The Owner – Manager Dynamic

I wrote previously about the various General Managers I have come across in the years of working at the hotel. I thought I would share a bit about the relationship between the owners and the managers.

The owner of the hotels is a limited partnership corporation, with one individual appointed to oversee the hotel operations and report back to the rest of the board of directors. For the first few years of me being at the hotel, my relationship with these individuals was limited, i.e. give them data to make decisions and make reservations for them. For the past year and a half, I had a deeper relationship with the board and the directors of the hotel. Needless to say, I’ve been able to get a pretty good sense of what is happening on all sides of the operation through my conversations with the owners, the General Manager, and other managers.

The Tasmanian Devil

Of course, I speak not of the Australian animal, but the Looney Tunes character.

During the past year and a half, the person in charge of overseeing the hotel operations wasn’t based locally. They communicated by phone, email, and periodic visits to the hotels. The visits were quite regular, but that was the only regular thing about the trips. Once here, the energy was vibrant as the Tasmanian Devil spun around the entire operation, dropping in to talk at the manager’s meetings, with individual managers, before tearing off into the distance to deal with other matters and leave town. Left behind is the dust of its trail, and the starry-eyed looks of the managers and staff wondering what they just witnessed. These visits were terrifying for most, because they never really knew what to expect and whether they were going to be a target, while others thrived within these visits.

The majority of the managers never had regular contact with the Tasmanian Devil, and they were the ones living in fear of it the most. When the Tasmanian Devil approached them, they never knew whether they were in trouble or whether they were just receiving a check-up. It should not have been like this, but like I mentioned with the post about the General Managers, they were not getting regular visits. They were not used to people asking their opinions about things, and when they voiced their concerns, they were not listened to. The Tasmanian Devil definitely stirred things up for these people, listening to their concerns, raising their own concerns, and leaving people with a clear answer on which direction they should be heading.

For people like myself, we looked forward to the times the Tasmanian Devil arrived because it was during these visits that we received an assessment of our positions. I never received a formal performance review, but these visits were close. I was told what I had to do to make things better, had a voice in the direction of the hotels, and had some positive affirmation about the job I was actually doing. I never really received that with the General Managers. I was like the other managers, basically left to do my own thing, but I was sending out twice weekly revenue reports, so someone could always keep an eye on the hotels’ performance. It was through these revenue reports that I earned further respect from the other managers, and most importantly, from the Tasmanian Devil.

There is incredible energy when the Tasmanian Devil touches down, and there is nothing that goes untouched in most cases. When the Tasmanian Devil sees something it should go after, it does not delay and attacks it head on. It puts things in the place where it believes it should be and departs. The biggest fault of the Tasmanian Devil is it never sticks around long enough to make sure things stay in place where it has put it. It will leave thinking it has fixed things, but within a day’s time, things are fixed to be the same as when they originally found them.