6 Proven Ways To Improve Your Meetings

Pre-shifts, huddles, lineups, premeal, shift brief, morning kickoff or the good old-fashioned standup. They go by many names, but most successful operations have fruitful and productive meetings before each shift. This is an essential daily practice that helps to elicit proper communication, engrain culture and establish service execution at the highest level.

Some hoteliers I have worked for list this practice, when done correctly, as having the single greatest impact on the operation of the hotel. I have interviewed at several properties throughout my career, that I have been asked to contribute and even lead a morning lineup to gauge my enthusiasm and cultural fit. Talk about nerve racking!

The first few hotels I worked for in my career, did not have pre-shifts. It wasn't until I worked for a luxury independent hotel that I learned just how important they are, and the difference was night and day.

As is everything that you do on a daily basis, tasks can become monotonous and lose their effectiveness if not innovative. Sometimes, we fall victim to leadership autopilot. I have listed a few tips to help get that mojo back, or at least freshen up not only your daily lineups, but your internal meetings as well:

1. Prepare in Advance - Some of the best senior leaders I have worked with, broad stroke a key topic for the week and lay out structured examples/stories/trainings for each day. When the team sees that you take this meeting seriously, then they will as well. If you are a department head, it is your responsibility to articulate the happenings within your department. Always be ready, always contribute.
2. Set Expectations Early - Make sure each leader is provided direction on what you expect them to contribute. There is nothing worse than asking key questions to an operator and getting a blank stare in return. The meeting should start on time, move quickly and be informative. Try to keep one foot in the present and the other in the future. Encourage people to stay off their phones and be present during this time.
3. Make It Interactive & Fun - Make your meetings more than just content and numbers and create something your leaders actually look forward to attending! Change up the location from time to time! Keep it fresh, positive and exciting. Have the culinary team prepare something for the team from the menu and tell a story around the dish. Not only have you made the morning fun, but you just created a dozen salespeople who will bring this back to their teams. People learn and absorb information differently so try to mix it up a bit with some visuals, audio, or a flip chart when you can.
4. Celebrate - Always take a moment to go through a positive guest comment or team achievement. It is essential to inspire your leadership team and fill them with a positive source of fuel for the day so that they can give themselves fully to their teams. Being mindful of the moments we curate becomes contagious and inspires innovation.
5. Show Off - Invite your supervisors and make sure they see how close-nit and supportive the leadership team is. Make your huddles something that supervisors WANT to attend in the future! Any chance you have to show a young leader what a walking example of loyalty, unity joy and excellence among leaders looks like, will impact them profoundly when they get promoted.
6. Take Notes & Mix It Up - If the information doesn't leave the room, it dies. Reality check that the information shared in the morning huddle is then discussed in each department huddle. There should never be a discrepancy of quality between departments and between shifts. When done right, they set the tone for communication across your operation. Mix it up! Visit and participate in another departments pre-shift and bring something. It can be food, knowledge or even gratitude. Do your best to shrink the distance between departments.

“The small things done consistently over time, tend to have the greatest impact."

I had a leader that almost every time you asked, "How is your morning going?" He would reply, "It's going....."

He didn't realize just how uninspiring and demotivating this response was over time and also the weight it carried in shaping his day and the negative impact it was having on others. After deciding how he could elevate this one sentence with something more positive and authentic, his perception was changed immediately, and he was seen as a more engaged leader that people wanted to be around.

Our words matter and in terms of scale, our body language carries even more weight. Make sure that when we are amongst other leaders, we elevate ourselves and motivate each other to achieve excellence together.