As a new role emerges for you, it’s time to prepare and anticipate your arrival. To put the odds on your side and ensure the success of your first few months, you need to focus on the right priorities.
Executives, managers, executives in the hotel industry, catering, leisure and tourism // Here are advices and recommendations for steps to take up a job with the aim of ensuring good integration to prepare for the future. The task is fascinating and the subjects to be covered will be numerous, take the necessary time and adapt your schedule to the priorities : be agile, flexible and attentive.
Steps to take to successfully integrate
- Preparing ahead before taking position
Before joining your new business, you most likely had some interviews and therefore learned about it.
- Keep your personal research on the internet to gather information about its history, its successes, the announcement of the upcoming projects.
- What the press says about the company, its owners and the articles published.
- Visit its website and write down all the information that seems relevant to you.
- Also, don’t hesitate to look at the company’s social networks: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Linkedin. There you will find everything you need to know: the last photo shared, the last article published, the subjects exchanged, the comments of the community, the achievements…
- Also consult all of the company’s SEO partner sites which are information relays such as #Tripadvisor or #OTA (online agencies), #affiliations, #labels, online guides, etc…
All these informations will allow you to take stock of the situation and ask the right questions during your first days. In addition, you will start to understand the corporate culture, its vision if it has not already been presented to you. Complete your preparatory work on the historical, geographical, economic, political, social and tourist environment with all the quantitative data that you can collect.
Goals // Knowing your environment – Vision from the outside. Understand how you will bring your value and create added value.
D-day … your arrival begins :
2. Observing the operation of the company “15 days”
The first week is undoubtedly the most critical. You have to meet your teams, lay the first stones with them. This involves understanding who does what in the company, knowing how to explain your mission, finding your place.
- Meet the members of the management of each department through casual one-on-one interviews.
- Meet close collaborators, employee representatives through small meetings.
- Introduce yourself to the teams and quickly establish the first contacts in their workplace.
- Organize a meeting of all the staff to introduce yourself and discover the teams: a welcome drink.
- But above all, make site visits on the client side but also on the internal side (the back office) to find your way around and learn how to move around everywhere. You should know everything about the physical facilities of your new structure, this will help you understand how it works as well.
The interest is to know your interlocutors, their backgrounds, their aspirations. Important questions to ask such as: How do you feel in your job? What do we need to improve in our operations? What can I do to help you? The first lines of work will emerge. Taking up a job is the best time to understand how it works, change habits and break the usual patterns of decision-making. This is the time to ask to validate as many things as possible from the start to check that there are no particular problems and to start off on a good basis. We must, especially at this stage, ask ourselves the question for each subject of the why and not just the how. Make your first decisions on things that are simple, first, but visible in relation to the topics that arise: quick and easy-to-implement actions that will allow you to assert your leadership.
Goals // Know your context – Vision of what the interior perceives – Make an inventory of risks. Understand the expectations of the company, its teams and its owner, on your behavior.
3. Introducing yourself to the local, regional and local environment “15 days”
You will also need to devote part of your time to meetings outside the company. Plan meetings with clients and prescribers in your schedule. The point is to communicate about the change of direction and possibly to reassure them that certain problems left unanswered until now will be addressed. Also meet some influential actors directly linked or not to your activity.
- Introduce yourself to your best customers, your direct contacts and decision-makers in order to facilitate discussions, take stock of the situation and discuss their future projects on which you can support them.
- Meet the local prescribers with whom the company works directly and indirectly: traders, hoteliers, restaurateurs, tourist and leisure structures, associations but also your suppliers, your banker, your insurer, accounting firm and accountant.
- Introduce yourself to influential networks: business clubs, other associations, representatives of business sectors. Your destination may have one or more major industries, you have to know them and that these entities know you.
- Make an appointment with local stakeholders: institutions (Town halls, Police, …), local authorities (Communities of municipalities, Region, …), CCI, tourism representatives of the city, the department and the region (OT, CDT, CRT).
- Meet face-to-face or by videoconference with the organizations prescribing your activities and sales partners: OTAs, affiliate networks, agencies, TOs, Wholesalers and expand the geographic areas as and when the topics to be dealt with that come to you ( contract renewal, renegotiations, etc …).
In any case, you have to arrive humbly in a new context, listen, ask for advice and help in your integration, present yourself to reassure.
Goals // Knowing your surroundings – Vision of what the outside perceives – Knowing your allies. Understand the expectations of external contacts and partners on your actions.
