Holiday Inn North… my first motel job and thoughts on management decisions.
I began not as a manager but as a night auditor for the Holiday Inn North in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. I was one of four people the motel was training for the auditor job. Two were to work at the Holiday Inn North and two were to work at the new Holiday Inn South in Tuscaloosa.
Each night we would go in and split up each section of the work so each of us would know how to do each part. We knew that the motel expected us to perform the work alone after our training. We could not see how one person could do all this work. In fact not one of us did all the work on any night, we worked on different processes each night. This presented the problem.
The first time I actually performed all the work was the night I was by my self. It was a great learning experience. I realized that the only way to learn anything was to perform the process form beginning to end. This was not how we were taught. Management had left it up to us to train ourselves. I eventually worked in to learning what was required and actually finished all the work in a faster time that when we had four people doing the job . This was because when I was out of balance I began to by instinct know where in the process to find the problem. In management it is critical to formally train employees from the beginning of the process through each step to the ending process. Also, as a General Manager I trained my night auditors.
We had a couple of managers at the motel while I was there. The first came from the sales department at Calloway Gardens. He did not fully understand how to manage the motel. He went back to the sales department at Calloway. Next manager he was a retired army person. He called me into his office to show me his Holiday Inn School diploma. He said that he had decided to become a motel manager in a fox hole in Viet Nam, and now he had made his wish come true. I saw a weakness in each of these managers. They had not been restaurant mangers or motel manager before so they did not make good decisions.
I saw that a manager must know something about the business he was managing to make the most effective decisions. Both managers thought that simple answers to complicated problems solved issues. Thus, they were constantly dealing with the unintended consequences of their decisions.
