HotelYearbook_Attract, Motivate, Train (2010)

2010

This excerpt from the Hotel Yearbook 2010 is brought to you by :

Ecole hôtelière de LausanneThe Ecole hôtelière de Lausanne (EHL) is the co-publisher of The Hotel Yearbook. As the oldest Hotel School in the world, EHL provides university education to students with talent and ambition, who are aiming for careers at the forefront of the international hospitality industry. Dedicated to preparing tomorrow’s executives to the highest possible level, EHL regularly adapts the contents of its three academic programs to reflect the latest technologies and trends in the marketplace. Since its founding in 1893, the Ecole hôtelière de Lausanne has developed more than 25’000 executives for the hospitality industry, providing it today with an invaluable network of contacts for all the members of the EHL community. Some 1’800 students from over 90 different countries are currently enjoying the unique and enriching environment of the Ecole hôtelière de Lausanne.

Boutique DESIGN New YorkBoutique DESIGN New York, a new hospitality interiors trade fair, will coincide with the 94-year-old International Hotel/Motel & Restaurant Show (IH/M&RS). Designers, architects, purchasers and developers will join the hotel owners/operators already attending IH/M&RS to view the best hospitality design offerings as well as explore a model room, exciting trend pavilion and an uplifting illy® networking café.

Hospitality Financial and Technology Professionals (HFTP)HFTP provides first-class educational opportunities, research and publications to more than 4’800 members around the world. Over the years, HFTP has grown into the global professional association for financial and technology personnel working in hotels, clubs and other hospitality-related businesses.

Bench EventsBench Events host premier hotel investment conferences including the International Hotel Investment Forum ; the Arabian Hotel Investment Conference and the Russia & CIS Hotel Investment Conference. Bench Event’s sister company, JW Bench, is a benchmarking company that has launched the Conference Bench and the Productivity Bench. An industry first, the Conference Bench, measures performance data for conference space in hotels throughout Europe.

Cornell University School of Hotel AdministrationFounded in 1922, Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration was the first collegiate program in hospitality management. Today it is regarded as one of the world’s leaders in its field. The school’s highly talented and motivated students learn from 60 full-time faculty members – all experts in their chosen disciplines, and all dedicated to teaching, research and service. Learning takes place in state-of-the-art classrooms, in the on-campus Statler hotel, and in varied industry settings around the world. The result: a supremely accomplished alumni group-corporate executives and entrepreneurs who advance the industry and share their wisdom and experience with our students and faculty.

HsyndicateWith an exclusive focus on global hospitality and tourism, Hsyndicate.org (the Hospitality Syndicate) provides electronic news publication, syndication and distribution on behalf of some 750 organizations in the hospitality vertical. Hsyndicate helps its members to reach highly targeted audience-segments in the exploding new-media landscape within hospitality. With the central idea ‘ONE Industry, ONE Network’, Hsyndicate merges historically fragmented industry intelligence into a single online information and knowledge resource serving the information-needs of targeted audience-groups throughout the hospitality, travel & tourism industries… serving professionals relying on Hsyndicate’s specific and context-relevant intelligence delivered to them when they need it and how they need it.

WATGOver the course of the last six decades, WATG has become the world’s leading design consultant for the hospitality industry. Having worked in 160 countries and territories across six continents, WATG has designed more great hotels and resorts than any other firm on the planet. Many of WATG’s projects have become international landmarks, renowned not only for their design and sense of place but also for their bottom-line success.

Although no one is immune to the effects of a global economic crisis, there are certain sectors, such as education, where exciting opportunities and real growth exist. MBA programs, particularly those that target career changers, are attracting unprecedented numbers of extremely well qualified and experienced candidates looking to develop their potential and reposition themselves in the business environment.

As the future is happening right now, I will explore 3 areas of change in the MBA landscape that are already gaining force in my own institution; and which I believe will continue to become major issues for 2010. I will examine each of the changes from three perspectives : the hotel industry, students, and providers of education (not necessarily with equal weight ; sometimes collectively, sometimes separately).

Re-inventing oneselfIn the past, my interviews with candidates seeking to enroll on an MBA program tended to focus on what they perceived as being essential to gain a competitive edge over the multitude of other MBA graduates. Becoming proficient in subjects relating to finance was typically voiced as a key objective for these prospective MBA students. Interestingly, although the importance of quantitative analysis is ever-present, my current conversations with future MBA’s are far more directed at their own personal development. They wish to tap their full potential and are taking the time to tend to their personal and professional goals. This does not translate into a self-centeredness like we encountered during the « me decade » of the 1980’s. Rather, this desire for introspection and reflection on oneself appears to be thoughtful, all-encompassing, and humble.

