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By Mark Hamister, CEO and Chairman, The Hamister Group, Inc.
June 2006 .
So I decided to adapt the acronym for use within The Hamister Group, Inc.: we now practice MBIWA, or �Management By Interacting and Walking Around.� Since acronyms are very powerful reminders of practices and theories, I believe that the �I� is necessary to remind our people that they must interact while walking through their departments. For us, this was the only way to convince our managers to stay true to every aspect of the concept of MBWA, as described in In Search Of Excellence. The result of the new teaching acronym, MBIWA, was amazing. Managers immediately began obtaining better information and therefore making better decisions. Staff and managers began working as teams and our performance began to improve significantly. One great example of how MBIWA helped us was when we talked to the nurses and dietary staff of our Adult Living Residences about our hiring practices. We were having trouble (or thought we were having trouble) selecting the best candidates for these positions. When our managers asked our staff for their suggestions about how we should change our interviewing process, they told us that the problem wasn�t so much our hiring practices as a need for better training. We decided to respond to their input by hiring a corporate Director of Training, whose first project was to establish orientation programs for all new staff. These programs greatly improved the performance of new staff members, showing that the staff for better training was valid. We would never have realized this without the practice of MBIWA. A simple example of how MBIWA helped our hotel management was the discovery of the fact that we were wasting an excessive amount of money and time under-loading our washing machines. One of our managers, on his daily rounds, realized that the machines were not loaded to capacity and had a discussion with the housekeeping staff about the issue. He discovered that they had never been trained on how to determine if a front loading commercial washer is full (such machines are at capacity when laundry starts to fall when rotating the drum manually to 45 degrees). This interaction with staff showed us that we needed to improve our training. The result was reduced operational costs. Adding an �I� for Interaction to MBWA made all the difference at The
Hamister Group, Inc.. It enabled us to finally enforce the original
concept of this clever acronym, which is to encourage teamwork between
management and staff, increase the number of informal problem-solving opportunities
on a daily basis, and thereby produce immediate and creative solutions.
Mark Hamister is the CEO of The Hamister Group, Inc. and The Hamister Hospitality Group, LLC, a rapidly growing hotel property management company. The Hamister Group is actively seeking hotel acquisitions and management contracts in the United States. For more details, please see our web sites: www.hamisterhospitality.com and www.hamistergroup.com. |
Contact:
Hamister Hospitality Group
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Also See: | Get Them At Hello: Establishing Personal Relationships With Our Hotel Guests / Mark Hamister / May 2006 |
�A Bakers Dozen� of Ideas for Hotel Management Company Executives / Hotel Common Sense / John Hogan / April 2006 |
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