Hospitality Paradigm

Procrastination is usually a deep rooted habit, stemming from a fear of failure, apprehension, anger, hostility laziness or a general lack of interest. We can change our habits provided we use the right system. In any task, the prompt first step is important, however difficult or annoying it may be.

The tendency to postpone things is called procrastination. How many of us get into New Year resolutions like daily exercise, quitting smoking, writing a diary etc.? Quite often this resolution does not last for more than a week. We need to match tasks to our level and deal with procrastination head-on by focusing on starting rather than finishing, looking for constructive criticism (aka critique) and by being decisive and setting priorities.

Do not try to do too much too quickly. First force yourself right now, to do one thing that earlier you have been putting off.

There is a difference between striving for excellence and striving for perfection. The first is attainable, gratifying and healthy whereas the second is often difficult to attain, frustrating, nerve wracking and results in time-wastage and stress.

Ask yourself what would happen if I do not do those activities aimed at perfection at all? If you are brutally honest with yourself, for some the answers may be ‘nothing would happen’. Peter Drucker says, ‘I have yet to see an executive regardless or rank or station who could not consign something like a quarter of the demands on his time to the waste paper basket without anybody noticing their disappearance’.

Learn to decline tactfully but firmly every request that does not contribute to your goal of striving for excellence. If you point out that your motivation is not to get out of work but to save your time to do a better job on the really important things, you will have a good chance of avoiding non-productive tasks.

A person who contributes to an organization or team is always more effective. Generally, managers focus on efforts and also on displaying their authority downwards. This is the age of specialists. Each executive first needs to think of the one quality he/she has at which he/she is extremely good at and which nobody can do better to produce exceptional results?

Vijay, VP-Operations of budget Hotel chain was at the no. 2 position, next to the CEO for around 20 years. The CEO a much younger person than Vijay was quite an aggressive person, a taskmaster. The sudden demise of the CEO made the board promote the VP Operations to the top slot. Vijay, now the new CEO was quite unprepared for the job as it came on too suddenly.

While he was taking the charge of the situation he asked himself the question, “What is it that I can do exceptionally well? How can I contribute? The answer that he received after careful introspection was that his tenure as a CEO was not to be more than 3 years as he was 55 years old. The only way he could make the difference was by developing people under him.

From then on every afternoon for one hour, he would take out personal files of his subordinates and individually discuss their strengths and opportunities for improvement and the action-plan they should make for themselves so as to rise within the organization. He would spend time counseling and guiding them, using all his many years of experience in the industry.Within three years he showed phenomenal growth and also developed a team of highly effective managers.

Instead of focusing on efforts can we focus on results? Rather than keeping a close eye on how our subordinates function, can we look further where results need to be obtained? That is the true yardstick of success!

What does it take to be effective? Intelligence, Imagination or Knowledge? Perhaps all the three factors may be necessary to some extent for making us effective but then again all these three may not guarantee that one becomes effective by having these qualities.

To look at the two aspects of productivity, efficiency & effectiveness, consider a worker in a laundry department handling the operation of a calendar machine. His productivity is decided by the number of linen iron-rolled in a shift. He has been given clear instructions on what to do. His efficiency is decided by doing his task correctly. However in the case of a knowledge worker, things are quite different. A knowledge worker is the one who puts to use what is between his two ears. While a manual worker puts to use the skills he has in his hands, an executive is the one who not only does what is being told to him, but anticipates what is expected of him and makes the right decisions.

Consider a kitchen where the chef is extremely skilled. A dish prepared and served to the guest on time piping hot, is a culinary delight, only for the guest to discover half-way through his meal, a strand of scrubber wire (used by the kitchen steward to clean the pan earlier, on which the dish was cooked in). However skilled this Chef is, however fast the F&B team cooks and serves the dish (i.e., however efficient they are), this process will not be effective. When the guest discovers the foreign object in his plate, he will not be a happy guest. Not only will this lead to dissatisfaction but it will also in some way impact the profitability of the organization.

Knowledge work is not only defined by quantity or by costs, but it is also decided by the results one produces. An effective executive is a knowledge worker who takes the right decisions thus making a contribution to his organization. He has to plan, organize, motivate, and integrate to obtain the desired results.

Thus efficiency is about doing things right while effectiveness is about doing the right things!