4. Identifying key people “10 days”
Building a team is a subtle art. You have probably received the organization chart on paper, you have to check what is happening in the field and ask yourself the right questions: Who is in contact with whom? Who makes the decisions ? Who advises whom? Who is critical in the support? Surrounding yourself quickly and well is vital.
- Map the personal issues of each and identify the drivers (the active, the supporters), the brakes (the opponents) and the passengers (the passive, the hesitant).
- Optimize the current organization and first of all unite the engines and the passengers. At this stage, it is a question of forging alliances and synergies. You can rearrange the teams in a second step.
- Start organizing your first meetings for communication and follow-up of activities // Daily briefing // Service meetings (Sales, Communication, Marketing, Housekeeeping, F&B, etc ….) // Heads of service meeting // Staff meeting where all the staff is requested.
This phase involves bringing together qualities and resources, convinced by the idea of change. The priority is to constitute its first two circles.
Goals // Choose your team – Know who the opinion leaders are. Forge the first good alliances to move forward quickly and integrate.
5. Laying the first milestones of the strategy “20 days”
Far from your final strategy, it is necessary to prepare a provisional action plan. This tool organizes operations: cost reduction, suspension or postponement of projects, abandonment of services, termination of leases…
- Make a report of amazement that you enrich over your past days, appointments and visits. It is recommended to send it to your owner, your supervisor or your shareholders at the end of your first month of arrival.
- Perform an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the company as well as the opportunities and threats of the market: SWOT Analysis.
- Establish your priority action plan: What are the levers to develop the team and the organization to achieve the objectives set? Look for the simplest and most evocative indicators to guide your mission. First, optimize all the existing tools. At this stage, you have to stay focused on your cash flow and correctly measure all levels of commitment. Fundamental or purely structural measures such as the launch of an innovation program, a hiring plan, the marketing of a product, are reserved for later.
So many approaches that must be highlighted through notes intended for the internal and other strategic targets (customers, shareholders).
Goals // Start fanning the flame of change. Definitely validate how you will bring your value and create added value.
6. Locking your communication “20 days”
You have to think about working on your “storytelling”, clear and simple to give direction and translate the vision of the owner, the shareholders or the Board of Directors.
- Connect with your employees to encourage feedback in a fluid and unfiltered manner.
- Once your action plan has been defined, and your ideas are clear, then communicate internally first and then externally, starting with local, regional and then national and international if necessary.
- Set up a communication rhythm with your teams which begins with the daily briefing or “morning briefing” to be initiated each morning with the representatives of each department. This moment of conviviality allows you to motivate everyone but above all to have the right information from the field every day to act.
One of the keys to the success of your first 100 days is communication.
Goals // Clarify your defined plan. Have a good internal and external communication strategy in relation to the context of the company.
7. Taking action to make your mark “20 days”
It’s time to send out strong signals and make the changes happen. The question to ask yourself at this stage: How to have the first victories?
- You need to find new growth levers and optimize those in place. It may be a question of simplifying the organization chart, regrouping services and creating synergies.
- You need to take ownership of a series of performance indicators. Those in relation to the cash, the customers. Valuable information relates to stocks, unpaid bills, orders, deadlines, but also those relating to the management of the company, its activities, staff, schedules, turnover…
- Create your operational dashboard, understandable by all and integrate the data collected. Your tool must bring you trends, it will fuel the desire for change and must circulate easily.
- Set your long-term goals, SMART // Specific – Measurable – Ambitious – Realistic and Time-bound goals. These are all objectives to strengthen team cohesion and shape the future. These challenges or objectives are shared with the teams.
This step involves identifying the levers of simple and rapid action to have the first lasting benefits.
Goals // Measure all levels of engagement (both yours and the company). Identify the skills needed to excel in your job.
***
A manager is the master of his communication. He embodies the company, verbalizes and expresses his vision. Through these stages presented, in no particular chronological order but for a time benchmark for your organization, separate your speeches according to the specificities of each of your targets: executives, staff representatives, service providers, customers, suppliers, public authorities. Most targets, however, have the same expectation: be reassured.
Putting on the jacket of a new leadership role is a long-distance race. Advancing methodically will allow you to project yourself more easily and for longer !
In conclusion //
- Go forward with peace of mind, look for accessible fixes on existing databases ;
- Set ambitious goals, consistent with the company’s vision ;
- Share readable and rewarding information by maintaining the right pressure ;
- Mobilize troops on targeted interventions ;
- Initiate efficient and rigorous feedback from the field.
Discover on http://www.A3amvens.com a document to download: a complete list of “handing over of instructions” for your taking up position.
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