The Importance of Decision Making

Today, I wish to cover a subject often spoken about within the hospitality industry, which is also a topic I broached not long ago when discussing empowerment and customer service related issues: Decision making!

The decision making abilities of hotel employees can make or break a guest’s stay. However, hotel owners and GMs too often reward the managers who achieve immediate results (often through luck) and not those who have made some admirable (lateral thinking) judgments which, often through no fault of their own, have not produced the instantaneous results required.

The owners, CEOs and GMs have got where they are thanks to their excellent decision making skills, however, if they were to look back at all the good decisions they made which went badly, they should be thankful to have a job at all. In today’s climate they be cleaning the toilets rather than managing hundreds of employees.

Professor Zeger Degraeve, who is the ‘Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Professor of Innovation, Professor of Decision Sciences’ at London Business School, believes that “the result is irrelevant… as a measure of decision quality.” Professor Degraeve goes on to say that a decision is made in a split second and then implemented (often by others) at a later date, the result is then observed in the future. Events happen that a manager could not possibly foresee and not every variable is controllable by the hotel or the decision maker. “Therefore, the quality of the result is not an indicator of decision quality and the result is irrelevant as a measure of decision (and execution) quality.”

It is important for hotel industry leaders to observe the decision being made at the time and judge the employee based purely on their decision making ability. The judgment may be made based on efficiency, profit, or even guest satisfaction, but it needs to be made based on the question, “what are we trying to achieve?” In the hospitality industry, the answer to his question will nearly always be guest satisfaction and therefore, if the customer was happy with little extra cost to the hotel then the decision was a good one, even if the result in the long run is less than originally hoped for.

For more information on Professor Zeger Degraeve and his thoughts on decision making, please go to HoteleMarketer, where there is an in-depth interview with the aforementioned thought leader.

To link this back, briefly, to hotel booking systems:

Hotels, motels, and guest houses choose hotel systems based upon their needs at the time of purchase. They cannot possibly foresee future events that will render the booking software unusable to them. It doesn’t mean that a bad decision was made; it purely means the results are poor. The overriding factor of hotelsystems.co.uk is the ability to customize the software for individual requirements... Meaning no bad decisions short or long term.