessed. Leaders, whether managers, owners or investors must confront issues, support people, and make a profit. Good leaders are essential to the sustainability of a business. The hospitality industry progresses despite problems with the pandemic and other challenges. This is illustrative of leaders that have shown adaptability and agility in tough times and as leaders are also good thinkers.
Leaders are immersed in thinking, decision making, and reflective judgment. These terms conjure a variety of terms and phrases such as analyze, conceive, judge, argue, speculate, estimate, consider, evaluate, comprehend, hypothesize, ponder, interpret, solving, and weighing evidence. that brings is the end goal of good thinking and the judgment or solution that brings the problem to closure, if only temporarily. The key for hospitality leaders is to be aware of the complexity of issues they face and know how their own critical thinking processes work.
Leadership Learning and Moving Forward
Leadership needs to be more than a buzz word. It must have meaning and be embraced by organizations and institutions and their people. How can we learn to be leaders? Can leadership be learned? I return to the statement, leadership is personal. You need to decide what kind of leader you want to be and or already are and how can you continue to develop? Good leaders are also believers in followership.
Jacobson noted that all leaders start off as followers, and the skills and experiences they acquire as followers lend themselves to the type of leader they will eventually become. Followership refers to the act of effectively following a leader or being part of a team by contributing and supporting the goals and objectives of the leader or the group. It is the counterpart to leadership and focuses on the role of individuals who are not in formal leadership positions but play a crucial role in the success of a team, organization, or community.
In the classroom we can provide discussion, activities, exercises, simulations and more to support students on their path to be the next generation of leaders. My goal in the classroom is to support student efforts to enhance thinking skills and their ability to decide and be able to justify those choices with facts. We constantly refer to data driven companies and universities and I agree, use the resources and tools you have available to you to create the next generation of leaders. Data is one of those tools! Our role as professors is to create an environment where students can and will pursue learning, become life-long learners, and continue to develop their leadership skills that can be in stages. Leadership stages as posited by Jones include,
- Positional Influence (The Facilitator)
- Operational Efficiency Leader (The Strategist)
- Guest-Centric Leader (The Ambassador)
- Team Dynamics Leader (The Harmoniser)
- Business Acumen Leader (The Navigator)
- Legacy & Mentorship Leader (The Torchbearer)
- Innovative Experience Leader (The Trendsetter)
These stages are illustrative of the traits, skills, capabilities, and qualities noted above. The descriptive elements, for example, The Facilitator, notes an effective way to think about what you as a leader, or future leader are doing or what you need to do in the roles you assume during your career path. Another question to be explored might be how do we assess leadership ?
Leadership Metrics
Interpersonal skills, however, are the secret to understanding customer needs and leading in ways that motivate employees to satisfy those needs. In short, your interpersonal skills are leadership qualities that deliver customer and employee satisfaction. Spencer Stuart, a leadership consulting firm, offers compelling insight on what makes a successful CEO in the hotel business: “While successful CEOs from all industries share many common strengths, the CEOs running hotel companies share several specific characteristics. These include a close affinity with the guest, an ability to build collaborative and productive relationships and networks, and the flexibility to ‘fail fast’ and change course.”
Given leaders have these characteristics, measures of success can include profitability, but also the means to get there. A long-time conversation in hospitality has been that a great team, staff, managers etc. will translate into happy and returning guests. One of these measures can be guest satisfaction scores and employee (satisfaction) as evidenced through retention. Some of the following, are noted as possible measures, employee engagement, guest satisfaction, employee retention, company profitability, and perhaps workplace innovation.
Additionally, the most important leadership metrics as noted by Gitnux include, employee engagement, employee retention rate, employee turnover rate, leadership trust, time to fill leadership positions, diversity and inclusivity, leadership development program participation, succession planning, decision-making quality, employee growth and development, collaboration and teamwork, leadership-to-subordinate ratio, management by objectives, customer satisfaction, ethical leadership, innovation and creativity and conflict management. These metrics differ, from one organization to the next, but will be essential to creating a great environment and sustaining the success of the organization. It is through the persistent analysis of leadership metrics that leadership success can be achieved, maintained, and refined.