It is not surprising that we hear more and more MBA programs offer access to coaches (academic, professional, even athletic), mentors, psychologists, psychiatrists, etc. Meta-cognition, or thinking about thinking, is now a buzzword in graduate education and applies to all levels of self-awareness. Industry, too, has recognized its increased role of attending to mental, spiritual, as well as physical well-being of their employees. It is

a well-known fact that if companies wish to retain their best talent, they need to support their employees’ personal growth and effectiveness.

There is a growing need for educational institutions to provide students and industry qualitative data that captures students’ personal and professional development. This is a challenge for faculty as it requires more time and energy to reflect what is not quantitatively measurable. To add further complexity, peer and self-evaluations are often factored in such evaluations which need to be reviewed over a continuum of time to ascertain and then track evidence of progress.

As will be the case with other industries, I believe that in 2010 we will see joint efforts between education providers and the larger chains represented in the hospitality industry, to create a platform for common understanding of terminology and processes that reflect levels of achievement in personal/interpersonal skills. Employers that advance on this front will attain competitive advantages by creating stronger employee relationships as they contribute to a longer-term vision of their employees’ professional development (life-long learning).

With the vast amount of anecdotal information on the work habits of young professionals, we are confronted with the observation that young people are no longer loyal to their employers. This fickle employment behavior has been attributed as a general characteristic of Generation X, and seems to be reinforced with a healthy dose of employer skepticism by the subsequent Gen Y. According to an article in the Boston Globe (Halpern, 2007), titled « The New Me Generation », anyone born after 1970 belongs to the « Entitlement Generation ». The article discusses findings from various US educational research initiatives, reporting higher levels of narcissism and the sense of entitlement demonstrated by the latest wave of 20-something-year-olds entering the workforce.

However irritating for older colleagues, it is precisely these qualities associated with « productive » narcissism that can lead

to innovation and entrepreneurial successes. Browsing through HR blogs and social networks where these young professionals contribute to debate, one finds countless discussions on why loyalty needs to be viewed as a two-way street. Given our challenging times and need for flexibility, employers may be unable to keep certain promises to their employees. Also, as leadership is often value-driven, changes in leadership typically result in changes in values. Young professionals may no longer be as loyal to a company per se, but unlike the negative connotations associated with a lack of commitment, perhaps they are simply more loyal to their ideals and aspirations than they are to a company. Given their social conditioning through unlimited access to knowledge, it is not surprising that they seek an environment that projects their own values and beliefs, and demonstrates commitment to investing in their potential.

Both industry and education have collective roles to play and opportunities to enhance longer-term relationships by providing the means for optimizing talent and tapping into a portfolio of learning and training tools for individual development.

The focus on qualitative skills is an ideal lead into my next theme, the « art of business. »

Art goes « beyond » scienceThe « Arts » and « Sciences » are not mutually exclusive, nor are they easy to define. By necessity, there is interdependence between the two, but often within business curricula we focus on the scientific method to validate our findings and ultimately our beliefs about the science of management. In tandem with our proclivity to focus on what can be « proved », we also realize that the consequences of our knowledge economy are simply too vast to tackle en masse in our curricula. What is the solution ? Up to now, it has been a trend towards specialization – or even über-specialization – in order to prepare our graduates for specific career paths. The flaw in this logic is that people often don’t have the luxury or the inclination to hold onto one career choice for the duration of their working life.

As a result, there is a great deal of talk about transferable skills (see sidebar on the « Bologna Backdrop ») and what I believe is a movement to a more « generalist » approach to management by business schools and business enterprises alike. Even before the current economic crisis, we witnessed an increase in industry’s desire to tap graduates that have leadership potential and problem-solving capabilities over pure quantitative skills. Although I deal specifically with the hospitality sector, there has always been a frank realization that employers value the attitude and behaviors required of managers and future leaders as much as competences… and given the right training, an educated and willing person can always learn the technical and procedural skills that are required by the specific sector.

