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The example I want to use
is an example from early of
my own career when I was working
in a large city center hotel.
I was a Junior Personnel
Manager Officer
responsible for looking after
things on the people side and
we had a big issue that arose.
It was a housekeeper.
Housekeepers are responsible
for managing the teams,
people who look after
the rooms in hotels,
bedrooms in hotels and in
those days we used to call them
chambermaids and
they were all women.
Nowadays, room attendant is
much more commonly used.
Ms P, the individual concerned,
she managed a team of
around 20 room attendants
and this is not easy job.
It's solitary you
spend most of the time
each day on your own,
although you're working
as part of a team.
It's quite physical work,
it's quite tiring and a lot
of work has to be done pretty
quickly sometimes,
getting the rooms
ready before people check-in.
There's a window usually
between checkout and
check-in, a lot of
work needs to be done,
and it's a high-staff turnover
professional people, don't
tend to stay in the very long.
So, it's challenging from a
people management point of view.
What happened is that
this lady, Ms P was
appointed and she was
very experienced.
This was not somebody who
hadn't done the job before.
I don't think she'd done it in
a big city center hotel before.
She had long career. She was
quite middle-age in
terms of her experience.
It started going
wrong pretty quickly,
the standards started slipping.
She wasn't really on top
of what was going on.
Work was not completed on time,
there were customer
complaints about the
standard of the work
from the team of
room attendance and it
was clear that Ms P was
part of the reason for this,
the main reason for this fall.
It soon became clear
that she could
not meet the required standard.
She thought that there the
required standard was too high,
that they were asking impossible
things of her and her team,
she defended herself but
within a year or so it
was quite clear that we
had to tackle the problem.
If there were a senior figure in
your management setup who
was not performing to
a high standard and
who isn't really
personally engaging
with the rest of the team
that she's working alongside.
The question really is, what do
you do in those situations?
What should happen? How should
you tackle the problem?
