Five Benefits of Losing Your Star Players

My team is undergoing a tremendous amount of change as several of our long-term, star players are moving on to other opportunities both in and outside the organization. For several years the composition of my team has remained relatively stable but now we’re entering a new phase of growth, which is both scary and exciting. It seems like each day I’m having the old Abbott and Costello “Who’s on first?”conversation with my managers, as we try to sort out who’s going, who’s staying, and how we’re getting our work done.

It’s easy to get discouraged when top performers leave your team. The immediate reaction is often to look at all the challenges that lay ahead — How do we replace the intellectual capital that’s walking out the door? Who is going to cover the work while we hire replacements? Will the new hires be able to match the productivity and contributions of the previous employees? All those questions swirl through your mind as you ponder the endless hours you’re going to have to invest in recruiting, interviewing, hiring, and training new team members.

Rather than being discouraged, I’m energized and looking forward to the future because the long-term benefits outweigh the short-term difficulties. Here’s five benefits I see to losing top performers:

1. It proves you’re doing something right. Huh? Doesn’t it mean that something must be wrong with your leadership or team dynamics if you’re losing your top people? Well, if you’re a toxic leader and your team’s morale and performance is in the tank, then yes, there’s something wrong. But if you’re doing a good job of leading it means you’re hiring the right talent and developing them to high performance. I take a little pride in knowing that other leaders see the immense talent I have on my team and they want to hire them away.

2. Your team is better off for their contributions. The contributions of my star players have helped raise the level of professionalism, productivity, and capability of my team over the last several years. They have redefined what “normal” performance looks like and we’ll be looking to existing team members and our new hires to reach that same level. We are better off for having them on our team and I believe they are better off for having been on our team.

3. It provides a chance for existing team members to step up. Losing valuable contributors is an opportunity for other team members to step up their game, either by moving into higher levels of responsibility or by taking on short-term duties to cover the gap. When you have several high-performers on a team, it’s easy for other valuable team members to get buried on the depth-chart (to use a football metaphor). Losing a star player allows second-team players to step into the limelight and prove their capabilities.

4. You can bring in new blood. Having long-term, high-performers on your team brings stability and continuity. However, stability and continuity can easily become routine and complacency if you aren’t careful. Hiring new people brings fresh perspective, a jolt of energy, and a willingness to try new things you haven’t done before. Teams are living organisms and living entities are always growing and changing. I see this as a new era to bring in a fresh crop of star players that will raise our performance to even higher levels.

5. It facilitates needed change. Bringing in new team members is a great time to address broader changes in your business. You have new people who aren’t conditioned to existing work processes, systems, or ways of running your business. They aren’t yet infected with the “that’s the way we’ve always done it around here”virus that tends to infiltrate groups that stay together for a long time. It’s a time to capitalize on the strengths and ideas of new team members to help you take your business to new heights.

Losing high-performers is never easy but it doesn’t have to be devastating. I’m grateful to have worked with star players that are moving on to other challenges and I’m excited about developing a new wave of top performers that will lead us in the years ahead. It’s time for change…Bring it!

When your organization has an opening, it’s tempting to hold out for the “perfect” manager candidate. Many employers are doing just that, leaving job postings open for up to four times as long as they would have before the 2009 recession hit as they wait for the best possible candidate to drop them a line.

Why wait?  Companies offer several reasons, such as the belief that better candidates are available and the desire to make every hire “count” in a slow economy, when available funds for salaries and benefits may be down. However, expanding the time it takes to hire a new employee often means expanding the cost of hiring as well – and risks leaving a “skills gap” open that decreases your company’s overall productivity and ability to reach its goals.

How can companies decide whether to hire or wait for a better candidate? Consider these five factors:

1. The organization’s needs.  What are the company’s top priorities in a manager?  What does the organization require from the candidate immediately, and what can be added later through training, or additional hiring?  Focusing on what is most important can help your organization decide if the managers currently ion hand will suffice, or if the search should continue.
2. Job market analysis.  Know how competitive hiring is in your local market for the positions you have available.  If competition is fierce, you may benefit more from focusing on hiring competent individuals for most positions, instead of holding out for the best possible candidate in all circumstances.
3. Training and retention.  In some cases, organizations find it difficult to even find capable matches for every open position.  Poor location, a labor shortage, or a need for specialized skills or experience can all limit the hiring options available.  Focusing on training and retaining the people you have can often address this problem more effectively than waiting on a new hire who meets your organization’s needs.
4. Effectiveness or cost?  The most effective hiring tools and services, from staffing partners to job ads, are those that bring in the best people.  Putting cost first may sacrifice effectiveness, however, leaving you with a long-term search that doesn’t turn up the quality candidates you’re searching for.
5. Should you hunt or gather?  “Gathering” candidates is more passive, involving little more than posting to job boards and waiting for resumes to arrive. It can often seem less expensive, but it also takes longer. “Hunting” requires a more active approach, but it saves time and often improves the quality of the applicant pool. Your staffing partner likely excels at hunting as well as gathering, and can be a key resource for an organization hoping to save time without sacrificing quality.

