Hi! Managers: Happiness and Teamwork

It was not just the delightful surroundings. The good feeling actually started from the moment I got out of the car at the hotel lobby and was greeted by a genuinely smiling member of the staff, who promptly relieved me of my suitcase. I would later realise that he was actually a department manager. We were pampered by the happy-acting personnel, who went out of their way to accommodate, and even anticipate, our needs.

Luisa, from the Philippines, was the caretaker of our meeting rooms. She began before 7:30am and was still with us at 8pm - if we worked that late - totally committed to ensuring that we had a great time.

It was so rare to see such sincere customer focus and obvious happiness from the hotel staff that I went and asked the general manager if he would mind joining us and discussing leadership with "the executive team", and he accepted warmly.

A charismatic figure, he had worked in the hospitality industry around the world for more than 30 years. To our surprise, when he joined us, he brought members of his team: the hotel manager (his "number two"), an energetic Chinese woman; the executive chef, a softly-spoken British citizen; the finance director, an articulate Indian; the security manager, a Malay; and the human-resources director, an Australian.

The general manager opened the discussion by asking Peter Drucker's famous question: "What business are we in?" Can you guess? His answer was, "we are in the business of happiness".

He then handed out a list of five topics:

Excellent organisation,

business results,

performance monitoring,

teamwork, and

guest delight.

Then he asked everyone to rank them according to priority. What would your ranking be?

Heated debate followed within the executive team. After a while, the general manager shared his views. First of all: teamwork. Second, excellent organisation; third, guest delight; fourth, performance monitoring; and finally, business results. And the latter, incidentally, are outstanding at his hotel.

If teamwork was so fundamental, what did they do about it? They believe that it all starts by connecting with everyone in the team on a personal level, to break through cultural and functional barriers. That was a big time investment, given that there were more than 300 employees in the hotel. Yet they went for it. Luisa, our caretaker, later confirmed that she and the general manager knew each other personally, and that he always greeted her - and others - by their first names.

The hotel manager told us that when she joined - a long-time ago - she insisted on serving as a maid for a few weeks, in uniform. Her boss at the time neither recognised nor greeted her when they passed in a corridor while she was cleaning rooms. From that day onwards, she felt the importance of connecting with everyone. She said the same connection had to be established with guests, and she invited her staff to treat every one of them as "a boyfriend or girlfriend".

The human-relations director said he spent a lot of time playing ping pong with employees. And the finance director told us he was a "mentor" for the front-office staff, in a cross-department mentoring system that made it comfortable for all "mentorees" to "open up".

Another embedded feature of the hotel's management culture is that employees visibly help each other across departments. Finance people can be found helping food and beverage colleagues when hundreds of guests have breakfast at the same time.

And if you want to meet that extraordinary general manager, go for brunch on Sundays at the hotel. He is the one making fresh fruit juice for the guests.

So much for leadership from the front. Another one of Peter Drucker's quotes seems most appropriate: "there is no leader in teamwork. The task is the master. Every team member serves the others."

Jean-Francois Cousin leads 1-2-WIN Executive Coaching (www.1-2-win.net) and is a

former managing director of a Fortune-500

company in Thailand.