You As A Leader-Self Assessment
For yourself, a great place to start the leadership self-assessment process is to assess yourself, your style, your traits, and skills. Assess your current position, education, work ethic, skill set, think of it as a combined job specification and description. As a mini example, my strengths, such as they are, are a combination of my family values, education and work experiences, and travel. For example, my work experiences include my current director position where I try to lead the school in positive directions.
Additionally, I have had a variety of positions, faculty, volunteer leadership, i.e., boards etc. as well as managing in the hospitality industry (years ago). These experiences helped me to enhance my ability to read and work with people, judge their skills and ability to fit in with a team. Also, I have been fortunate to travel for work and for pleasure, including a backpack adventure around the world after college, plus traveling across the USA. The interaction and exposure to people from across the globe and living in diverse geographic regions of the country including Massachusetts, New York, Los Angeles, Sacramento, Upstate New York, Memphis and now North Carolina, provides perspective. I am tired! The point being that these travel experiences and diverse residences enhanced my regional and multicultural awareness and the ability to interact and work with people from all walks of life. I am happy to let others judge my leadership success or lack thereof, but I will note I know who I am.
Self-assessment means to judge your effectiveness. A big part of that is your own self-awareness, therefore reinforcing that leadership is a personal skill. Some measures of this can be workplace effectiveness, workplace relationships, managing your emotional intelligence and working to reduce stress in your life. Professor Joshua Margolis from the Harvard Business School notes “Self-awareness is about developing your capacity to sense how you’re coming across-to have undistorted visibility into your own strengths and weaknesses-and to be able to gauge the emotions you’re personally experiencing,”
There are self-assessments for leadership available online, take one and start your journey. Assess yourself, and then identify what else, other skills you need to develop. For example, there is a leadership assessment tool from Purdue University. Within this leadership self-assessment tool, they explore leadership understanding, self-awareness, ethical behavior, sustaining leadership, diversity, communication skills, managing conflict, developing teams, and committing to serving others. The assessments ask that you grade yourself as, Do Not do well, do somewhat well and do well, while providing you the opportunity to note what you will work on. Another leadership self-assessment tool is from University of Wisconsin-Madison. This tool is inclusive of self-awareness, interpersonal communication, learning and development of others, honing culture and context, decision making, bridge building and collaboration and moving ideas forward.
Fleshing these areas out requires thinking about your goals, objectives and next steps and the time frame for your development plan. In this tool, I notice that honing culture and content is an area of concentration. I am a believer that history matters, it counts, it happened. You cannot live there, and you probably would not want to, but you need to understand and see how those that came before you did things, good and bad and then be able to note that somethings need to be corrected, edited, enhanced, and improved for the next generation.
You can also observe yourself and solicit feedback and input from others. Ultimately, as stated in the Harvard Business Review, cultivate a robust network. Building and maintaining your network is a lot of work but it will pay off. Additionally, it can be useful to be a keen observer of people, and actions. In the classroom for example, there are activities and teaching and learning tools that can support the education of leadership. Look for leadership examples to learn from, they can be anywhere. For example, Eugene Jennings, retired and now deceased professor from Michigan State University, as far back as1986 (I was in his course) used film clips from popular movies to emphasize key points on executive development and leadership. For example, the feature film, Twelve Angry Men was used to illustrate leadership and tactics for communicating and persuading jury members.
There are many other teaching and learning tools and it is important to learn about leadership by watching and doing. Leadership is an elusive term in business. Many companies boast that they are leaders in their industries or boast about training their employees to be the best leaders. Servant leadership is different from other types of leadership because it focuses on leading by example and putting the needs of employees and organizations above the needs of an individual leader. Servant leaders set an example of service for their employees to follow. The concept of leadership in the hospitality industry is continuing to evolve, as the industry’s needs evolve. There can be as many ways to lead people as there are leaders. An industry that is focused on providing customer service must have an example of true service to emulate. Hospitality leaders that model servant leadership to inspire their employees to become servant leaders can also provide excellent customer service.
A reminder is that leadership is connected to responsibility. These responsibilities are to yourself, your organizations, your employees, and your community. Great leaders can build sustainable businesses and communities, inclusive of the environment and people guests, visitors, and employees.