At Gecko Hospitality, our experienced staffing partners can help you find top managers in the hospitality industry in less time. Contact us today to learn more!

Hiring managers and owners throughout the hospitality industry have seen it: after a long search and several interviews, they find a top manager candidate who seems like a great fit – only to have the candidate turn down the offered salary.

While money isn’t the primary consideration on every manager’s list, it’s certainly one of the items the best candidates consider when pondering a job offer.  How your company responds when an initial salary offer is turned down does two things: it demonstrates how well you’re willing to work with the candidate and how much you value what they have to offer. When handled correctly, an initial rejection can turn into a “yes” that satisfies both parties.

What should you do when a candidate rejects an initial salary offer?  Consider these three options:

• Stick with it.  Your first option is always to stick with the initial offer, but it can also be the risky option, especially if your organization badly needs the manager’s skill set or presence in the position.  If you choose to stick with your original offer, describe to the candidate a clear, well-defined path to increased responsibilities and job opportunities – and the increased salary that typically comes with them – if he or she stays with your company.  Managers who are considering a long-term relationship may review their positions.
• Reassess the offer.  Consider the basis on which the original salary offer was made.  Is it based on the money in the budget, or on the value the manager will bring to the business?  If the candidate has a superior skill set compared to other applicants, an increase in salary may be well worth the investment in terms of the value the candidate’s skills and experiences will return.
• Improve the benefits.  If you simply can’t move on the dollar amount, consider beefing up the candidate’s benefits package.  “Non-traditional” benefits, like flextime, tickets to cultural or sports events, or assistance picking up dry cleaning and scheduling family appointments can all attract top talent, even if the salary offered isn’t the candidate’s first choice.

In many cases, it’s less expensive to the business to increase the salary offering or benefits than it is to start the recruitment process from scratch.  Taking a flexible approach to salary negotiations and knowing where your company stands in terms of offering competitive compensation can help you weather rejection and secure a top candidate.

At Gecko Hospitality, our skilled staffing partners can help you not only find great manager talent, but also know the salary and benefits offerings for similar positions, allowing you to stay competitive while also recruiting top talent. For more information, contact us today!

Online marketing provides a wealth of opportunities when it comes to growing a business – but only when it’s applied wisely.  Social media sites, email direct marketing, and other tools can be used not only to reach potential clients, but also to appeal to potential job candidates and engage employees.

Internet marketing can be carried out in myriad ways, allowing you to choose the tools that work best for your business.  These include creating YouTube videos, enlisting in pay-per-click advertising, launching a social media marketing campaign, blogging, and more.  Involving clients and employees in Internet marketing can further expand its reach and establish your organization’s reputation not only as a key service provider in the hospitality industry, but also as a great place to work.

What are some advantages to Internet marketing?

• It can be less expensive than many other forms of marketing, including traditional print, direct mail, or radio advertising.  In fact, some of the most popular forms of Internet marketing – like social media participation or blogging – can be done for no cost.
• Internet marketing has a broad reach, making it useful for pulling in clients and candidates regardless of their current physical location.  At the same time, however, social media and other tools allow you to focus on a highly specialized target market each time you release a message.
• Many Internet marketing tools make it easy to produce original content.  Blogs are a common example, but videos, direct-mail pieces, and even social media status updates can be tailored both to your organization’s immediate needs and to the audience you’re hoping to address.
• Customer engagement is easier than ever.  Communicating with clients, addressing complaints, and providing well-rounded customer service have all become easier with the additional communications and contact tools the Internet provides.

Despite its advantages, Internet marketing can seem daunting at first.  The sheer number of options and the loss of face-to-face communication can seem confusing – but they don’t have to be.  Making Internet marketing a priority project within your organization can give you an advantage when hiring managers or communicating with your target audience.

At Gecko Hospitality, our experienced recruiters are experts at recruiting managers to help you run your business and your online marketing needs. Contact us today to learn more!

Like any human, managers make the occasional mistake.  Some mistakes are easily fixed, while others have lasting consequences.  Mistakes that kill employee productivity are especially costly, both to the team and to the organization as a whole.

Many productivity-killing mistakes are made in good faith; managers believe that their team really does have things “figured out” or that they’ve judged a situation correctly.  That’s why it’s so important for hospitality managers to understand what works, as well as why the things that don’t work should be avoided.

