Hospitality management is the kind of field where success only happens with practice. Hospitality managers acquire a number of interpersonal and work practice skills by accumulating years of experience. If you want to be ahead of the game, start by getting experience that will allow you to build these skills.
Multitasking
Hospitality managers are managers of businesses that typically deal with hundreds if not thousands of customers per day. If you want to be a good hospitality manager, you have to be good at managing all of the different tasks that contribute to making a positive experience for the customer.
Attention to Detail
Because there are so many different elements of positive customer experience, hospitality managers also have to be very attentive to detail. Hospitality managers have to care, for example, if the trashcans are overflowing (even if it’s someone else’s job), because customers don’t like seeing trash in a place where comfort and relaxation is supposed to be a given. As a hospitality manager, if you’re attentive to detail, your staff will be too. If you’re not, your staff will not care about the little things that improve the customer experience.
Flexibility and Creativity
In the hospitality and tourism industries, emergencies happen and things don’t always go as planned. When you’re the manager dealing with conflict, stress, or poor planning, you have to have a flexible and creative attitude in order to find necessary solutions.
Technical and Language Skills
Working in the hospitality industry usually means using equipment and computers to make the job easier, so you need to be capable of learning and using different software and programs. Additionally, language skills are always helpful because your business is likely to attract people from around the world, and it’s helpful to have language skills to help with communication barriers.
Customer Service
Hospitality management is all about customer service. If you don’t know how to treat and deal with customers, you won’t be a successful manager. Managers have to deal with unhappy customers, and they also have to ensure that customers are having a positive experience.
Marketing and Selling Abilities
In order to attract customers to the product or service that their business offers, hospitality managers must have a basic understanding of marketing principles and must be good at selling the product or service to the customer. Successful hospitality managers help the customer to want the service they are trying to sell.
Organization and Scheduling
As a hospitality manager, you have two primary components to your job: the customer service component and the managing component. As a manager, you’ll likely have to do the scheduling for your employees and act as an HR manager at times. This means knowing how to balance the number of employees on the job and knowing how to deal with employment issues when they arise.
Personal Presentation
Hospitality managers reflect their product. Because of this, it is crucial that the hospitality manager put care and effort into their personal presentation. If you want your business to reflect class and elegance, you have to make yourself reflect those values as well.
