Can every Hotel Manager be a Hotel Supervisor?

A Hotel Supervisor ...

One of the hardest roles of Hotel Managers is to oversee and Supervise the work of their Hotel Teams. This task, which might look easy upon the surface is, essentially, a combination of delegation, coaching, communication and juggling.

It requires an understanding of your Hotel Team members, a knowledge of their strengths and weaknesses, an awareness of their working preferences and development needs and an ability to calculate rapidly how long work will take depending on who is doing it.

It also means being able to give good, confident and constructive feedback when necessary.

It is, perhaps, not surprising that some new Hoteliers find this task difficult.

Just getting to know your Hotel Team can be the work of many months. Adding in the need to understand the Hotel work, the tasks required and the time they take makes this a real challenge for anyone.

Hotel Supervision, however, is a very useful skill. Fortunately, it is also one that can be developed over time with a bit of patience.

The Main Skills Needed to Supervise in a Hotel Effectively

It is possible to argue that almost any skill is vital to help you Supervise Hotel work effectively. Communication skills, for example, are important in any interpersonal interaction and Hotel Managers inevitably need to have good communication skills, both speaking and listening.

However, there are some skills which are particularly helpful in this Hotel Management situation. These include:

Delegation Skills Learning to delegate effectively is something of an art. It requires an understanding of yourself and the amount of control that you want over the task. It also requires you to be able to communicate this fully to the person to whom you are delegating.

Managing work effectively across the whole Hotel Team that you are Supervising means being able to develop and bring on team members. There are two essential areas of skill for this: feedback and coaching skills

Feedback Skills

Giving feedback is easy. Shouting at the top of your voice “That was absolutely rubbish!” is giving feedback.

Giving effective feedback - that is, feedback that is heard and acted upon - is much harder. There are some useful rules about good feedback, including that it should be about behaviour, as specific as possible and about the effect of a person’s behaviour on you. It should also be provided soon after the event and at a suitable moment.

Coaching Skills

A good coach - or a Hotel Manager using a coaching approach - starts from the position that the person they are coaching, or their team member, knows the answer to their problem, and just needs a bit of support to learn.

This is, oddly enough, easier as a new Hotelier, because you may well not be an expert in the subject matter. You may, therefore, not really know the answers, and be dependent on your team to work them out. Try it and see…

An important part of a coaching approach, both with yourself and with your Hotel Team, is the idea of ‘trying it to see’.

As a Hotel Supervisor give yourself the opportunity to try new things and potentially fail, without considering what happened was a disaster.

Most importantly, as a Hotel Supervisor, learn to appreciate that work allocations are fluid, and that working flexibly is important to manage peaks and troughs in any Hotel demand.

Good Luck …

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My posts are intended for hotel workers, supervisors and managers around the world, who are (or want to become) actively engaged in learning and development.