Leadership Lounge

Editor's Note: This is part two of a two-part series authored by RCS owner & president Whitney Reid Pennell for 2018, intended to help club managers and hospitality professionals understand the current obstacles in employee retention and training. Part One can be read here. Part One of this series on trends in employee retention and training discussed what obstacles are currently being faced by hospitality professionals and why they have occurred. Let's continue. What is bein

If you're in the hospitality business, you probably already know that the food and beverage industry has the highest turnover rate of an

using online instruction allows learning to more easily become a continuous process and not just a sporadic special event. And because onlin

Have you ever taken a personality test? These tools are becoming more and more popular with employers as we strive to hire workers with specific qualities, rather than skills. After all, skills can be taught--but inherent qualities cannot. This is particularly important in the hospitality industry. We can train you to be a good server or hostess for example, but if you aren't naturally hospitable, friendly, and helpful, then all the skills in the world still won't be able t

As a manager, training is an inescapable part of your responsibilities, and unlike teaching wherein your audience is usually children chances are you will be working with adult learners. Engaging with adult learners has its own unique set of challenges. When you train adults, there is a greater need for mutual respect and for the learners to find the trainer credible with enough character authority to teach them something new. Once the trainer has established their skills an

We often find ourselves talking a lot about timing when it comes to food and beverage service. Each player on the team from the host/hostess to the servers, cooks, and managers are responsible for keeping the dining room flowing and managing the timing of the table. However, the most important time in any food and beverage operation is the 15 minutes before each shift begins: the pre-shift meeting. Photo by Paul Sarlas Call it the warm-up, sound-check, or preflight run-throug

This article originally appeared in BoardRoom Magazine in 2015 as "What is The Point...of Training?" What is the point of training? Does everyone on your team really understand the point of training and how best to make your training effective? We train for a variety of reasons, but they are all centered on producing change and to keep our service culture strong. We train to affect change in skills (how to do something), knowledge (critical thinking or decision making) or att

This article originally appeared in BoardRoom Magazine in 2014. Customer service means different things to everyone. Wikipedia defines customer service as “The provision of service to customers before, during and after a purchase.” Businessdictionary.com defines it as “All interactions between a customer and a product provider at the time of sale, and thereafter.” But what does this mean in the club business? My general rule of thumb is to first realize that very often our cu

On Tuesday November 22, a judge in Texas ruled that the federal Department of Labor's new Overtime Rule--that raised the salary threshold under which workers would be eligible for overtime pay from $23,660 annually to $47,476--should be halted in its implementation. According to the National Club Association, "The ruling means that the rule WILL NOT go into effect on December 1, 2016 and that all clubs may keep their employees at their current salary and schedule without the