Change Management: Grief
A brass band is calling in the distance. Co-workers and strangers all surround you on the curb swaying to the music. You are sad, but the atmosphere is colorful and celebratory. As the procession gets closer and the music grows louder, stories are being shared about excel reports, market share, and room type attributes. As the band passes by, you notice the pallbearers swaying the coffin carrying Revenue Management to the music.
Since revenue management is dead, I think it is important to take a few minutes to mourn. If you have not read it, Managing Transitions by William Bridges will change your perspective. In his book, he notes that to process change, we must first begin with an ending. The first stage in accepting change is to grieve the old way of doing things. Take a moment to consider the mundane daily tasks you perform. Make a list of the items you do each day, week, month that may cloud your mind and prevent you from being strategic. Next to each item, consider what is automated already and how you are not taking advantage of it. Look at the $10 rate change; this is automated, so what is holding you back? Once you find these items and understand the “why”, I want you to thank them for their service and the years of comfort they have provided you and then let them go. Throw them an authentic New Orleans style jazz funeral and make space for your strategic mindset.
Having a strategic mindset means that you have an approach focused on long-term goals and the big picture and you can make informed decisions to achieve your goals. It can involve picturing a desired future state, breaking down complex situations into manageable tasks, anticipating potential challenges and then generating innovative solutions, making informed choices based data, and adjusting plans as things change. My favorite element of a strategic mindset is failure to win. It is when you deploy a strategy that worked and then pushed that strategy to its outer limits until you failed. Testing those boundaries and then adjusting them is the key to easy success.
There is fear in jumping into strategic mindset. It is new and there has not been a wealth of training offered. If we circle back to my beach hotel and the question of what is wrong with applying a sales budget to finding group, the answer was in the question: the demand in my market is all leisure tourist, mostly retail and discount business with a splash of wholesale. There is no mention of group business in the data. While focusing on the group segment seems like a potential win, even if you can grow a $1M, the data showed there was no group in the market. You are using gut based decisions to set a marketing plan. No matter how long or how hard those sales managers work, they will never meet expectations.
This is the opportune time to apply testing boundaries and recycling the box. Using a strategic mindset, how can you make informed decisions based on pure data? If sales salaries run $120k annually, brainstorm different ways we can use that money. Some ideas that come to mind are enhancing your marketing budget in the digital space, like hiring influencers or creating niche content for the beach. You could take some of that money and buy better data, having multiple data sources for demand generation is advisable. There are several opportunities in optimizing wholesalers who now power most of the fin tech travel space, where leisure is king.
Now that you have grieved and are ready to move forward, where do you even start? An excellent way to begin the shift into a strategic mindset is to take a step back and set a simple mission statement for your hotel. Mission statements should be short and to the point. They should encompass everything you want to achieve in 2 sentences. Doing this allows you to refocus on long-term goals and the big picture. Be on the lookout for my next blog as we dive into mission statements and explore their possibilities.
By embracing a strategic mindset and letting go of outdated processes, you can transform your organization and achieve greater success. Remember, change is necessary. Start by grieving the old, celebrating the new, and crafting a clear mission statement. Your journey to strategic leadership begins now.