Managers may be doing more harm than good when it comes to productivity if:

• They assume patterns where none exist.  Assuming that a worker with one good quality is great at everything or that a worker with one bad quality is poor at everything, both cause damage.  They eliminate opportunities to provide feedback for improvement, and they fail to see where team members can be used most effectively.
• They neglect giving feedback.  Many managers simply assume that their team members already know where they need to improve or that they will figure it out without direction – even if neither one is true.  This assumption misses many opportunities to give both constructive and negative feedback that can improve productivity.
• They “go negative.”  Occasionally, every employee needs to be told what he or she is doing wrong.  However, managers who speak negatively about team members to one another or who criticize or shame team members in front of one another damage the team’s motivation and sense of trust, which kills productivity.
• They fail to explain.  When it comes to understanding the team’s goals, what achievement looks like, or what management’s reasons are for certain requests or requirements, managers can’t communicate too often with team members.  Communication is key for keeping everyone focused on the same goal and for heading off problems before they bring productivity to a halt.
• They muddle the message.  “Sandwich” feedback, or putting a negative comment between two constructive ones, was once a popular method of training managers to talk to employees.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t work; most employees simply end up wondering what the point of the conversation was and whether the problem really needs fixing. Focus on a single point when giving feedback, and offer concrete examples of how the employee should handle the situation in the future.

At Gecko Hospitality, our experienced recruiters can help you find management and other top hospitality talent. Contact us today to learn more!

Strategic workforce planning takes a long-term view of your organization’s workforce needs, based on its overall goals, plans, and strategies as well as on external data like workforce projections.  It’s designed to ensure that an organization has the capacity and talent to deliver on its strategy now and in the future.

By creating and following a strategic workforce plan, your restaurant can use information about employees it already has to make future projections that alert you when it’s time to bring new people on board or when a “skills gap” is likely to occur.  A strategic workforce plan answers questions like:

• What management roles must be filled for our organization to fulfill its goals?
• What capacity do we have, and what will we need in the future?
• Who currently has the critical skills we need?  How do we ensure our managers have these skills so that we don’t face a “skills gap” in the future?
• What’s the most effective way to spend our “people budget”?

Like all big plans, a strategic workforce plan isn’t built in a day. Here are a few questions organizations can explore to get started:

• What changes do we anticipate over the next five to ten years?  Consider a long list of changes, both inside the organization (mission, budgets, skills and competencies) and outside (labor force trends, environmental changes, outsourcing).
• How will the anticipated changes affect us?  Think about concerns like where, when, and how work is performed, how the organization’s structure may need to change, and what skills will be needed from which employees.
• What is our planned organizational outlook?  This question addresses considerations like how many full-time managers or temp employees the organization will need, what types and levels of skills each employee should have, and how supervision and teams will be structured.

These questions focus your organization’s planning on the work the organization reasonably expects to tackle and the knowledge, skills, and abilities needed to carry it out.  Focusing on the most important issues allows the organization to determine what the most critical knowledge, skills, and abilities are to handle each issue.

Most strategic workforce plans go on to consider the likely labor supply in the future and make additional plans. By completing these first steps, however, you’ve clarified what your organization needs to look for in those it hires today – helping you and your recruiter “hire smarter.”

The experienced hospitality recruiters at Gecko Hospitality can help you find the top management talent you need to keep your strategic workforce plan on track. Contact us today to learn more!

The hospitality industry covers a vast range of travel, tourism, and entertainment venues, but its employees all have one thing in common: they deal with people.  As a result, hospitality businesses and employees who reach out to people in many different ways improve their chances of expanding business and engaging fully in their work.

If you’re looking for new ways to engage your employees and expand your business, consider building a community via LinkedIn.  This guide will help you do just that.

Why LinkedIn?

While social media sites like Facebook and Twitter have great general popularity, LinkedIn hosts the world’s largest professional network. The site does one thing – business – and it does it well.

How do I get started in LinkedIn?

If your business doesn’t have a LinkedIn profile, you can create one for free by visiting www.linkedin.com.  Securing a “vanity URL” that matches your business’s name can make it easier for employees, candidates, and companies to find you.  Encourage employees to join LinkedIn if they have not already done so.

LinkedIn has a lot of tools.  Which are best for my business?

Once you’ve established a presence on LinkedIn, your single best choice for engaging employees and growing your business is to join LinkedIn Groups – for two reasons.

One, Groups give employees the ability to communicate with one another easily.  They create a shared source for information and data that help employees build the relationships and swap the information they need to do their jobs well.

Two, Groups allow any member of the Group to communicate with any other member of the Group.  Normally, LinkedIn members who don’t have premium accounts can only message one another if they are “first-degree connections” – that is, if they’ve connected via LinkedIn directly.  (Think of a “first-degree connection” as a Facebook “friend” or Twitter “follower.”)  Within a LinkedIn Group, however, members can communicate with every other member of the Group, whether or not they’re also first-degree connections.