If I may take a moment to focus on the service sector that encompasses the hospitality and « luxury » sectors, we see that at the heart of one’s aesthetic is craftsmanship. To go back to our initial topic, this entails both art and science. For the most part, we are in the business of « wants » as opposed to « needs », and in today’s world that translates into creative solutions that are dependent on the emotions consumers attach to these products/services. Emotions are not particularly rational nor are they predictable, and yet a pragmatic approach is necessary to generate a feasible business plan. Can we really think of facilitating such capabilities and solutions in purely scientific approaches ? We need to foster the qualitative elements necessary for the « art of business » as much as we do the more quantitative elements associated with scientific approaches. We need to move knowledge or solutions from immediate managerial problems, to constructing « capability in action. »

I believe that in 2010 we will see a trend by hotel employers to seek team players and leadership potential first, and specialists second. In an environment of unknown business continuity or robustness, everyone is pressured to demonstrate flexibility. In many countries, the legal/financial responsibilities associated with hiring a new full-time employee are daunting. This is only exceeded by the legal and financial responsibilities of trying to terminate a contract with a qualified full-time

employee. Therefore, such an employment marriage needs to be anticipated with multiple scenarios, contexts, and even alternate business activities for a given post.

You go, girl !So the world of higher education is experiencing a virtually universal trend of more women than men enrolled in and graduating from degree programs. According to a recent report published by UNESCO (2009), one third more women than men are enrolled in tertiary educational programs in North America and Europe. In the Arab countries, the genders are equally balanced but with much higher growth rates represented by women. Although this might upset the gender balance in the classroom, I don’t yet see real significant changes in curricula to respond to this occurrence. What is of particular interest is the consideration of what future consequences this observable fact will elicit in the business world. The female economy is already upon us. Commercially, we are confronted with marketing data on how the balance is tipping towards women as the key decision makers for purchasing the majority of consumer goods.

Yet these are only details compared to the more profound implications that will result from women’s decision-making influence in the corporate management roles they will increasingly take on, as well as their growing representation in the boardroom. The literature on leadership needs an overhaul to reflect this changing landscape. If we subscribe to evolutionary theory whereby men and women are hard-wired differently, then it does not come as a surprise that women also have a very different risk profile to men. As the growing number of female college graduates enter the business world with record levels as entrepreneurs, the perception of risk is a unique, individually constructed concept. Of particular interest is how women deal with the identified risks they perceive.

As mentioned in the discussion on the « art of business, » emotions are playing an increased role in management literature, particularly concerning organizational learning. In the past, we tended to associate « emotional » managers with a negative connotation. Women’s propensity to be more emotional was viewed as a drawback and somewhat of a liability for senior management roles. Now emotions are at the

To set the stage, it is important to note that the Bologna process that started in 1999 with the creation of the European Higher Education Area is nothing less than a revolution of change in the provision of education among universities across European countries.

Adherence to certain standards and quality assurance of degree programs result in the ability to compare programs internationally for credit transfer and student mobility. As with reform of such magnitude, old assumptions are being challenged. Given the explosion of knowledge and the easy access to it, educationalists are asking themselves, what is critical for students to learn in our institutions ? However, there is a dramatic shift from placing the attention on academic content, to speaking about outcomes and competences. In other words, what can the student do upon successfully completing a particular degree ? For some business and professional curricula, this question may be rudimentary. But like the traditional universities, many institutions dedicated to specific professions are also seeking universal ideals similar to those of the ancient Greeks, nurturing the development of the « whole being ». So we are seeing ever more a blurred distinction between traditional and professional universities.

forefront of business publications. Emotions and passion are what distinguish and differentiate successful entrepreneurs, turn brands into experiences rather than mere products or services, and are the reason celebrity chefs with « attitude » are idolized like rock stars.

Ultimately, what does this mean for the hospitality industry ?If we recognize a significant shift in the profiles and the attendant values held by future graduates, then the question is how will hospitality companies continue to attract, motivate, and retain such talent ? For those employers reading this article, perhaps I can anticipate my plans for next year with a checklist of questions that I would love to ask CEO’s interested in hiring our Master students :

Have your hiring criteria and practices changed to adapted to the new profile of graduates entering the market ? If yes, how ? If not, why not ?Have you « re-positioned » your entry-level job opportunities to attract the best potential talent ? If yes, how ? If not,

why not ?Have you developed (or modified) your recruitment and retention policies with the specific aim of being competitive with other industries ? Do you benchmark against other service industries ?Do you have an employment policy that includes retention goals ? Do you care if good people leave, and if so, what are you doing to minimize this, given what we know about the profile of newly minted MBAs ?Are you closely working with any educational institutions… or do you play a silent role by merely visiting campuses

to interview ?

And ultimately, how will your company motivate and inspire these people in the first place ?

academic Ecolehôtelière de Lausanne,

WouldEinstein get in?

maybe.

Master in Hospitality Administration