How do I improve my company image on LinkedIn?

LinkedIn offers several tools aimed directly at businesses.  One is the new LinkedIn Company Page design, which the site recently made available to all users.  The Company Page lets you add a cover image, create Product and Service Spotlights, and highlight the connections between your company and its employees on LinkedIn.

Your Company Page also lets you add Company Status Updates, which encourage followers to add your company to keep up with its latest news.  Company Status Updates can even be targeted to appear on the feeds of specific LinkedIn followers.  They’re an easy way to get new products, services, and promotions in front of those who are most likely to take your business up on its offers.

At Gecko Hospitality, our experienced hospitality recruiters can help you find the right people for any position within the hospitality industry.  Call us today to learn more!

Every organization in the hospitality industry relies on teamwork to spur productivity, solve problems, and improve customer experiences. It’s no surprise, then, that team building has become a popular topic in the business world – but only effective team building will help your company prosper.

When is team building most effective? Studies show employees learn the most about teamwork when they’re cooperating in pursuit of a common goal. If you’re looking for ways to encourage team building and drive your organization forward, consider the following tips:

1. Share your mission and values. Companies that commit to effective team building do so from the very first step: the company’s mission statement and core values. Consider revising your organization’s mission and values to include relationship building and teamwork. If your organization has already adopted these goals, make sure your managers know it. When your managers have embraced your mission, they will be able to lead more effectively by setting an example for their staff.
2. Acknowledge individual contributions. Every great team works together, but no great team is a faceless mass: teams work because each member contributes according to his or her greatest strengths. When a manager goes the extra mile on behalf of the team, highlight both the person and the way the person’s contribution helped the group and the organization as a whole.
3. Give team members the resources they need to innovate. When one team is on the “front lines” of a project or an event, give team members the authority to make project-related decisions, according to organizational guidelines. You’ll accomplish two goals: the project’s results will improve because the solution better “fits” the problem, and you’ll be empowering your managers to spur innovation amongst their team. You’ll also encourage your entire team to take the initiative and invest in their results.
4. Encourage “giving back.” Whether it’s offering managers a chance to share their successes on your company’s Facebook page, or arranging a team to tackle a charity walk-a-thon, opportunities to “give back” encourage employees to take their teamwork further. They also establish your company’s value within the community and spur additional team building outside work hours – a clear win-win.

At Gecko Hospitality, our experienced hospitality recruiters can help you find great managers to add to your team. Contact us today to learn more!

Restaurants that embrace social media often improve their marketing reach and collect new and loyal customers – but they must also face the fact that social media makes feedback inevitable. While responding to feedback takes time, it’s also key to establishing an effective social media presence and building a positive reputation among customers.  Here are a few tips for responding effectively to feedback your restaurant receives online:

Positive Feedback

Positive feedback generates positive feelings, so most companies find it is much easier to respond to than negative feedback. When you’re sending a response to a positive email, blog post, comment, review, or social media message, here are a few guidelines:

• Say thank you.  A simple “Thank you for your kind words, we are happy to hear you enjoyed your experience” goes a very long way on social media.  It’s an easy place to start drafting a response and one that leaves a positive impression.
• Offer them a special to express your gratitude.  Consistent, thoughtful, positive feedback from certain loyal customers may reveal that they hold your restaurant in high esteem and express it well to others. This may lead them to influencing their friends and connections and send business your way. If you think you’ve found such a person, consider offering him or her a special or a freebie.

Negative Feedback

Negative feedback is never fun to receive or to face. However, recent studies show that companies that respond well to negative feedback improve their social media standings and overall reputation. A thoughtful, personal response to negative feedback may even convert a skeptic into a loyal customer.

Here are a few tips for responding to negative feedback:

• Don’t wait.  Just like responding to an unhappy customer who is in your restaurant, quickly addressing an individual’s concern on social media is more effective than a slow one. Studies show that customers expect a quick response to negative feedback and are more likely to rate an organization negatively if a response is slow or non-existent.
• Let it stand.  The Internet may seem ephemeral, but it’s not. Deleting a negative comment can easily come back to haunt your restaurant, since online archives and reader screenshots can preserve comments even if you believe you’ve eradicated them. Instead, respond to negative feedback and let the original comment stand.
• Stay constructive.  Forums and blogs all over the Internet live by the rule “don’t feed the trolls” – in other words, don’t engage with people who are clearly only trying to heckle you. Instead, focus on quick responses to constructive criticism.

At Gecko Hospitality, our experienced recruiters can help you find the quality managers you need throughout the hospitality and franchise industries. Contact us today to learn more!